Ken Douglas - Death Glitch

A few minutes later they were ushered into the office of the President and CEO of St. Catherine’s, an athletic looking man with a full head of ash grey hair and skin so white it looked like he hadn’t seen the sun in forever, named Aaron Shaffer. He was a doctor and his office was large and afforded him a prime view of Reno’s downtown casinos. Must be gorgeous at night, Mouledoux thought, as Dr. Romero introduced them to the hospital’s CEO, then to Simon Drake, the hospital’s attorney, and lastly to Dr. Elizabeth Jordan, the attending who’d treated Isadora Eisenhower in the emergency room.

“ As you know, we had a busy day here yesterday,” Shaffer said after they were seated.

“ Yeah, the accident,” Peeps said. “I can imagine.” There’d been a random, gang related shooting, which caused a multi-car accident at the Spaghetti Bowl, where Interstate 80 and Highway 395 crossed. Several injured; fortunately no fatalities.

“ Yes, so you can imagine the confusion here.” He looked first toward Peeps, then toward Mouledoux. Both cops met his eyes straight on.

“ Yeah, we get the idea,” Peeps said.

“ I had Dr. Romero ask for you for a reason, Detective Friday.”

“ He told me it’s sensitive and I’m known for keeping my yap shut. We get it.”

“ And Detective Mouledoux?”

“ I can keep my yap shut, too. We’re cops, we don’t go broadcasting our investigations.”

“ Yet I read about so many of them in the press.”

“ You called me because you trust me,” Peeps said. “You can trust Detective Mouledoux as well.”

“ Okay, but if any of this gets out the press will go crazy. The public too. There will be a feeding frenzy like none before.” He sighed, the way only a troubled man can. “At the present only the four of us know what I’m about to tell you. Well, the four of us and Isadora Eisenhower, of course.”

“ Wait a minute,” Peeps said. “She’s dead.”

“ Is she?” Shaffer said.

“ Well, isn’t she?” Peeps said.

“ We don’t know for sure and that’s the problem.”

“ Where’s the body?” Peeps said.

“ It’s gone.”

“ Someone stole it?” Peeps said.

“ Not exactly,” Shaffer said.

“ Well, it didn’t get up and walk away.”

“ As I said, that’s the problem. We think it did.”

“ We’re outta here!” Peeps said.

“ Wait a minute, Joe,” Mouledoux said. “He’s serious.”

“ You’re kidding?” Then to Shaffer. “So what’s the deal, you pronounced her and she wasn’t dead? You thought she’d been shot through the heart, but you made a mistake? It was only a flesh wound, so the patient got up and went home?”

“ Not exactly,” Shaffer said. “I’d like to show you part of a video we took of one of our surgeries this morning.” He put a disk into his computer, then rotated the screen so the detectives could see it.

On the screen, a woman was on the table and a team of surgeons and nurses were around her. A young female doctor was about to cut into the woman’s chest. She paused, turned away from the patient, lowered her mask, took in a deep breath, then wiped sweat from her brow with her scrub sleeve and, for an instant, the camera caught a frontal view of her face. Shaffer stopped the tape.

“ I know that woman.” Mouledoux hadn’t known Amy was a doctor. He’d thought she was a full time student. She must be taking classes as a hobby of some sort. Must be nice to have that kind of spare time. “She used to live in my complex.”

“ I know her, too,” Peeps said. “She just broke up with someone I know. Her name’s Amy Eisenhower.” He paused for a second. “Wait a minute, she related to the missing body?”

“ This might be easier than I’d hoped.” Shaffer tapped his keyboard and the screen went dark. “Detective Mouledoux, what color are Amy Eisenhower’s eyes?”

“ Blue.”

“ You sure?”

“ I’m a detective with a great memory for faces. Besides, she’s a pretty girl. I’m sure.” Mouledoux paused for a second. “Hey, wait a minute-”

“ Hold up, Detective,” Shaffer said, cutting him off. He turned to Peeps. “Is he right, Detective Friday?”

“ Oh, yeah, they’re definitely blue, the bluest eyes you’d ever wanna see.”

“ And you wanted to say, Detective?” Shaffer turned to Mouledoux.

“ The doctor on the screen, her eyes are brown.”

“ Yes, they are.” Shaffer tapped his keyboard again and the young doctor’s face was back on the screen.

“ Contacts,” Peeps said.

“ No,” Mouledoux said. “I don’t think that’s what Dr. Shaffer wants us to take away from this meeting.”

“ It’s not?” Peeps said.

“ No, it’s not,” Shaffer said. “Isadora Eisenhower was the finest heart surgeon I’d ever laid eyes on. She had the greatest hands, steady and true. She never doubted she could save a patient and her record is unmatched. But like us all, sometimes she’d lose one, but unlike the rest of us, it would hit her hard. She treated every patient like family.

“ When I came here, she took me under her wing. She saw something in me no one else did. She used to tell me I’d go far, that I’d be a great surgeon one day. If not for her, I’d probably be an old country doctor. Not that that would’ve been such a bad life.”

“ And you’re telling us this, why?” Peeps said.

“ I must have assisted Dr. Eisenhower hundreds of times, I know her work better than I know the layout of this office. Yesterday, when I learned there was a doctor performing open heart surgery in my hospital, who wasn’t on staff, I couldn’t get to that OR fast enough. I went in there to bust heads and I found Isadora Eisenhower, the only woman I ever loved, instructing one of my interns, who had a heart in her hands and Izzy Eisenhower was younger than she was on the day I met her, forty-five years ago.”

“ Holy fuck!” Peeps said.

“ This is a Catholic hospital,” Shaffer said. “But we’ll make an exception.”

“ It’s gotta be some kind of trick,” Mouledoux said.

“ Last night,” Dr. Jordan said, “Isadora Eisenhower presented with a chest wound. It looked like the bullet had smashed right on through. Smack through her chest, smack through her heart. She should’ve died when she was shot, but somehow her heart was still working. She was alive when she came here, but she didn’t last long. I called it and they took her body away.”

“ And now,” Drake the attorney said, speaking for the first time, “it looks like she woke up in the morgue, minus about fifty or sixty years, donned a pair of scrubs, performed open heart surgery, then vanished.”

“ That’s spooky.”

“ Yes, Detective Mouledoux,” Shaffer said, “that’s spooky. So, you can see why we don’t want this getting out, can’t you?”

“ Yeah,” Mouledoux said, “you’d be jammed with people looking for the Fountain of Youth.” He looked around the room. “Every doctor and every hospital in the world would be. It’d be chaos.”

Leaving Aaron to close had been a stroke of genius. It had given Izzy time to get out of the hospital and with her new found youth, she was able to run like the wind. She’d made it home, sweating like a marathoner, in under fifteen minutes.

In her house, she stripped off the scrubs and stuffed them in a paper bag. She didn’t think Aaron would be able to keep what had happened to her quiet for long. He’d try to honor his promise, but there were cameras in the OR. And those cameras, combined with her missing body, painted one heck of a picture. Then there was the anesthesiologist, the intern and the nurses who’d assisted her during the surgery, too many people to keep quiet. She had to get out of town.