Lewis Perdue - Perfect killer

"Dr. Claiborne," I managed as I returned his handshake.

"Please call me Clay. You're an accomplished physician yourself now; I've run across your papers in the literature any number of times now, and I have to confess, a lot of what you have written sails right over the head of this old country doctor." His broad, self-deprecating smile further rattled my emotional equilibrium. "Of course… Clay."

"Well, then, come on in." He motioned me into a small, windowless room overstuffed with an Oriental rug, dark mahogany furnishings, and all the professionally decorated accoutrements that went with the look.

Broom closet indeed. I saw from a quick glance at the walls that he was on the hospital board and had been for a several decades.

"Here." He motioned me in the direction of his desk, to an armchair upholstered in burgundy leather and studded with brass. "Have a seat." He closed the door and followed me, settling his tall, lanky frame into an identical chair facing me.

Claiborne gave me an intense silent stare that made me feel like a patient again.

Then he leaned closer to me, studied my face, then sat back in his own leather-upholstered chair.

"Lordy, Bradford, you do have the Judge's eyes," he said finally "You have that look that… demeanor he had which made people do what he told them to, made them instantly believe he was right about most anything." He nodded to himself as he continued to fix my face with his gaze. "Call it charisma or presence if you like, but it clearly made him such a successful lawyer and a political force that lives on today."

Given the Judge's political leanings and the ways he enforced his power, I did not want to say "Thank you," so I nodded and asked, "You really think so?"

I knew my noncommittal, equivocal response fell right in with how good people could stand by and let evil things like segregation happen. I reminded myself, I had not come to refight the Civil War, but to find a way to look at my comatose wife's brain scans. "Lordy," Claiborne said again. "Why, I remember the last time I saw you, you were about this high." He raised his left hand about three or four feet off the floor. I caught the gold Piaget on his wrist. "Yes, yes," he mused to himself. "That would have been about the time you were in the first grade and we were giving everybody Salk vaccines. I remember one other time your mama brought you in bleeding like a stuck hog where you had stepped on some glass barefoot." His eyes went distant for a moment and I sensed he was watching some version of the same memory in my own head where I'd played in tall grass down by Riverside Drive near Eddie Stanton's house, I thought for sure I had been bitten by a water moccasin and was going to die right there.

"Your mama had a cute little Nash Rambler and you lived in the Judge's house then. Lordy, your mama sure was proud of you." His face went blank for a moment and showed me his professionally sympathetic gaze. "I sure mourned her passing." He nodded again, then returned to studying my face.

"Yes, yes, you certainly do have the Judge's eyes." Then he laughed. "Fortunately for you, you don't have his hairline." He combed his aristocratic fingers through his white thatch. The Judge had been cue-ball bald.

Claiborne mined this particular historical vein for another eternal ten minutes before finally asking me what had brought me into his office. "Got just the thing." I followed Claiborne to the radiology department.

"We've got a terrific system allowing us to send digitized X-rays and scans down to the medical school in Jackson for consultation, or Ocshners or anywhere else for that matter."

I followed him through the waiting room, smiling and nodding politely as he introduced me in glowing terms as a local boy made good, all the while letting everybody know I was the Judge's grandson and he had been my physician. Somehow that seemed to matter, and once again it astounded me how eagerly people here allowed their lives to be shaped by dead men.

We made our way to the back corner of a long, claustrophobic supply closet, where we found a young man in a white coat intently tapping at a keyboard. A giant, highresolution, flat-panel plasma screen dominated the room.

Claiborne cleared his throat. "Tyrone?"

The young man turned toward us.

"Tyrone Freedman, this is Dr. Stone. He's one of my old patients, but he's from

California now." Claiborne said nothing about the Judge this time.

When Freedman stood up and shook my hand, I tried not to look at a ragged scar that puckered its way from the corner of his left eye and made it across his temple before disappearing into his hair above his ear.

"Tyrone here is a surgical resident from the University Medical School, a local boy who proves Valley State can produce more than famous NFL stars. He wants to be a trauma surgeon." Claiborne paused. "We have plenty of practice for him unfortunately." "Pleased to meet you," I said

"Likewise," the young man said.

"Dr Stone wants to know if we can help him view some scans from back in

California."

A smile broadened Freedman's face. "Of course we can."

"Tyrone's something of a computer genius," Claiborne said. "He was actually a programmer before premed."

Freedman nodded.

"Well, that's beyond this old country doctor," Claiborne said as he sidled his way out of the confined space. "Tyrone, you take good care of Dr. Stone so he'll have nice things to say about us when he gets back to Los Angeles."

Tyrone turned to me, "Okay, Dr. — "

"Please call me Brad."

The young man gave me an odd raised-eyebrow look, then nodded. "All right, uh,

Brad. Let's get down to it. What site do we head to first?"

"Head to http://ConsciousnessStudies.org — three s's in the middle-and click on the private data link."

Instants later, my Web site appeared. Tyrone brought up the account entry box when he clicked on the data link.

"My user name is bstone, password, jambalaya."

"Those are way too obvious," Tyrone said. "I mean, my apologies, but anybody who wants into your private data would be deterred by like… seconds."

"You're right," I said as the scan files began downloading.

"You want me to change it for you?"

"Let's wait."

Tyrone shook his head. "What do you want first, the MRIs, the PET, or the EEG?" "Let's do the EEG."

If you want privacy, I can show you what to do and leave."

I thought about this for a moment. "I can walk you through things if you're interested,"

"Wow? Really?" He turned and looked up at me. The scar presented itself again.

He caught my glance.

"Drive-by shooting," he said casually. "My own damn fault. I fell in with some older gang members, hacked bank accounts and school grades for them. When the police caught me, the trails all led to the gang. I needed to be zeroed out… fourteen years old and sitting on my uncle's front porch in Balance Due when it happened."

Balance Due had been the black section of Itta Bena. I had been a small child the last time I'd visited there, but I still remembered the smell of raw sewage, which raised sulfurous bubbles in the stagnant, scum-carpeted ditches alongside muddy, unpaved roads lined with weathered wood shacks, rusted corrugated metal roofs, and wood-fire smoke coming out of battered tin stovepipes.

"Killed my uncle and aunt," Tyrone said. "Left me with this souvenir." He swept his index finger casually across the scar. "Made me want to be a trauma surgeon." "I thought drive-bys were a big-city thing."

He shook his head and returned to the keyboard and display, talking as he worked.

"Every small town in the Delta has got its Crips and Bloods, or a bunch of drug-thug wannabes who are half as smart and twice as dangerous." He paused. "That's why I live way out in the country, at the end of a dirt road." He nodded to himself.