Robin Cook - Foreign Body

“How’s it going?” Laurie asked, coming up alongside Jack.

“We’re having a ball as usual,” Jack responded, straightening up and stretching.

“A typical gunshot suicide?” Laurie asked.

Jack let out a short laugh. “Hardly. At this point, it’s pretty clear it was homicide.”

“Really?” Laurie questioned. “How so?”

Jack reached over to the corpse and grabbed the reflected and inverted scalp and pulled it from covering the face back into its original position. High on the side of the head and in the center of a shaved area was a sharply defined circular deep-red entrance wound surrounded by a number of two-to-three-inch black speckles.

“My word,” Laurie exclaimed. “You are right. This is not suicide.”

“And that is not all,” Jack said. “The path of the bullet is steeply downward such that it ended up in the subcutaneous tissues of the neck.”

“How can you guys read so much into this?” Vinnie asked.

“It’s easy,” Laurie said. “When someone shoots themselves, they almost always place the barrel against the skin. What happens then is the explosive gases go into the wound along with the bullet. The resultant entrance wound becomes raggedly stellate as the skin blows away from the skull and tears.”

“And you see this stippling?” Jack said, pointing with the handle of a scalpel to the ring of black spots around the wound. “That’s all gunpowder residue. In a suicide, all that goes into the wound.” Then, turning back to Laurie, he asked, “How far away do you think the barrel was when the gun was fired?”

Laurie shrugged. “Maybe fifteen to twenty inches.”

“That’s exactly my thought,” Jack agreed. “And I think our victim was lying down when it happened.”

“You’d better let the boss know as soon as possible,” Laurie advised. “This is the kind of case that invariably has political fallout.”

“That’s my plan,” Jack said. “It’s amazing, isn’t it, how many cases we see where the manner of death is different after the autopsy than what it was thought to be before.”

“It’s what makes our job so important,” Laurie said.

“Hey!” Jack voiced. “Did you get to see Calvin yet?”

“Oh, yeah!” Laurie said remembering her mission. “That’s why I popped down here. I’m on my way to Travisa to get our Indian visas. Calvin has given us the green light for a week.”

“Damn,” Jack said, but then he laughed before Laurie could get miffed.

October 17, 2007

Wednesday, 7:40 p.m.

New Delhi, India

Raj Khatwani cracked the door from the stairwell and peered out into the wedge of the third-floor corridor of the Aesculapian Medical Center hospital that was visible. There was no one in his line of sight, but he could hear a medication cart approaching with its characteristic rattling of glass against glass. He let the door close. Through its fire-resistant thickness, he heard the cart roll past.

Leaning back against the concrete-block wall, he tried to control his breathing. With the tension he was experiencing, it was difficult. Sweat dotted the upper part of his forehead. All he could think of was his new respect for Veena and Samira. Now that he was in the middle of putting his first patient to sleep, he realized it was a lot more stressful than he had anticipated, especially after Samira had told him it was a breeze. Some breeze, he thought grudgingly.

When an adequate amount of time had passed, he cracked the door again. Not seeing anyone or hearing anything, he opened the door farther and slowly stuck his head out, looking up and down the hallway. The only people he saw were two nurses a distance down the main corridor at the central desk, talking to an ambulatory patient. They were far enough away so that Raj could just barely hear them. In the opposite direction, there were only three more patient rooms on either side of the corridor before a terminal conservatory. There were conservatories at both ends of the long corridor, each filled with plants and chairs for those patients able to use them.

In his mind, Raj could hear Samira’s advice: Don’t be seen, but if you are, act normally. Let your nurse’s uniform do the talking. Don’t be seen! Raj scoffed silently. Since he was a big man, slightly more than two hundred pounds, not being seen was particularly difficult, especially on a full hospital floor with nurses and aides scurrying about on any one of myriad possible errands.

Raj had gone to Samira and Veena’s room to seek advice that evening before he’d left for the Aesculapian Medical Center. He didn’t think he’d really need help and did it more out of respect for his female colleagues, but now that he was there, he was glad he did. Samira had finally admitted she had been nervous, which was good to know, since he, too, was definitely nervous. Veena, however, had said nothing.

Of the twelve nursing employees of Nurses International, as the only male, Raj provided a stark foil for the other eleven attractive and quite feminine females. He had medium-dark flawless skin, very dark closely cropped hair, darkly penetrating eyes, and a pencil-line mustache beneath a slightly hooked nose. But his most characteristic physical feature was his physique. He had broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and bulging muscles. He looked every inch the enthusiastic weight lifter and black-belt martial arts expert he was. But despite his appearance, Raj was not a masculine-acting individual, but nor was he feminine, at least in his mind. Nor was he gay. He thought of himself as just Raj. The seemingly out-of-character weight lifting and martial arts had originally been his father’s idea. Recognizing early his son’s social proclivities, his father had wanted him to have some protection in a socially cruel world. As he got older, Raj liked the weight lifting, as looking buff had become enjoyable because of the attention it engendered from his mostly female friends, and he liked the martial arts because, in his mind, it was more like dance than an aggressive sport.

Suddenly Raj heard loud footsteps against bare concrete. To his horror, he realized that someone was behind him in the stairwell, descending from above. From the proximity of the noise he could tell the person was imminently going to reach and round the landing between the third and fourth floors, at which point Raj and his loitering would be in full view! Raj knew he had two choices if he didn’t want to be seen: either he could run back down the stairs, maybe as far as the basement, or he could exit onto the third floor and take the risk of being seen there.

The footsteps were rapidly descending; Raj had to decide! He was in a panic. He heard the more hollow sound as the approaching individual reached the landing. In an even greater panic, Raj opened the door to the third floor only enough to step through and then used his hip to push it closed. Not realizing he’d been holding his breath, Raj allowed himself to breathe as he glanced up and down the corridor. Behind him, in the stairwell, he could hear the now muffled steps descending toward the third-floor landing. For fear whomever it was might try to exit on the third floor, Raj pushed off the stairwell door and headed for his patient’s room. He’d been forced into action. It had been like standing at the edge of a pool afraid of the water and then being pushed in. Raj did not look back until he’d reached David Lucas’s door. Just ahead, two nurses emerged from the next patient room, in deep conversation about the individual’s care. Luckily, they immediately turned toward the central desk. Had they looked in the opposite direction, they would have locked eyes with Raj a mere ten feet away, and he would have had some serious explaining to do.