Public Anatomy (35 page)

The driver’s license in his wallet identified him as Nathaniel Franklin Canavan.

Nathan Canavan.

The Organist.

While Liza French lay in a heavily guarded room at Gates Memorial Hospital, her face and lips too swollen to talk, Basetti dug into the Canavan family history. Lipsky sent him on this mission while the detective finished up his paperwork on the whole messy incident.

Basetti was quite savvy with this freelance investigation. A little Internet research, a few targeted phone calls to relatives and friends of the Canavan family brought forth some valuable information. In the parking lot of Gates Memorial, Eli found the crime technician sitting in his car and staring at the screen of his cell phone. Basetti spilled all he knew.

Nathan’s mother had been a nurse and aspiring artist who received recognition among the local colony of painters, sculptors, and other creative types. His dad had left the family when Nathan was a young boy. His overachieving, could-do-no-wrong sister, Cate, was a fourth-year medical student on the way to an OB-GYN residency, ready to conquer the world. That left Nathan as the one who never quite got it all together.

He was rejected by every medical school to which he applied, his prior transgressions, which included a hit-and-run and a vaguely described assault and battery, proved too great a barrier. To please his mother, he managed to get accepted as an anatomist’s assistant, processing bodies for dissection at the medical school. The work seemed to fit him. Though he pissed off the living, the dead didn’t seem to mind.
And he was surrounded by the real subjects of his mother’s art. The anatomy professor who hired him quickly noticed his familiarity with anatomical structures, the result of hours spent reading his mother’s anatomy texts and watching her sketch anatomical subjects.

He began assisting the new medical students with their dissections. He told his mother that although he couldn’t get into medical school, he could teach those who did. She was most proud.

But then, fitting to his history, Nathan became overzealous in his job, sneaking into the anatomy lab at night, performing the dissections himself, arranging the bodies in poses to mimic his mother’s art. At first his antics were considered a prank by the medical students, a way to cope with the stress of the discipline of anatomy, until the real perpetrator was discovered. Not only was Nathan fired, but a desecrating-the-dead lawsuit was filed against him by the medical school and the families of the deceased. Once again he disappointed his mother, this time in shame.

An anatomy expert from Ole Miss named Salyer was called in and testified in the trial. Ultimately, the prosecution lacked enough evidence to link Nathaniel Canavan to the scene. The suit was dismissed. He bounced around doing various jobs, always supporting his sister, the success of the family. His most recent employment was as a support technician at Renaissance Robotics. His time for recognition would come. And his skills in anatomical dissection would not go to waste. While he couldn’t make his mother proud while she was alive, he would prove his worth by exacting revenge for her death.

When Eli pulled into the parking lot of the Poplar Avenue Free Clinic, a short line had already formed outside. The front door was closed and it appeared the clinic had not yet opened.

Lipsky had already updated Eli on the status of the assault victim, Cate Canavan. The previous night, Cate had been taken to the emergency room, examined, and found to be uninjured, at least physically. Before releasing her, the police took her statement. She told the police she had never before seen the man who had assaulted her and Liza. She told them she had gone to Dr. French’s house to ask for a letter of recommendation in support of her residency application. A man broke into the house and assaulted her and Dr. French. Cate said the man would have killed her had Dr. Branch and the police detective not arrived when they did.

The four men who waited in line for the clinic to open appeared content in the cool morning. Two of them sat crossed-legged on the pavement. Eli joined them, standing at the back of the line. They regarded him with suspicion at first. He asked if they had seen Mr. Norman Felts. They didn’t know who this was until he said the name Tobboganhead.

They hadn’t seen him. Two more patients arrived and stood behind

Eli. He waited a few more minutes and the door of the clinic opened.

Cate stood in the doorway wearing a white coat. Her hair was pulled back, very professional. He understood why the clinic was so popular. The patients looked to Cate as their doctor. The free clinic made a direct impact on the homeless and impoverished. She was doing a good thing.

By the sudden change in Cate’s expression, he knew that his presence alarmed her. She approached the line of patients.

“Dr. Branch, I’m so glad you could make it.”

Upon hearing that he was a doctor, those in front of Eli turned to face him.

Cate motioned to the door. “Please come in.”

Eli followed Cate inside the clinic.

She shut the door behind them.

“How are you?” Eli asked.

Tears welled in her eyes. She collapsed into a straight-backed chair, hands covering her face.

Eli had a lot of questions for Cate. He decided to let her talk.

“I had to come to the clinic today,” she said, removing her hands from her eyes. She kept them cupped over her mouth. “It’s the only thing that could get my mind off last night.”

Eli nodded. “When I’m in the operating room, that’s all there is. Just me and the patient, everything else doesn’t matter.”

Cate seemed to wait for more words of encouragement from Eli—anything, he guessed, that moved away from the subject of the previous evening.

“What happened last night?”

Cate stood and walked to the window. She was quiet for a moment, watching as more patients walked across the parking lot. “Dr. French has been a good friend to me. More than a friend, really. She’s a role model. The reason I chose OB/GYN.”

Even though Lipsky had read Cate’s police statement to Eli, he wanted to hear it for himself. “Why were you at her house last night?”

“She’s writing a letter of recommendation for my fellowship. Dr. French wanted to discuss it with me.”

Eli knew this was odd. A letter of recommendation would be discussed in an academic office during regular hours. Not at a faculty member’s
home at night. He planned to confront her about the intruder. Cate beat him to it.

“That man broke into her house. We didn’t hear him coming. He just appeared.”

The line outside was getting longer. The patients saw Dr. Cate in the window and started tapping the pane, wanting to come in. When Cate went to the door and explained to the patients that they’d have to wait a few more minutes, Eli went into the break room and unlocked the back door.

Cate returned and continued her story. “I thought it was a joke at first. Dr. French didn’t seem alarmed, like maybe she knew him. He started touching her. And she let him do it. Maybe she was scared, I don’t know, but I just wanted to get out of there. That’s when I saw the gun.”

Cate was remarkably calm as she said this, a blank stare past Eli.

He had seen this look on assault and abuse victims in the emergency room. The icy stare as they told of the violence against them.

“He pointed the gun at me and told me to strap Dr. French to the table.” Cate described how she’d tried to fight him but he hit her, kept hitting her. “Then, he made us—”

A pulsing screech from Cate’s beeper made her jump and stop mid-sentence. She checked the number.

So far, Eli thought, everything checked out. The details were the same as in her statement to the police. Eli wondered what she would have said next, without the interruption.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Branch. I really need to answer this and then see my patients.”

She reached for the clinic phone, but Eli pulled out a cell, flipped it open, and presented it to her.

“Please, use this one.”

She took the phone, ready to enter the number from the pager, but came face-to-face with her picture on the small screen. It was a little out of focus, the brown clinic building in the background, her in a white coat as the doctor in charge.

Cate looked at Eli, her expression showing that she remembered the picture being taken. Against her steady protest, Mr. Felts—Tobbagan head—had insisted on it, said he had
a new picture phone he wanted to try out. But she wasn’t the only person in the photo. It was one of the few days her brother had been at the clinic with her. In the small picture, he was there, behind her, a side shot in profile, but unmistakable.

Cate attempted a smile, as though Dr. Branch might not know of this detail.

Eli wasn’t smiling. “This man tried to kill Dr. Liza French. The newspapers call him the Organist. He’s your brother, Cate.”

Cate looked again at the photo captured on the cell phone. “Our father left us when I was seven. Nathan was a few years older. I barely remember the man, just that he was mean to our mother. She had to work two jobs. Put us in the best schools. Nathan was always smarter than me. Always. But he had a chip on his shoulder, bitter that our father abandoned us. He stayed in trouble, spent six months at a juvenile detention center.”

Cate told Eli how her brother had too many incidents from his past for acceptance into medical school. How their mother was disappointed, Nathan felt rejected, and they didn’t speak to each other for years.

Patients were knocking on the door now. Gentle taps at first that grew louder. Faces filled the window. The patients were restless and called her name, not understanding why Dr. Cate was ignoring them.

“Just before Mom’s operation, she and Nathan came back together. The wounds healed. We were a family again.”

Cate looked up at Eli.

“Then she died. In the operating room. Under Dr. French’s care.”

The patients were shouting now, asking Dr. Cate what she was doing with that new doctor.

“After the shock of it, we both felt incredibly guilty. My brother for the way he detached himself from our mother during the last years of her life. Me, for not being there. I was away on a senior externship at UNC in Chapel Hill. I wanted to fly back for her operation, but I was afraid that leaving during the rotation would affect my grade.” Cate lowered her head. “It seems so stupid now.

“Dr. French didn’t even come out to tell Nathan our mother had died during the operation. She ran off to meet with her lawyer, trying to save
her own butt. One of the nurses came out to tell him. By then he already knew.”

Eli had remained quiet, until now, when he felt obligated to say something.

“He already knew?”

“My mother’s operation was webcast over the Internet. Some high school kid had a laptop in the waiting room. He was waiting on a family member in surgery, logged onto the Gates Memorial website, and saw the advertisement for the operation. Started watching it. Freaked out when he saw the blood. Everyone ran over to see. That’s how my brother found out.”

Revenge deaths, Eli thought. The Organist wanted revenge, not only against Liza, but the whole operating room team. Anesthesia, nurses, surgery resident. He killed all of them, except Liza.

Cate became very quiet. Eli wanted her to keep talking.

“My mother died six years ago,” he said. “She had cancer. But that didn’t kill her. It was the treatment, the chemotherapy.” Eli hesitated, measuring his words. “Her doctors miscalculated the dose. Gave her ten times the normal amount. The membranes in her mouth and GI tract peeled off. She died in a pool of spit and blood.”

Eli stopped. He made sure Cate was listening to him. She was, intently.

“The doctors never told me about the mistake. They covered it up instead. Two weeks after her funeral, a pharmacist came forward. I knew medical errors occurred. But the fact they lied about it, I …I was so mad I wanted to kill them. I filed a lawsuit. But I was a surgery resident then. I had no money, and taking time off from my surgery residency to pursue the lawsuit was not an option. So at the last minute, I withdrew the suit.”