Do No Harm

Students milled in clusters, sporting backpacks weighed down with books. Inside, students were bent over cadavers with scalpels and tongs, slicing and prodding. In the corner, a frail student with a prominent Adam's apple enacted the timeless ritual of making the skeleton talk, manipulating the mandible so it moved up and down as he attempted a bad pirate accent. He stopped abruptly when he noticed David.

David had almost reached the door to the prep room when it swung open with a gust of formalin, revealing Yale and Dalton. A nauseated expression on his face, Dalton paused outside the door, leaning slightly on a chair.

Yale regarded David suspiciously. "What are you doing up here?"

"I was coming by to see the Lab Tech," David said. "There are a few maneuvers I'd like one of my med students to practice on a cadaver."

Yale snapped his gum. "Uh-huh," he said.

"What are you guys doing here?"

Yale said, "We got an anonymous tip to this location."

"You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?" Dalton added.

Unaccustomed to lying, David shook his head, hoping he looked convincing. "Find anything interesting?" he asked.

"Capone's gold. Lindbergh's kid." Yale flashed a quick smile. "O.J.'s other glove."

Dalton's look was firm and piercing. "We don't want to find you anywhere around this case, Doc," he said. "Remember that."

David stepped around them, entering the prep room and closing the door behind him. Horace looked up from the body he was working on, bloody saw in hand. A goofy smile lit his face. "Hey, Dr. Spier, how ya doing?" He offered David a blood-caked glove but then glanced down at it and withdrew it before David had to protest. Bits of gray matter clung to his eye shield, which he shoved atop his head with a forearm. His eyes were large, buglike, and somehow endearing. "Good to see you. Goddamn, has it been crazy in here. The kids are hyper because it's their last day of anatomy, on top of which the cops had me sealed out for four hours this morning. Dusting and picking and prying. Then the questioning." He rolled his eyes. "I guess after all that, they didn't find a single goddamned print they liked."

A police flier sat on the wooden desk, the composite of Clyde staring up from it. Horace followed David's eyes and nodded. "The cops brought that with them. I guess they went out through the hospital, but I haven't picked up my mail yet today."

"So he does work here?"

"Worked here. Crazy, huh? I always knew the guy was a few nerves short of a full plexus."

David's mouth went dry. "What's his name?"

"Douglas DaVella. He worked here up until a few months ago, as an orderly. His job was to bring the corpses up from the hearses and help me hang 'em."

So Clyde was a fake name, as David had considered. "What else did he do?"

"He ran specimens, got them to the appropriate labs."

That would mean he'd had a worker's pass, and would have known the codes to most of the Omnilock doors in the facility. Running deliveries-moving from stretch of corridor to stretch of corridor-would've taught him his way around the hospital. Transferring cadavers had been how he'd learned to operate a gurney; David had been wrong in making inquiries about the orderlies who dealt with patients.

Horace walked over and opened a cabinet below the sink, removing a plastic container of DrainEze. He plunked it down on the embalming table beside the cadaver lying inert and gray, a fresh hole sawed through its chest. "Trade secret." He grinned. "I have to special-order it. Which means Douglas probably stole it right from here."

Hurwitz, Gregg

Do No Harm (2002)

"What was he like?" David asked. "DaVella."

Horace shrugged. "Not much into hygiene, if you catch my drift. For our lower-skilled positions, we like to hire people a bit disadvantaged." A glint of pride showed in Horace's face, the pride of a self-taught man who has pulled himself up the job ladder. "I'll tell you, he smoked with a vengeance, two at a time sometimes. You know, like trying to calm himself down. Willing himself to hold together. But he didn't."

"What happened?"

"He started coming undone. Showing up late. Not reporting back from runs. I found him once in the crypt, standing among the bodies. Wasn't doing anything weird, just swaying on his feet. Said the stillness calmed him."

"Any trouble with the corpses? Any of them… violated or anything?"

"No, no. Nothing like that." Horace drew back his head as if he'd just been exposed to a bad odor. It was the first time David had seen him wear an expression of disgust.

"Was he fired?"

"I finally had to let him go," Horace said. "I didn't have a choice," he added defensively. "Things weren't getting done."

David wondered if Clyde was avenging the fact he'd been fired. He'd told David, I just want them to be sorry. "Did he seem pissed off when you fired him?"

"No. Not really. Kind of sad, maybe."

"Did he interact well socially?"