Public Anatomy (26 page)

A few minutes later, Cate’s brother pulled the air-conditioning unit out of the wall, without the help of the men he’d just hired. Not only does he have good hands, Cate thought, but he’s also strong as hell. She wondered why he even paid the men if he wasn’t going to use them.

He removed the replacement unit from the back of his car and carried it toward the clinic. Foster, the Meatman, and Joey the Flicker shuffled alongside and held to the side of the unit as though trying to help. They held the unit in place while her brother secured it with screws. He flipped a switch and cool air blew into the clinic. Her brother waved to her and left. The three men returned to the end of the line.

Nate Lipsky drove his squad car down South Cooper Street and stopped at a light before turning onto Central Avenue. The timing of this homicide call was unusual—4:30 in the afternoon. Lipsky blocked the sun with his hand so he could see the light change. What was most unusual about this call was its location. He looked again at the address for the Zante Repository.

How could someone have been killed in the Zante?

Primarily an attraction for school groups and admirers of odd Southern culture, the Zante held the logical combination of stuffed animals, from anteaters to nutria the size of a small horse, various Native American artifacts, and a historical exhibit on the contribution of the comman American chicken to the Southern way of life. A planetarium brought visitors into the 21st century and allowed gazers to learn about the constellations as tiny lights twinkled against a pitch-black fabric sky.

From the initial call, Lipsky came to a conclusion, or at least an educated guess, about the mode of death. When he heard Zante Repository, he figured someone ambled into the museum from the street in the final throes of heat stroke. But the officer first on the scene had called from the planetarium. He said that in the middle of a shooting star show, a human body part fell from the ceiling, straight through the constellation of Orion.

Lipsky asked him if it was a heavenly body. The young officer didn’t get it, but said, “No, it looks more like a heart.”

“A heart?”

“And what’s weird, we found a drawing of the heart pinned to the victim’s clothing. Like a name tag or something.”

“Have you found the body?”

“Yeah, stuffed in a closet in the back of the museum.”

A few minutes later, Lipsky arrived at the Zante Repository. An ambulance, two squad cars, and a Memphis fire truck were already there. A group of children huddled at the entrance, their adult chaperones reporting frantically into cell phones.

Before making the call, Eli moved to the far side of the autopsy room with his cell phone, as though he needed privacy.

Meg mouthed the question. “Who you calling?”

Lipsky answered.

“I know who the next victim will be,” Eli told him.

“That’s good. So you can tell me whose heart this is splattered across the floor.”

When he first dialed the phone, Eli had an I’m-calling-too-late feeling. If Lipsky was already at a crime scene, Eli’s feeling was valid. What alarmed him most, however, was not that another victim had been killed.

“Did you say
heart?”

“Looks like it to me, Doc.”

Once again, not the pattern of Vesalius and the
Fabrica
. But now Eli had the list of operating room personnel.

“A male or female?”

“Hmm.” Lipsky groaned. “I’m pretty good with female anatomy, but I’ll be damned if I can look at this piece of meat and call sex. Hold on.”

In the background, Eli heard Lipsky ask for the victim’s driver’s license.

A few seconds later, Lipsky said, “Female. Fifty-eight years old.”

“Wait.” Eli moved to the computer screen. “Don’t tell me the name.” He switched the call to speakerphone.

Lipsky hummed an off-key version of the
Jeopardy
theme.

Meg rolled her eyes.

The remaining females on the list were the medical student, attending
surgeon Liza French, and the circulating nurse. Both the student and Liza were much younger than fifty-eight.

Eli called out the name and added, “She’s a nurse.”

“Nnnnnnn,” Lipsky buzzed. “Try again.”

Lipsky read the name from the license.

“Damn it,” Eli whispered. It didn’t match with any name on the screen.

“What?” Meg tried to catch up on the conversation.

Eli answered by shaking his head, still listening to Lipsky.

“You did get one part right, though,” Lipsky told him. “About her being a nurse. We found a Gates ID badge in her purse.”

Eli stepped into the dark sanctuary of Madison Avenue Episcopal Church, a place where he found himself more often during the past few weeks. Sometimes, as he did now, he entered the empty church in the evening, alone, except for an occasional church worker who prepared the sanctuary for the next morning’s services, leaving Eli to himself on the back pew, merely nodding to him in affirmation of his need to seek a few moments of refuge. Once, he slipped into a back pew on a Sunday morning. He made it through the entire service, but he preferred his solitary visits in an empty chapel.

Today, another visitor had arrived before him. A few pews in front of him, a dark green blouse covered shoulders that bowed. She rocked slowly forward and back again, meditating.

Eli sat as quietly as he could, not wanting to distract the woman, or not wanting to be known. That was it, he realized. That was why he came here. A place where he was anonymous, shielded by a thick wooden door and stone walls and an expectation of safety. But it wasn’t just the violence he had faced in the past few weeks, as disturbing as that was. Eli sought to reexplore where his life had landed—a father who had betrayed him and his family with his secret. The once respected anatomist had ultimately betrayed those who donated their bodies and the families who had taken the safety of their loved ones for granted.

With his parents dead, he was left to fend for his older brother. He had not only failed emotionally with his only sibling, but Eli now feared financial failure as well, his funds to pay rent to Henry’s institution dwindling fast.

Eli closed his eyes, felt the silence surround him. He wanted to feel
protected, however briefly, from drought and disease and the senseless killings that he knew weren’t senseless at all but were a series of calculated deaths in a pattern that he was unable to discern.

He shivered. The ambient temperature must have been in the low sixties. He was surprised that half the city wasn’t camped out in this air-conditioned haven. But he knew that for most, the threat of a spiritual reckoning was far greater than the fear of suffocating in the heat. Images of garbage and fire and a corpse in a warehouse melted into one as rational thought slipped drowsily away.

Shuffling past his pew, the woman in the green blouse startled him. He nodded to her, but her gaze remained grounded and she left the sanctuary.

Eli rubbed his eyes and then refocused on a figure standing near the pulpit. The robed priest clasped his hands at his waist and watched Eli. He made his way purposefully down the aisle.

Eli shifted in his seat. He turned and hoped that the woman had returned and was the focus of the priest’s attention. As he suspected, they were alone.

The clergyman stopped beside his pew.

“Hello to you, young man.”

He was not as old as Eli initially thought. Late fifties, he wore a close-cut beard speckled with grey.

“Hello, Father.”

“I am glad that you visit us.”

Eli nodded.

“You are welcome any time.”

“Thank you.”

The priest began to turn toward the pulpit again but he stopped. “May I be of any particular assistance?”

“No. I’m just here to sit a while, if that’s okay.”

The priest nodded in confirmation, but he wasn’t finished. “I recognize you from the newspapers.”

Eli realized his anonymity, even here, was not assured.

The priest went on. “I know times have been hard for you.”

Eli had not expected this. He had let his guard down, and he tried to
harden what must have appeared as a vulnerable shell. But instead, he felt a softening, suddenly aware that no one had acknowledged the life-changing events that plagued him. Eli said, “I’m fine,” but he hoped the priest would continue his absolution.

“I knew your father.”

Eli assumed his father had not been inside a church in decades. Stunned by the mention of him, Eli stood. “I need to go.”

In a surprising gesture, the priest stepped inside the pew to block his exit. “Your father, he struggled. Just as you are now. You should know that.”

Eli shook his head. “He didn’t struggle enough.”

“We all have our demons. Some more than others.”

“I can’t do this, Father. Not now.”

Eli stepped toward the priest, who gave him room. He exited the sanctuary and reentered the sultry world.

It happened after a code blue at three in the morning almost ten years ago. They were interns, paged stat to the hospital room of an obese male admitted with a bowel obstruction but found unconscious and pulseless by the night nurse. The room was full of nurses and medical residents barking out orders. Liza and Eli were relegated to doing the chest compressions, alternating positions every few minutes.

Eli started first. After three minutes of compressions, he yelled “switch” and Liza slid a standing stool beside the bed, locked her elbows, and delivered sequential crunches to the man’s sternum. It was a difficult position for each of them, leaning past the edge of the bed over the man’s rotund chest and abdomen. Liza was determined to deliver effective compressions, her thin frame bucking with each blow. Then Eli took over so Liza could catch her breath. On Liza’s next turn, just as she bent over the man, he vomited around the breathing tube, a forceful spray that sent a plume of yellow bile onto Liza’s face and scrubs. Eli motioned to switch places, but Liza waved him off. Using her forearm, she wiped the vomit off her face and resumed the compressions, more forceful than before.