Tess Gerritsen - The Surgeon

“I need to know if he and Capra were friends.”

Kahn thought it over. “I don’t know. I can’t tell you what happens outside this lab. All I see is what goes on in that room. Students struggling to cram an enormous amount of information into their overworked brains. Not all of them are able to deal with the stress.”

“Is that what hapened to Warren? Is that why he withdrew from medical school?”

Kahn turned toward the glass partition and gazed into the anatomy lab. “Do you ever wonder where cadavers come from?”

“Excuse me?”

“How medical schools get them? How they end up on those tables out there, to be cut open?”

“I assume people will their own bodies to the school.”

“Exactly. Every one of those cadavers was a human being who made a profoundly generous decision. They willed their bodies to us. Rather than spend eternity in some rosewood coffin, they chose to do something useful with their remains. They are teaching our next generation of healers. It can’t be done without real cadavers. Students need to see, in three dimensions, all the variations of the human body. They need to explore, with a scalpel, the branches of the carotid artery, the muscles of the face. Yes, you can learn some of it on a computer, but it’s not the same thing as actually cutting open the skin. Teasing out a delicate nerve. For that, you need a human being. You need people with the generosity and the grace to surrender the most personal part of themselves — their own bodies. I consider every one of those cadavers out there to have been an extraordinary person. I treat them as such, and I expect my students to honor them as well. There’s no joking or horsing around in that room. They are to treat the bodies, and all body parts, with respect. When the dissections are completed, the remains are cremated and disposed of with dignity.” He turned to look at Moore. “That’s the way it is in my lab.”

“How does this relate to Warren Hoyt?”

“It has everything to do with him.”

“The reason he withdrew?”

“Yes.” He turned back to the window.

Moore waited, his gaze on the professor’s broad back, allowing him the time to form the right words.

“Dissection,” said Kahn, “is a lengthy process. Some students can’t complete the assignments during scheduled class hours. Some of them need extra time to review complicated anatomy. So I allow them access to the lab at all hours. They each have a key to this building, and they can come in and work in the middle of the night, if they need to. Some of them do.”

“Did Warren?”

A pause. “Yes.”

A horrifying suspicion was beginning to prickle Moore’s neck.

Kahn went to the filing cabinet, opened the drawer, and began searching through the crammed contents. “It was a Sunday. I’d spent the weekend out of town, and had to come in that night to prepare a specimen for Monday’s class. You know these kids, many of them are clumsy dissectors, and they make mincemeat of their specimens. So I try to have one good dissection on display, to show them the anatomy they may have damaged on their own cadavers. We were working on the reproductive system, and they’d already begun dissecting those organs. I remember it was late when I drove onto campus, sometime after midnight. I saw lights in the lab windows, and thought it was just some compulsive student, here to get a leg up on his classmates. I let myself in the building. Came up the hall. Opened the door.”

“Warren Hoyt was here,” ventured Moore.

“Yes.” Kahn found what he was looking for in the filing cabinet drawer. He took out the folder and turned to Moore. “When I saw what he was doing, I — well, I lost control. I grabbed him by the shirt and shoved him up against the sink. I was not gentle, I admit it, but I was so angry I couldn’t help myself. I still get angry, just thinking about it.” He released a deep breath, but even now, nearly seven years later, he could not calm himself. “After — after I finished yelling at him, I dragged him here, into my office. I had him sit down and sign a statement that he would withdraw from this school effective eight A.M. the next morning. I would not require him to give a reason for it, but he had to withdraw, or I would release my written report of what I saw in this lab. He agreed, of course. He didn’t have a choice. Nor did he even seem very disturbed by the whole thing. That’s what struck me as the strangest thing about him — nothing disturbed him. He could take it all calmly and rationally. But that was Warren. Very rational. Never upset by anything. He was almost…” Kahn paused. “Mechanical.”

“What was it you saw? What was he doing in the lab?”

Kahn handed Moore the folder. “It’s all written there. I’ve kept it on file all these years, just in case there’s ever any legal action on Warren’s part. You know, students can sue you for just about anything these days. If he ever tried to be readmitted to this school, I wanted to have a response prepared.”

Moore took the folder. It was labeled simply: Hoyt, Warren. Inside were three typewritten pages.

“Warren was assigned to a female cadaver,” said Kahn. “He and his lab partners had started the pelvic dissection, exposing the bladder and uterus. The organs were not to be removed, just laid bare. That Sunday night, Warren came in to complete the work. But what should have been a careful dissection turned into mutilation. As if he got his hand on the scalpel and lost control. He didn’t just expose the organs. He carved them out of the body. First he severed the bladder and left it lying between the cadaver’s legs. Then he hacked out the uterus. He did this without any gloves on, as though he wanted to feel the organs against his own skin. And that’s how I found him. In one hand, he was holding the dripping organ. And in his other hand…” Kahn’s voice trailed off in disgust.

What Kahn could not bring himself to say was printed on the page that Moore now read. Moore finished the sentence for him. “He was masturbating.”

Kahn went to the desk and sank into his chair. “That’s why I couldn’t let him graduate. God, what kind of doctor would he make? If he did that to a corpse, what would he do to a live patient?”

I know what he does. I’ve seen his work with my own eyes.

Moore turned to the third page in Hoyt’s file and read Dr. Kahn’s final paragraph.

Mr. Hoyt agrees that he will voluntarily withdraw from school, effective 8:00 A.M. tomorrow. In return, I will maintain confidentiality regarding this incident. Due to cadaver damage, his lab partners at table 19 will be reassigned to other teams for this stage of dissection.

Lab partners.

Moore looked at Kahn. “How many lab partners did Warren have?”

“There are four students to a table.”

“Who were the other three students?”

Kahn frowned. “I don’t recall. It was seven years ago.”

“You don’t keep records of those assignments?”

“No.” He paused. “But I do remember one of his partners. A young woman.” He swiveled around to face his computer and called up his medical student enrollment files. The class list from Warren Hoyt’s freshman year appeared onscreen. It took Kahn a moment to scan down the names; then he said:

“Here she is. Emily Johnstone. I remember her.”

“Why?”

“Well, first because she was a real cutie. A Meg Ryan lookalike. Second because after Warren withdrew, she wanted to know why. I didn’t want to tell her the reason. So she came out and asked if it had something to do with women. It seems Warren had been following Emily around campus, and she was getting the willies. Needless to say, she was relieved when he left school.”