Robin Cook - Blindsight

The center of the room was crowded with old gurneys, each bearing a separate body. Again, some were covered, others naked and blankly staring up at the ceiling like some sort of macabre dormitory.

Feeling uncharacteristically squeamish, Laurie stepped over the threshold, her eyes nervously darting around the gurneys to locate Julia Myerholtz. Behind her the heavy door slammed shut with a loud click.

Irrationally, Laurie spun around and rushed back to the door, fearful that she’d been locked into the cooler. But the latch responded to her push and the door swung open on its bulky hinges.

Embarrassed at her own imagination, Laurie turned back into the refrigerator and began methodically going through the bodies on the gurneys. For identification purposes each body had a manila name tag tied around the right big toe. She found Julia not far from the doorway. Her body was one of those that had been covered.

Stepping up to the head, Laurie drew down the sheet. She gazed at the woman’s pallid skin and her delicate features. Judging by her appearance alone, if she hadn’t been so pale, she could have been sleeping. But the rude, Y-shaped autopsy incision dispelled any hope that she might still be alive.

Looking more closely, Laurie saw multiple bruised areas on Julia’s head, an indication of her probable seizure activity. In her mind’s eye Laurie could see the woman bumping up against her statue of David and knocking it to the floor. Opening up Julia’s mouth, Laurie looked at the tongue, which had not been removed. She could see that it had been bitten severely: more evidence of seizure activity.

Next Laurie looked for the IV site where Julia had injected herself. She found it as easily as she had the others. She also noticed that Julia had scratched her arms the way Duncan Andrews had done. She had probably experienced similar hallucinations. But Laurie noticed Julia’s scratches were deeper, almost as if they had been done with knives.

Looking at Julia’s carefully manicured nails, Laurie could see why the scratches were so deep. Julia’s nails were long and immaculately polished. While she was admiring the woman’s nails, Laurie noted a bit of tissue wedged beneath the nail of the right middle finger.

After finding no other tissue under any of the other nails, Laurie went to the autopsy room for two specimen jars and a scalpel. Returning to Julia’s side, she teased a bit of tissue free and put it into one of the specimen jars. Using the scalpel, she sliced a small sliver of skin from the margin of the autopsy wound and slipped it into the other specimen jar.

After covering Julia’s body with the sheet, Laurie took the two samples up to the DNA lab, where she labeled them and signed them in. On the request form she asked for a match. Even though it was fairly obvious the woman had scratched herself, Laurie thought it was worth checking. Just because the M.E.’s office was overworked was no reason not to be thorough. Still, she was relieved that it was evening and the lab was empty. She wouldn’t have wanted to explain the need for this test.

Laurie walked back to her office. With everyone else gone, she thought she might take advantage of the quiet and turn her attention to some of that paperwork she’d been so studiously neglecting.

Still feeling slightly tense from her strange reaction to the cooler door closing, Laurie was ill prepared to deal with what awaited her in her office. As she rounded the corner of the doorway, preoccupied with her thoughts, a figure shouted and leaped at her.

Laurie screamed from someplace deep down in her being. It was a purely reflex response, and of a power that caused the sound to reverberate up and down the cinderblocked hallway like some charged subatomic particle in an accelerator. She’d had no control. Simultaneous with the scream her heart leaped in her chest.

But the attack that Laurie feared did not occur. Instead her brain frantically changed the message and told her that the terrifying figure had cried “Boo!”-hardly what a mad rapist or some supernatural demon would yell. At the same time her brain identified the face as belonging to Lou Soldano.

All this had happened in the blink of an eye, and by the time Laurie was capable of responding, her fear had changed to anger.

“Lou!” she cried. “Why did you do that?”

“Did I scare you?” Lou asked sheepishly. He could see that her face had turned to ivory. His ears were still ringing from her scream.

“Scare me?” she yelled. “You terrified me, and I hate to be scared like that. Don’t ever do that again.”

“I’m sorry,” Lou said contritely. “I suppose it was juvenile. But this place has been scaring me; I thought I could get you back a little.”

“I could bop you in the nose,” Laurie said, shaking a clenched fist in front of his face. Her anger had already subsided, especially with his apology and apparent remorse. She walked around her desk and fell into her chair. “What on earth are you doing here at this hour anyway?” she asked.

“I was literally driving by,” Lou said. “I wanted to talk with you, so I pulled into the morgue loading dock on the chance that you’d be here. I really didn’t expect you to be, but the fellow downstairs said you’d just been in his office.”

“What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Your boyfriend, Jordan,” Lou said.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Laurie snapped. “You’re really going to irritate me if you persist in calling him that.”

“What’s the problem?” Lou asked. “It seems to me to be a relatively accurate term. After all, you go out with him every night.”

“My social life is no one’s business but mine,” Laurie said. “But for your information, I do not “go out’ with him every night. I’m obviously not going out tonight.”

“Well, three out of four ain’t bad,” Lou said. “But look, down to business: I wanted to let you know that I talked with Jordan about his patients being professionally bumped off.”

“What did he have to say?” Laurie asked.

“Not a lot,” Lou said. “He refused to talk about any of his patients specifically.”

“Good for him.”

“But more important than what he said was how he acted. He was really nervous the whole time I was there. I don’t know what to make of that.”

“You don’t think he was involved with these murders in any way, do you?”

“No,” Lou said. “Robbing his patients blind-no pun intended-yes, shooting them, no. He’d be killing the golden goose. But he was definitely nervous. Something’s on his mind. I think he knows something.”

“I think he has plenty of reason to be nervous,” Laurie said. “Did he tell you that Cerino threatened him?”

“No, he didn’t,” Lou said. “How did he threaten him?”

“Jordan wouldn’t say,” Laurie said. “But if Cerino is the kind of person you say he is, then you can just imagine.”

Lou nodded. “I wonder why Jordan didn’t tell me.”

“Probably he doesn’t think you could protect him. Could you?”

“Probably not,” Lou said. “Certainly not forever. Not someone as high profile as Jordan Scheffield.”

“Did you learn anything helpful talking with him?” Laurie asked.

“I did learn that the murder victims did not have the same diagnosis,” Lou said. “At least according to him. That was one harebrained idea I had. And I learned that they are not related in any other obvious way vis-á-vis Jordan Scheffield other than being his patients. I asked about every way I could imagine. So, unfortunately, I didn’t learn much.”

“What are you going to do now?” Laurie asked.

“Hope!” Lou said. “Plus I’ll have my investigative teams find out the individual diagnoses. Maybe that will tell us something. There has to be some aspect I’m missing in all this.”