Public Anatomy (36 page)

While Eli told this, Cate inched closer and closer to him until they stood only a couple of feet apart. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Eli chose this moment to strike. “You were there during the most recent operation, when the death occurred.”

Cate wasn’t expecting this. She took a step back.

“Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?” Eli said.

Another step back.

“Or is it?” Eli followed her retreat. “After your mother’s death, you went to Dr. French. Became her protégé. Gained her trust. She even mentioned that you could be her partner, after your training. You set it up, made sure you could be there for the next operation after her period of probation was over. That operation was webcast, live, just like your mother’s operation. That was
your
revenge, Cate. To shatter the career of Liza French by another operative death.”

Cate’s chin began to quiver. She clenched her jaw.

“Dr. French taught you about the robotic equipment. You knew which part of the procedure carried the most risk. You could make it appear that it was the robot’s fault.”

Cate shook her head.

Eli went on.

“During the final moments of the operation there was a distraction. A phone call from a prospective patient’s husband. It was all captured in the transcript. The caller was your brother, Cate. No one was watching when you were supposed to remove the instruments, when instead you jammed the trocar into the patient’s aorta and killed her.”

Cate stared at the picture on the phone.

“But it didn’t stop there, did it, Cate? Your brother couldn’t stop until every member of the team from your mother’s operation was dead.”

Eli took the phone from her. He held the screen to her face, visual evidence of Cate’s connection to the Organist, her brother.

“And then you both went after Liza.”

Cate began to plead. “You know what it’s like, Dr. Branch, to have someone you love taken away by doctors who don’t even care. It has to stop.” She looked again at the phone. “We had to stop it.”

Eli waited. He waited for her to realize what she was saying. That killing these five people was somehow justified.

But Cate was defiant.

She pointed at the cell phone. “So what if we’re both in this picture, that doesn’t mean a damn thing. And besides, you could never prove that I caused the patient’s death.”

With that statement, Eli knew they had enough evidence. He turned
toward the back of the clinic. In the doorway of the break room, Lipsky appeared.

“It proves quite a lot, Ms. Canavan,” Lipsky said. The detective walked slowly but purposefully toward her.

Cate stood and announced that she must start seeing her patients. She marched through the front door into those waiting to see her. But she didn’t stop. She ripped off her white coat, slung it to the ground, and took off in a dead run across the pavement.

Through a window in the free clinic, Eli and Lipsky saw flashes of sunlight reflected off glass as two police cars lurched forward and stopped Cate at the edge of the parking lot.

The police wanted to close the clinic. All the patients had watched as Cate was escorted to the back of a squad car and driven away. But rather than leave, the patients kept their place in line. They knew another doctor waited for them inside.

Lipsky remained at the clinic, said he needed to search the place for evidence.

“Evidence?” Eli said. “What more evidence do you need?”

A second officer stayed behind as well. He looked through drawers and cabinets.

“You never know,” Lipsky said. “Anything we find might be important.”

Eli watched them. The clinic was so sparsely furnished there weren’t many places to hide evidence if you wanted to.

“We have the killer,” Eli told Lipsky. “He’s in the hospital. He will probably live, but he’s not going anywhere. And we have Cate’s confession. She was there during the second operating room death, the only member of the operative team, other than French, who survived. She knew all the team members and knew enough about their personal lives so her brother could hunt them down.”

The officer found a stethoscope in one of the drawers and was playing doctor, with the prongs in his ears, listening to his own heart.

“Maybe she didn’t think it would go this far,” Eli said. “Maybe she even tried to stop her brother. Who knows? But five people are dead. Cate confessed the motive—revenge for her mother’s death. And we’ve apprehended both individuals responsible.”

Eli waited until Lipsky stopped rummaging through papers and looked at him. “It’s over, Lipsky.”

The detective returned to the drawer, removed a tangled blood pressure cuff, replaced it. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” he said. “We’re still going to search the place. So lock the doors and tell those hobos out there to go home.”

Through the window, Eli counted eleven people, including a woman who had just arrived and stood at the end of the line. She was holding a baby.

“Search all you want,” Eli said. “But these people have been waiting and deserve to be seen. I’m not closing the clinic.”

Lipsky and the officer continued their search.

After the night rain’s brief respite from the heat, a full sun returned and bore down hard on the people outside the clinic. The newcomer stepped away from the line and Eli could see her more clearly. She was an older than average white woman who carried a black baby.

The woman appeared to be talking nonstop. A man whom Eli recognized immediately stood near them. Tobogganhead reached over to shield the baby’s eyes and the woman slapped his hand.

Eli opened the door and motioned for the woman to bring the baby inside. He expected complaints from those at the front of the line, but they were glad to see the clinic open. They made way for the woman, but she yelled at them anyway.

“Get away from my baby, you liquor breaths.”

Tobogganhead followed behind. When he saw Eli, a big smile lit up his face.

“Dr. Branch. So good to see you.”

Eli shook his hand. “Mr. Felts.”

“Norman!” the woman snapped. “I’m talking with the doctor.”

Tobagganhead rolled his eyes.

Eli had forgotten his first name. Norman. And they seemed to be a couple. Speaking of odd.

“My baby’s sick,” the woman said. “Been vomiting all night.”

“Come in, please.” Eli closed the door behind them. It had been over ten years since he’d treated a newborn. But he was all they had.

“I try to give him milk but he spits it back at me.”

Tobagganhead tried to add to the story, but she stopped him each time.

“How old is your baby?” Eli asked.

“About one week,” the woman said. Then, for clarification. “He’s not our birth baby. We adopted.”

“Oh?” Eli said. “I would have never guessed.”

They made quite the adoptive parents. The mother with an obvious psychiatric problem. And Norman Felts, the father, with who knows what kind of animal living on his head under his toboggan. How in the world had they become the guardians of this child?

“His birth mother abandoned him,” the woman said. “You know, teenage drug addict.”

“Yeah, I know.” Eli found a thermometer to take the baby’s temperature. “How did you adopt so quickly?” he asked.

Tobogganhead tried to answer. “We didn’t really adopt, we—”

But the woman cut him off again. “Hush. Let me tell it.” She kissed the baby on top of the head, bounced him up and down even though he was already content. Then she placed the infant on a small examining table, reached up, and repositioned the overhead light.

“Mary’s a nurse here at the clinic,” Tobogganhead said.

Eli tried to hide his surprise. “Oh, really.”

“It’s all official,” Mary said. “The doctor said we could keep it.”

Eli held the thermometer steady under the infant’s arm. “The doctor?”

“After the drug addict girl delivered, Dr. Canavan and I were taking her home with the baby when she decided she didn’t want it. Handed the child to me in the parking lot.”

She looked at Tobogganhead and smiled, all of a sudden the loving couple.

“The drug addict mother didn’t have any parents. She was a runaway. So we saved this little baby’s life. Dr. Canavan said as long as we came to the free clinic for the baby’s check-ups and didn’t go to any other hospital, we could keep him.”

“She did, did she?” The story was so hard to believe that somehow
it all made sense. Eli removed the thermometer. The baby’s temp was perfectly normal. He was smiling and cooing.

Eli noticed a shriveled nubbin of tissue at the outside tip of the baby’s foot. Gently, he flicked the tissue with his finger and watched as it fell off, rolled to the edge of the table, and landed on the floor. The “mother” stepped back and put her hand over her mouth. Eli looked at Tobogganhead. He was grinning at the sight of the mini-amputation procedure. Other than the sixth toe, their child was the healthiest baby Eli had ever seen.

“Wait right here,” Eli said and went to the break room.

The officer was searching a cabinet under the sink. Lipsky was reading a memo posted on the wall. It was from the dean of the medical school and addressed to Cate Canavan, medical student director of the free clinic. “Doc. You know all these patients can come here and get free medical care. Completely free. Just like that.”

Eli looked through the medical supply closet, removed a round canister with a plastic lid.

“Yeah, I know.”

“What you got there?”

Lipsky was obviously bored with his unnecessary search. Eli held up the canister. “Baby formula. Want some?”

“Nah. Ate half a dozen donuts on the way over.”

Eli gave the container of formula to Tobogganhead and explained to the mother that baby formula would be tolerated better than cow’s milk. She was most grateful.

For the first time in weeks, he felt like a doctor.

Once they had the baby formula and a little reassurance that they were good parents, Tobogganhead and the woman were ready to leave with their baby. But first, Tobogganhead told Eli that after the baby settled down, he would come back to the clinic in a few days and let the doctor fix the sore on his head.

From the break room, Lipsky watched them leave. “What was wrong with that baby?”

“Nothing, really,” Eli told him. “New parents.”

Lipsky nodded as if he understood. “Say, Doc,” Lipsky walked toward
Eli, his shoulders pulled back, hands pressed behind him, just above his waist, “while you’re at it, my back’s been killing me.”

Eli opened the clinic door again. A wave of heat rushed in. The typical Memphis summer was back. The rain was over. Not a cloud in sight.

“I’ll be glad to take a look at your back,” Eli said and pointed. “Just go to the end of the line.”

Lipsky returned to the break room. “You doctors, always making people wait.”

Outside, an old man sat in a wheelchair, dirty bandages wrapped around both feet.

It wasn’t high-tech surgery, Eli thought. Definitely not glamorous. But these people needed a doctor just as much as anyone. And for now, at least, he was that doctor. With undiagnosed illness and late-stage disease, each patient would be a challenge. But the challenge would release his mind from the past days of death that he had been powerless to stop.

To his surprise, Eli noticed a new arrival outside the clinic. A white coat distinguished her from the patients. She leaned beside the man’s wheelchair and began unwrapping one of his bandages.

The patients allowed Eli to cut through the line.

Meg looked up at him, kept unwrapping. “So, you’re the new clinic doctor now?”

Eli nodded. “Keeps me out of trouble.”

Meg let the dirty bandage fall to the ground. “Need any help?”

“Think you can handle an actual live patient?”

Meg stuck out her tongue and then removed a package of gauze and a roll of tape from her coat pocket. She rewrapped the man’s foot, tore off a piece of tape with her teeth, and winked at him.

Eli wanted to keep watching her, but Meg rolled the man’s wheelchair to him. “Take him inside and see if you can do as well with the other foot.”

Pushing the wheelchair, Eli turned to see Meg approach the line and call out, “Who’s next?”

I am surrounded by a group of talented individuals at Oceanview Publishing. I thank Mary Adele Bogdon, Frank Troncale, Kylie Fritz, and Susan Hayes. I am grateful for my publicist, Mary glenn McCombs, from day one, and the artisan of covers, George Foster. I extend a special thanks to Bob and Pat Gussin and to Susan Greger for those extra years devoted to publishing.

I cherish Penny Tschantz for her encouragement of my writing life that began during my days at the University of Tennessee. I want to thank Chris Roerden for her insight and I give a hearty thank you to the folks at Davis-Kidd Booksellers.

For their knowledge and assistance with research on Vesalius, I thank Mary Teloh and Jim Thweatt in the History of Medicine Collection of the Eskind Biomedical Library at Vanderbilt University. I especially appreciate the opportunity for a hands-on perusal of a fabulous edition of
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
.

I acknowledge the valuable resource of the following texts in my research and writing on Vesalius:
Andreas Vesalius of Brussels
by Charles D. O’Malley, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964;
The Epitome of Andreas Vesalius
, Preface and Introduction by L. R. Lind, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1949; The Illustrations from
The Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels
by J. B. deC. M. Saunders and Charles D. O’Malley, Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1993.