Gregg Hurwitz - Do No Harm

There was still much to be done before sunrise.

At dawn, David pulled a pillow over his head and attempted to prolong his few hours of sleep, but the stresses of the past week pulled him from any thoughts of slumber. It was his first full day off since the attacks had begun, and he wasn't about to waste it in bed. Reaching for the phone on the nightstand, he paged Ed immediately.

He trudged into the study and removed the drape from the large brass birdcage. Two glassy black eyes stared out at him from beneath the fan of the bright salmon crest. The cockatoo's beak disappeared into its breast feathers, preening.

David sighed. "Hello, Stanley."

"Where's Elisabeth?" the cockatoo squawked. "M amp;M's. Where's Elisabeth?"

"Ran off and joined Cirque du Soleil."

The cockatoo's head tilted, then straightened. "Where's Elisabeth?"

"Moved to Memphis with a blues band." David took care not to spill any birdseed this time as he angled a handful through the bars of the cage into the plastic cup.

The cockatoo shifted from foot to foot, then dashed over and picked at the birdseed. Before David could leave the room, it raised its head again. "Where's Elisabeth?"

David paused by the cage. "Ice fishing in Alaska."

Taking the cordless phone and moving to the living room, he paged Ed again, then collapsed into a plush leather chair. Above the mantel hung a signed de Kooning print-Woman I. A violent depiction with rough, haphazard brush strokes, the painting portrayed an archetypal woman with a gleaming, devouring crescent of a mouth and a mess of broad, bloody strokes where her hips should be. It had been his mother's favorite painting.

Arrayed on the Oriental cabinet to one side were a Waterford vase and several photographs in silver frames. A picture of Peter with David's mother from late in her tenure as chief of staff-her head was tilted slightly back, suggesting royalty or aloofness. His favorite shot of Elisabeth, in the tub, only her head and knees visible in the wash of bubbles. A photo from the ER retreat to Catalina-David talking to Diane on the ferry over to the island, her smile just becoming a laugh. For the first time, it struck him as noteworthy that he kept a framed picture of himself and Diane on the cabinet with his personal photos. The mind moves before it is aware.

The phone rang and he picked it up on a half ring, eager to get an update from Ed.

"David, it's Diane."

"What's wrong?"

"It's Carson. We had a seventy-year-old stroke victim in early this morning. He was putting her in the sniffing position to tube her and accidentally snapped her neck. She died a few minutes later. David? Are you there?"

"Jesus, that's awful. How's he doing?"

"Not great. Dr. Lambert screamed at him for five minutes in front of the whole staff, called him a killer, and kicked him out of the ER. He was a mess. I'm stuck here all day, then I'm covering Marcy's late-night shift. I thought maybe you might want to-"

"What's his address?" David found a slip of paper and jotted it down. Carson lived in a little apartment complex at the top of Barrington near Sunset with which David was familiar. "I actually have to take care of some things around the hospital today. I'll stop by his place this afternoon-he could probably use some time alone now anyway."

"Okay. Swing by the floor if you get a chance."

"Will do."

"I've never seen Carson like this." A long pause. "I have to go figure out how to take a history from a deaf-mute."

David felt sick when he hung up the phone.

He dressed quickly and fixed himself a quick breakfast. He left the LA Times out on the doorstep, not wanting to see the day's blaring headlines, but he couldn't resist turning the radio on during his drive to the hospital. The news about the case was mostly high drama and rehash. He wasn't sure what to make of the fact that Ed hadn't returned his pages; he found himself second-guessing whether turning over to him a key piece of evidence had been a wise call. Maybe Ed hadn't even placed an anonymous call to the police, as he'd claimed he would.

David parked and hurried up to the seventh floor, pausing outside the anatomy lab.

Students milled in clusters, sporting backpacks weighed down with books. Inside, students were bent over cadavers with scalpels and tongs, slicing and prodding. In the corner, a frail student with a prominent Adam's apple enacted the timeless ritual of making the skeleton talk, manipulating the mandible so it moved up and down as he attempted a bad pirate accent. He stopped abruptly when he noticed David.

David had almost reached the door to the prep room when it swung open with a gust of formalin, revealing Yale and Dalton. A nauseated expression on his face, Dalton paused outside the door, leaning slightly on a chair.

Yale regarded David suspiciously. "What are you doing up here?"

"I was coming by to see the Lab Tech," David said. "There are a few maneuvers I'd like one of my med students to practice on a cadaver."

Yale snapped his gum. "Uh-huh," he said.

"What are you guys doing here?"

Yale said, "We got an anonymous tip to this location."

"You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?" Dalton added.

Unaccustomed to lying, David shook his head, hoping he looked convincing. "Find anything interesting?" he asked.

"Capone's gold. Lindbergh's kid." Yale flashed a quick smile. "O.J.'s other glove."

Dalton's look was firm and piercing. "We don't want to find you anywhere around this case, Doc," he said. "Remember that."

David stepped around them, entering the prep room and closing the door behind him. Horace looked up from the body he was working on, bloody saw in hand. A goofy smile lit his face. "Hey, Dr. Spier, how ya doing?" He offered David a blood-caked glove but then glanced down at it and withdrew it before David had to protest. Bits of gray matter clung to his eye shield, which he shoved atop his head with a forearm. His eyes were large, buglike, and somehow endearing. "Good to see you. Goddamn, has it been crazy in here. The kids are hyper because it's their last day of anatomy, on top of which the cops had me sealed out for four hours this morning. Dusting and picking and prying. Then the questioning." He rolled his eyes. "I guess after all that, they didn't find a single goddamned print they liked."

A police flier sat on the wooden desk, the composite of Clyde staring up from it. Horace followed David's eyes and nodded. "The cops brought that with them. I guess they went out through the hospital, but I haven't picked up my mail yet today."

"So he does work here?"

"Worked here. Crazy, huh? I always knew the guy was a few nerves short of a full plexus."

David's mouth went dry. "What's his name?"

"Douglas DaVella. He worked here up until a few months ago, as an orderly. His job was to bring the corpses up from the hearses and help me hang 'em."

So Clyde was a fake name, as David had considered. "What else did he do?"

"He ran specimens, got them to the appropriate labs."

That would mean he'd had a worker's pass, and would have known the codes to most of the Omnilock doors in the facility. Running deliveries-moving from stretch of corridor to stretch of corridor-would've taught him his way around the hospital. Transferring cadavers had been how he'd learned to operate a gurney; David had been wrong in making inquiries about the orderlies who dealt with patients.

Horace walked over and opened a cabinet below the sink, removing a plastic container of DrainEze. He plunked it down on the embalming table beside the cadaver lying inert and gray, a fresh hole sawed through its chest. "Trade secret." He grinned. "I have to special-order it. Which means Douglas probably stole it right from here."