Do No Harm (25 page)

"--sleazeball reporter dressed as a doctor tried to sneak in a mini-camera. Cranked the cuffs extra tight for his ride to the station."

One of the cops saw David in his car. "Can I see some ID?" he asked.

"Yes, I'm the chief of the emergency room." David flashed his badge. He thought he detected a note of recognition in the cop's eyes. And disdain.

"The ER's shut down for at least a few more hours, sir, and we're keeping this area clear. You're gonna have to leave."

"What time do you think they'll open the ER again?"

"I don't know. At least a few hours."

David drove slowly down the concrete tiers to the exit. A few cars were queued at the police perimeter, and David gazed back at the hospital, taking it in. The ER, David now saw with renewed clarity, was the most accessible part of the institution. And the most vulnerable. As he'd discussed with Dash, the attacks on the ER were probably not specific to the division but symbolic attacks on the hospital itself. Even if Clyde did work at UCLA Med, that didn't necessarily mean his employment was the starting point of his relationship with the hospital. Clyde had been terrified of Dash in a way that seemed to indicate perceived abuse at the hands of doctors. Which could have been his interpretation of a childhood trip to the hospital or the NPI. If only David had a last name for Clyde, he could run him through the hospital files and see what came up.

David was puzzled by Clyde's claim that he wanted "them" to be sorry for locking him in the dark. Was this merely a hallucination, or was it grounded in reality? And if it was reality-based, what did it have to do with the hospital? David had considered that Clyde's comments might be cover smoke--crafty manipulations designed to mislead investigators--but his presentation had been authentic enough.

A cop waved David through at the perimeter. Not wanting to go home, David drove to a gas station two blocks away, leaned against his trunk, sipped a cup of coffee--scalding in taste and temperature--and tried to order his thoughts. He felt the night chill through his thin shirt and realized that, though it was past five in the morning, he wasn't even tired. Seventeen years in the emergency room provided excellent sleep-deprivation training.

He threw away the empty cup and called Diane from his cell phone. She sounded wide awake. "I heard," she said. "Pat called me. It's all over the news."

"I'm going to need you to cover a bit for me tomorrow," David said. "Would you mind coming in?"

"Not at all. Do we have another attending in the morning?"

"Nelson."

"Fine. The media is stringing you up over this."

He fended off a stab of insecurity. "As well they should be."

"What does that mean?"

"I'm never going to apologize for treating him, obviously," David said.

"Obviously."

"But as you said, I stepped beyond my domain. Which is fine. I don't like boundaries, especially when other people are drawing them for me. But if I was going to assume responsibility for Clyde--and take that responsibility away from those who were actually entitled to it, however fucked up they may have been--I should have assumed all aspects of that responsibility."

"Like how?"

"Like instead of resenting security, I could have insisted it be tightened."

A pause as Diane processed this. "I guess we all dig ourselves into our own neat little areas of expertise, grow smug, and forget how many things we're not good at."

"My list is longer than I've been forced to consider for some time."

"So now what?"

"Now I have to see this through. That patient--and the fact he's on the loose--is still my responsibility." David hadn't said it aloud yet, and it rang with sudden conviction.

"So what are you gonna do? Track him down?"

"Yes."

"I'm not sure you want that mission."

"I know I don't want it. But that's irrelevant."

"Yeah," Diane said. "I guess it is." A pause. "What are you gonna do now?"

"Call Dash, fill him in, and let him know the assessment's off for the morning."

"Then what?"

"Sit here, drink shitty coffee, and wait for the ER to open up so I can get on this."

A cleaner Horace returned a half hour later, munching on a Snickers. The cadaver had paled nicely, taking on a yellow hue. He threw the white sheets that had previously wrapped the bodies into a large rolling trash bin, followed by the woman's clothes. The man's clothes were not there, and he glanced under the table, puzzled, before concluding he must have thrown them out right after removing them from the body.

An I-beam ran overhead, continuing through a small gap in the top of the crypt door. Several chains dangled from the I-beam, and Horace slid one along its length, positioning it above the woman's body. The chain terminated in a pincer clamp, a unit with two jaws that crossed themselves and curved inward. Horace fitted the dull ends of the pincers into the embalmed woman's ear canals and hoisted the chain. The clamp tightened as it rose, the weight of the body pulled the pincers taut, and the cadaver jerked up to a sitting position. Horace raised her straight off the table until she was dangling from the I-beam, the weight of her body sustained by the two pincers digging into the holes of her skull.

Swinging the massive crypt door open, Horace returned to the woman's hanging body and slid it along the length of the I-beam, through the open door, and into the immense refrigerated room. To the left, about a dozen other bodies hung suspended from their heads, pale and naked. Storing them in this fashion ensured that their features wouldn't distort; a body left to harden on an embalming table had a plank-flat backside, which did little to help medical students who needed to explore the human body in its natural form.

Though Horace had long grown accustomed to the room, it was a gruesome place. Swollen blue tongues protruding from mouths, scrotums tightened to small walnuts between loose-dangling hairy legs, eyebrows perfectly plucked on wrinkled yellow foreheads. The donors, magnanimous givers to the cause of science, now hanging up with every inch of their bodies exposed. Each extra tuft of hair, each fold of the abdomen, each mole and birthmark. The same scrutiny would soon be applied to their insides.

Buckets around the periphery of the crypt contained brains and eyeballs, ready to be claimed by the various departments. Blue and red tubs, the type bought at Home Depot to ice down beers at summer parties, were positioned beneath the bodies to catch the ooze and drippings. Horace slid a red bucket beneath the woman and paused for a moment, nostrils widening. He rose, glancing around suspiciously. Beneath the overwhelming formalin and meaty odors, he had caught a whiff of something. Cigarette smoke.

The swaying bodies creaked and swayed as Horace walked slowly through them, searching. Once during his first week, he'd heard the crypt door swing shut behind him when he'd been hanging a squat Asian man. He'd pushed aside the panic, walking calmly to the door and finding that there was indeed a post to open it from the inside. Aside from that brief moment when he'd thought he was locked in with the cadavers, he'd never felt frightened inside the room.

Until now.

He walked along the far wall of the crypt, half expecting someone to jump out at him from behind a wall of yellowed flesh. He pushed aside the last cadaver in the row, a woman whom he could tell had been young and robust in life, but no one was hiding behind her.

Horace sank slowly to his haunches and gazed beneath the swaying feet. Aside from buckets and stained plastic tubs, there was nothing. The woman's body pivoted slowly on its chain, creaking. She was a fresh cadaver, and still draining. A thin stream of yellow liquid curved around the inside of her calf, dripping from her big toe into the red tub beneath her. Realizing he'd been holding his breath, Horace exhaled long and hard, rose, and walked out of the crypt.

Had he looked more closely at the woman's cadaver, he would have noticed a wisp of smoke rising from her foot. If he'd drawn nearer still, he'd have seen the small holes that had been burned into the side of her heel, just in front of the Achilles tendon.

With two cigarettes, held side by side.

Wrapped in an effluvium of formalin, Clyde sauntered past the gift shop and the security desk in a dark burial suit, the Beretta shoved in the band of his pants and pressed to the small of his back. The buttons that ran up the back of the jacket were misaligned, the gaps and flares of the fabric betraying the impromptu contortions he'd undertaken attempting to don apparel designed for the deceased. The combination of the suit's antiquated style and Clyde's robust build gave him the appearance of a vaudeville barker.

He caught a sideways glance from a six-year-old pulling an IV post, but neither of the guards at the desk looked up as he strode past, the glass hospital doors sliding open before him. The cops running the investigation had no photograph of him to circulate, but if the guards had looked closely, they might have seen dark spots on the shirt where the fabric clung to his weeping blisters.

The doors slid open before him and he stepped out, pulling the pack of cigarettes from the suit's damp breast pocket. He lit a cigarette--just one--with a match from the book nestled inside the clear wrapping and inhaled deeply, shooting a plume of smoke into the dark air of the plaza. In front of him, a massive lawn stretched wide, reaching almost to the top tier of the uncovered PCHS lot. The parking structure had many low walls, and exits leading to streets, paths, and gardens. The cops would have searched the cars that had remained there overnight, as well as those left along Le Conte.

His Crown Vic waited, hidden behind a Dumpster at the back of the old Macy's lot across the street, keys resting atop the left rear tire.

An officer jogged up the front steps, touching his cap. "Morning."

Clyde nodded, then, with an economical movement of his fat grubby fingers, flicked the cigarette butt aside. The cool air breezed around him as he walked forward into the open expanse of the plaza, the hospital towering behind him.

The sky was just beginning to grow light.

POLICE officers were still moving about the hospital in clusters, but much of the activity had died down. The ER reopened at 7:45 A.M.; David was there waiting at the police perimeter, doing his best to hide his intense discomfort at the reporters pressing him for statements. The cops spitefully made him wait until eight to enter the hospital, as that was when his shift officially began. The gas station coffee, bad as it may have been, had certainly been caffeine-intensive, and he actually felt a few steps better than exhausted.

It would be a long, unrelenting day. After working a full shift, he'd have to run over to the Sunset Recreation Center for the meet-and-greet for the incoming class of residents. Aside from Diane and Dr. Nelson, the ER staff was curt with him. He wasn't sure if they held him responsible for Clyde's escape or if it was merely his own guilt at work.

Composites of Clyde had been posted in the lobby and the CWA. David removed one and gazed at it. The artist had failed to capture Clyde's dead, flat eyes, but she'd managed to sketch the mouth and chin perfectly. David stared at the wide neck and acne-scarred cheeks and felt a faintness ripple through him.

After making sure the floor was under control, he found Ralph in the rear hall of the ER. "Anything?" David asked.

Ralph shook his head.

David pulled the sketch of Clyde from his pocket. "Did you send these around to staff?"

"We posted them just about everywhere."

"I think we should circulate copies through the internal mail, make sure every single staff member sees this. We should write on it that Clyde is a possible hospital worker, so people give it more than a cursory glance."

"Yale told me about the worker angle," Ralph said. "But it would take me awhile to get a request like that through the bureaucratic bullshit."

"Put my weight behind it. See if that helps. If not, let me know and I'll get into it personally." David walked briskly through the network of halls across the hospital and into the connected Neuropsychiatric Institute. He unfolded Clyde's composite and examined it on the elevator down to the Badge Center in the basement. In order to move freely within the hospital, every employee of the UCLA Hospital was required to wear a photo badge. All pictures were taken passport style at the Badge Center, with a digital camera and a blue backdrop.

An obese woman manned a computer behind the terminal, her monitor cluttered with family photos and stickers featuring anthropomorphic animals. A plaque adhered to a bulletin board behind her read: SEXUAL HARASSMENT WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. BUT IT WILL BE GRADED. David shuddered.

The woman looked up with a wide grin. "Hello, Dr. Spier." She glanced him over, then waved a finger at him in scolding fashion. "I see you're not wearing your badge."

David found it difficult to force a smile. "You keep all employee photographs on computer file, right?"

"Did you lose your badge again? Do you need us to make you up another new one?"

"No, I have mine right here." He removed his badge from his coat pocket and brandished it at her. "I was wondering how many years back your photo files run."