The Select (13 page)

"Number four."

"How'd we happen to get together?" she
said. "Did you pull something—?"

"Not my doing, I swear. Check the list
yourself. Brown is the last of the B's. There's only two C's, and
Cleary comes before Coye. They put us together."

Quinn stepped over to the bulletin
board. Sure enough: Brown, T. and Cleary, Q. were assigned to table
four.

"Come on," Tim said. "Stop dragging
this out. Let's go meet Mr. Cadaver."

Table four was in the far left corner.
As they made their way toward it, Quinn took in her surroundings.
The Anatomy Lab was a long, high ceilinged room, brightly lit by
banks of fluorescents. Twenty-five tables were strung out in two
rows of ten and one row of five; a lecture/demonstration area took
up the free corner.

She and Tim were among the last to
arrive but no one was looking at them. They all were standing at
their assigned metal tables, one on each side, flanking their
cadavers—inert mounds beneath light green plastic sheets. Quinn
studied the faces of her fellow students as she passed. Some grim,
some green, some as gray as their lab coats, some avid and
animated, all a bit anxious.

Quinn took heart. Maybe she wasn't
such a wimp. She felt a sampling of each of those same emotions
swirling within her: As much as she loathed the idea of cutting up
a human body, she yearned for what she would be learning. And as
eager as she was to get started, she dreaded her first look at that
dead face.

"Here we are," Tim said.
"Table four." He moved around to the far side of the green-sheeted
form. "And here's Mr. Cadaver." He lifted the edge of the sheet and
peeked beneath. "Oops. Sorry.
Mrs.
Cadaver."

"Tim," she whispered. "Knock it off.
Aren't you...the least bit...?" Words failed her.

Tim lowered his dark glasses and
looked over the rims with his blue eyes.

"Want to know the truth?" he said
softly. "I'm terrified. And I'm completely grossed out." Then he
snapped the glasses back up over his eyes and gave her a steely
smile. "But don't tell anyone."

Well, we've all got our own ways of
dealing with things, I guess, Quinn told herself. This must be
his.

Better than throwing up, which was
what she felt like doing.

She jumped as the overhead speakers
came to life.

"All right, gentlemen and ladies.
We're about to start the first dissection. But before we begin, I
want each of you to listen very carefully to me."

Quinn looked around and saw their
anatomy professor, Dr. Titus Kogan, short, balding, puffy, looking
like he'd spent some time in the formaldehyde baths himself. He
stood in the lecture/demonstration area, holding a
microphone.

"For the next nine months
you will be dissecting the cadavers at your assigned tables. They
are no doubt intimidating now but you will soon enough become
familiar with them. Do not become
too
familiar with them. I will
repeat that for anyone who might have missed it: Do not become too
familiar with your cadaver.

"Never forget that you are dismantling
the body of a fellow human being. This is a rare and precious
privilege. Many of these people donated their bodies for this
purpose. Others belonged to the least of our species—the homeless,
the unidentified, the unclaimed. All of them are anonymous, but
that doesn't mean they didn't have names, didn't have friends and
family. Remember that as you carve them up. No matter what their
past histories, no matter what their socioeconomic status when they
were alive or what route they took to get here, they all deserve
our respect. And I shall demand that you accord them that
respect.

"I should inform you that this lab
will be open at all times. One good thing about an enclosed campus
with its own security force is that it allows students access to
the labs whenever they need them. Do not hesitate to take advantage
of that.

"Now. Roll your cover sheets down to
the foot of the table. It is time to begin."

Quinn looked at Tim across the table.
He raised his eyebrows.

"Ready, partner?"

"Sure," she said, steeling herself.
"Now or never. Let's get to it."

They each grabbed a corner of the
green plastic sheet and drew it swiftly toward the end of the
table.

Gray hair...sallow, wrinkled, sagging,
turgorless skin... flabby buttocks...skinny legs—the images,
strobed close-ups, bits and pieces, catapulted into her brain. She
blinked, got the whole picture. Female. A thin old woman. No
jolting surprises in the appearance of their cadaver except that it
was lying face down on the table.

Quinn glanced around at the other
tables. All the cadavers were face down.

She turned back to her table. Whoever
the woman was—or had been—Quinn felt embarrassed for her, laid bare
like this under these pitiless lights. She wanted to edge the sheet
up, at least to cover her buttocks, but she left it where it was.
As she tucked the plastic sheet under the cadaver's feet she
noticed a tag tied to her left great toe. She turned it over and
read the print:

Fredrickson Funeral Home

Towson, MD

A name had been block printed in blue
ink below the heading:

Dorothy Havers.

Dorothy Havers...that couldn't be
anything but the woman's name. They weren't supposed to know their
cadaver's name. Nobody was.

Quinn pulled her dissection kit from
her labcoat pocket, removed the scissors, and snipped the string.
The back of her hand brushed the cold, stiff flesh. She
shuddered.

"What are you doing?" Tim asked,
leaning over from his side.

"Nothing." She stuffed the tag into
her pocket. "Just checking out my kit."

"Good afternoon, Miss
Cleary."

Quinn turned and
recognized the white-haired figure standing by the head of their
table. He wore a stained, wrinkled labcoat and had a battered
hardcover copy of Gray's
Anatomy
clamped under his left arm.

"You lucked out," he said, looking
over the cadaver. "You got yourself a thin one."

"Dr. Emerson. I didn't expect to see
you here."

"Oh, you'll see a lot of me around
here," he said, smiling. "Neuropharmacology is my field and my
love, but you can spend only so many hours a day calculating
minuscule changes in the reuptake rates of sundry neurotransmitters
without going batty. A few afternoons a week it does me good to get
back to the basics of gross anatomy."

Quinn was glad he was here. She liked
Dr. Emerson. She had a feeling he'd played an important part in her
acceptance, but she would have liked him anyway. He radiated a
certain warmth that invited trust. And it was certainly good to
know that she had someone willing to go to bat for her at The
Ingraham.

She introduced him to Tim.

"Do you have a photophobic condition,
Mr. Brown?" he said, eying Tim's shades.

"Yes," Tim said slowly. "In a
way."

Quinn then asked the question that had
been plaguing her since they'd removed the plastic
sheet.

"Why is she face down?"

"Because the first dissection you'll
be doing is the nuchal region, the back of the neck. You'll be
looking to isolate the greater occipital nerve. Dr. Kogan will be
starting you off momentarily but if you want to get a jump, take a
look at Section One in your lab workbook."

"Okay," Quinn said. "But
first..."

She freed the end of the plastic sheet
from under Dorothy's feet and drew it up to the middle of her
back.

Dr. Emerson was looking at her
curiously. A faint smile played about his lips. "Are you afraid
your cadaver's going to catch a chill?"

She's not just a cadaver, Quinn
thought. She's Dorothy.

She shrugged. "We'll only be working
on the neck, so I just thought..." She ran out of words.

Apparently she didn't need any more.
Dr. Emerson was nodding slowly, his eyes bright.

"I understand, Miss Cleary. I
understand perfectly."

*

Quinn made the first cut.

With Dr. Kogan instructing over the
loudspeaker and Dr. Emerson watching, Quinn gloved up, fixed a
blade to her scalpel handle, and poised the point over the
white-haired scalp. The diagram showed a central incision running
from the back of the head down to the base of the neck.

She hesitated.

"Want me to do it?" Tim
said.

She shook her head. She was going to
have to get used to this and the quickest way to acclimate to the
water was to jump in.

"Press hard," Dr. Emerson told her.
"Human skin is tough. And human skin that's been in a formaldehyde
bath can be almost like shoe leather."

Quinn gritted her teeth and pushed the
point through the skin. Dr. Emerson hadn't been exaggerating. Even
with a brand-new scalpel blade it was tough going. The honed edge
rasped and gritted as she dragged the blade downward to the base of
the skull and along the midline groove above the vertebrae of the
neck.

"Very good," Dr. Emerson said. "Now
you've started. From here on you're each on your own, each
responsible for the dissection of your own side. Later, of course,
when we get to them, you'll have to share the unpaired internal
organs." He patted Quinn on the shoulder. "I'll be back later to
see how you're doing."

"Wow," Tim said to the air when Dr.
Emerson had moved on to another table. "Only just got here and
already she's teacher's pet."

She flashed him a grin. "Some of us
have engaging personalities, some of us don't."

"Is that so?" Tim raised his scalpel
in challenge. "Race you to the greater occipital nerve?"

"You're on."

*

Quinn won.

In fact, she had to stop her own
dissection a couple of times to help Tim with his.

Finally she told him, "I would venture
to say that your manual dexterity is inversely proportional to the
accuracy of your memory."

"Am I to take it then that you don't
think neurosurgery is the field for me?"

"Only if you keep the world's finest
malpractice defense attorney on permanent retainer."

"Who knows? I may decide
to
be
the world's
finest defense attorney."

"You have to go to law school for
that. This is a med school, in case you forgot."

"Didn't I tell you? I'm going to law
school as soon as I graduate from The Ingraham."

Quinn was about to ask Tim if he was
joking when one of the second-year student teaching assistants
strolled up to the table. The name tag on his labcoat read
"Harrison." He was thin, with longish blond hair, and pale,
pock-marked skin that glistened under the fluorescents. His
attitude was condescending, bordering on imperious. Quinn disliked
him almost immediately.

"Not bad," he said as he inspected
their dissection.

He smiled as he pulled a pen-like
instrument from the breast pocket of his labcoat, telescoped it
into a pointer, and began quizzing Quinn on the local anatomy. She
did all right on the tissues they'd already covered in class, but
then he began to move into unknown territory.

"We haven't got there yet," Tim said,
coming to her aid.

"Oh, really?" Harrison said, his gaze
flicking back and forth between the two of them. "Well, maybe you
ought to consider showing some initiative. One way to get ahead at
The Ingraham is to work ahead."

"Thank you for that advice," Tim said
softly. "Now, if you don't mind, what was the origin and insertion
of that last muscle you pointed to?"

Harrison smirked. "Look it up," he
said, then turned and almost walked into the man standing directly
behind him.

"Oh," Harrison said. "Excuse me, Dr.
Emerson."

Dr. Emerson's expression was not
pleased.

Quinn wondered how long
he'd been standing there. Long enough to hear Harrison's last
remark, apparently. Quinn hadn't noticed him come up. But Tim
obviously had. His lopsided smile told her he'd bushwhacked the
second-year student. He cocked his head toward Harrison as he
mouthed the words,
Dumb
ass
.

"I'd like to speak to you a moment,
Mr. Harrison," Dr. Emerson said.

He took the younger man aside and did
most of the talking. Quinn couldn't hear much of what was being
said but caught brief snatches such as, "—if you wish to keep your
stipend—" and "—no place for one-upmanship—"

Finally Harrison nodded and turned
away, moving toward the far side of the lab. Dr. Emerson, too,
moved on, not bothering to stop at their table.

"You set that up, didn't you," Quinn
said.

"'Hoist with his own
petard.'"

"Easy," Quinn said.
"
Hamlet
. But does
this mean I have two guardian angels here?"