Gregg Hurwitz - Do No Harm

Pacing impatiently beneath a fire escape, David waited for Yale's return call. None came. He'd just decided to page Yale again when the muffled cries of a woman caught his attention. Looking up the side of the building, he saw he was standing beneath Clyde's window. The muffled cries were in all likelihood coming from Clyde's apartment.

David's face went slick with sweat. The breeze kicked up, and he lost the sound of the cries momentarily, before it died down. Ed had pointed out that police response time to this area was slow. Clyde could return and resume torturing, or even kill, whoever was up in his apartment before a 911 call could be responded to. And Yale hadn't even called back.

David walked back and forth beneath the fire escape, the cries overhead driving him to a near-panic. His mind stumbled through terms-suppressed evidence, search warrants, unlawful entry-searching for something to guide him, but he was forced to acknowledge that his legal expertise was derived almost entirely from bad movies. A pained, stomach-deep grunt overhead drove him to action.

David pulled on a pair of latex gloves from his back pocket, then jumped up, grabbing the fire escape ladder and yanking it down. He climbed to the first landing, then the second, the structure creaking beneath him.

Peering through Clyde's filthy, cracked window, he saw little more than an unmade bed. The reflection of the glowing Healton's Drugstore sign shined in the glass, and David turned to look at the store, visible beyond the empty lot. In front of the store, bathed in a cone of light, sat his Mercedes, in clear view from Clyde's window. David grimaced at the distinctive tilt of the headlights-his car stuck out glaringly from the surroundings. Clyde must have recognized it pulling up, and realized David had come looking for him. The Pearson Home was also distinctly observable from Clyde's apartment. It struck David as noteworthy that Clyde had never left the vicinity of the Happy Horizons home in which he'd spent part of his childhood. Clearly, he derived some comfort from being nearby.

The woman's cries brought David's attention back to the dark apartment. He carefully removed a long shard of glass from the cracked window and reached through, lifting the catch. He pushed the window up and slid inside, resting the shard on the sill.

The first thing to catch his attention was the odor of decay-nearly unbearable. Thousands of motes swirled in the artificial light filtering through the window.

The woman's muffled screams continued, rising in pitch and frequency. David felt an overwhelming sense of embarrassment as he crossed to the moaning mound of clothes and pulled away a crusted sweatshirt to reveal the amorphous, static-bathed shapes of a couple fornicating on an overturned television set. The riddle of the cries was solved. David closed his eyes, feeling himself flush. He could not help but picture Freud's somber, astute face.

He started for the open window, but then paused. He was inside now. Whatever laws he may have violated were already broken. He might as well look around and see what he could glean about Clyde Slade, aka Douglas DaVella, aka Slade Douglas, while he waited for Yale's call. He ran through a quick checklist in his mind of what he should look for. DrainEze. Lithium. Evidence.

He stepped farther into the apartment, surveying it. Clyde obviously had been removed from normal socialization for some time. Burnt and cracked pots and pans covered the small counter that served as the kitchen. Among them sat hardened clumps of bread that Clyde had molded into sculptures. They resembled decaying gingerbread men. Toothpicks protruded from the sculptures, decorative flags or voodoo pins.

David almost tripped over the cat bowl, overflowing with mush and teeming with flies. The odor was riper here, more fresh. He turned and saw, sprawled along the top of the kitchen pantry, a partially decayed cat. It had been dead for weeks, and the flies and maggots were at it.

With a nervous stare at the door, David quickly entered the bathroom. On the interior doorknob hung a child's hospital gown that looked to be the one Clyde had worn during Connolly's study. David stared at the filthy mirror, dotted with bits of pus from popped zits. The toilet was splattered with stains. Diarrhea-an early side effect of lithium toxicity. The medicine cabinet was empty, except for a massive bottle of generic aspirin. Aspirin meant more trouble; when taken with lithium, it raised the lithium blood level and thus the likelihood of toxicity. If Clyde did indeed suffer from migraines, that would explain why he kept so much aspirin on hand. David briskly searched around the sink, but was unable to find where Clyde stored his stolen lithium.

He pulled aside the frayed shower curtain. The entire bottom of the tub was lined with jam jars, lids screwed on tight, stacked five or six jars high. David raised one to the light and saw the yellow liquid inside. Urine. Clyde was saving his urine. The date and time was etched on a label on the side in black pen. David looked over the jars with increasing amazement. Clyde had been saving his urine, off and on, for months. A few jars were filled with clusters of hair, and others with fingernail and toenail clippings. One held a collection of scabs. David tried to swallow, but his throat clicked dryly.

The best he could come up with to assess the contents of the tub was a weak parallel to Freud's anal stage, and to the fetishizing nature of recently toilet-trained two-year-olds. Flushing the toilet and becoming upset at where it all went. Fixation at an early stage of development. Maybe Clyde was holding on to some part of himself. Himself at an earlier age? David shook his head, irritated. Too facile an explanation.

Stepping back into the main room, David approached the large wooden table. Several books were stacked to one side, and he noticed the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library stamp on the fore edges-Clyde had stolen them from the hospital. David laid the books side by side. A Merck Manual, a DSM-IV, a Physician's Desk Reference, a dictionary, and several psych textbooks. One of the pages of the PDR was dog-eared, and David flipped to it.

Not surprisingly, it was the section on lithium. Several bullet points detailed its possible uses: to control mood swings and explosive outbursts, and to help patients combat aggressiveness and self-mutilation. One phrase, "may also help control violent outbursts," had been circled in red. Clyde must have mistaken violent outbursts to mean outbursts of violence rather than intense, brief tantrums. Certain words were underlined, and David flipped through the dictionary and found them marked there correspondingly.

Driven by senseless compulsions that he didn't understand, Clyde was-with some degree of sincerity-trying to prevent himself from committing acts of violence, and poisoning himself in the process. It was, above all else, a display of wish fulfillment, a desperate hope that magical pills could heal him and dissolve his violent urges. Clyde had managed to galvanize some of his few and pathetic resources to this misguided end.

Beside the books, stubbed-out cigarettes lay clustered on a small plate, a few wayward butts scattered across the table like shriveled white worms. Most of them were mashed together in twos, as if they'd been smoked that way. Clyde had probably developed a heavy dependence on nicotine to reduce his anxiety and improve his concentration. Two cigarettes at a time would certainly maximize those effects.

David leaned over a sheet of notes that Clyde had scrawled, most of it phrases he'd evidently culled from the med textbooks. Clearly, much of the reading was above his level; Clyde had drawn up lists of words he didn't understand. David studied his writing, considering whether Clyde was dyslexic. At the bottom of the page were several phrases. Nic wether toda. Helo ther. Hav a nice dae. Variant spellings of dae were written beneath-day, daye, da.