The Surgeon (9 page)

"Did Elena Ortiz drive a green Honda?"
"Excuse me?"
"I need to know her license number."
"I'm afraid I don't understand--"
"Just tell me!" Her sharp command startled him. There was
a long silence on the line.
"Let me check," he said. In the background she heard men
talking, phones ringing. He came back on the line.
"It's a vanity plate," he said. "I believe it refers to the family's
flower business."
"POSEY FIVE," she whispered.
A pause. "Yes," he said, his voice strangely quiet. Alert.
"When you spoke to me, the other day, you asked if I knew
Elena Ortiz."
"And you said you didn't."
Catherine released a shuddering breath. "I was wrong."

six
S   he was pacing inside the E.R., her face pale and
tense, her coppery hair a tangled mane about her shoulders.
She looked at Moore as he stepped into the waiting area.
"Was I right?" she said.
He nodded. "Posey Five was her Internet screen name. We
checked her computer. Now tell me how you knew this."
She glanced around the bustling E.R. and said: "Let's go

into one of the call rooms."
The room she took him to was a dark little cave,
windowless, furnished with only a bed, a chair, and a desk.
For an exhausted doctor whose single goal is sleep, the room
would be perfectly sufficient. But as the door swung shut,
Moore was acutely aware of how small the space was, and he
wondered if the forced intimacy made her as uncomfortable
as it did him. They both glanced around for places to sit. At
last she settled on the bed, and he took the chair.
"I never actually met Elena," said Catherine. "I didn't even
know that was her name. We belonged to the same Internet
chat room. You know what a chat room is?"
"It's a way to have a live conversation on the computer."
"Yes. A group of people who are online at the same time
can meet over the Internet. This is a private room, only for
women. You have to know all the right keywords to get into it.
And all you see on the computer are screen names. No real
names or faces, so we can all stay anonymous. It lets us feel
safe enough to share our secrets." She paused. "You've never
used one?"
"Talking to faceless strangers doesn't much appeal to me,
I'm afraid."
"Sometimes," she said softly, "a faceless stranger is the
only person you can talk to."

He heard the depth of pain in that statement and could think
of nothing to say.
After a moment, she took a deep breath and focused not on
him but on her hands, folded in her lap. "We meet once a
week, on Wednesday nights at nine o'clock. I enter by going
on-line, clicking the chat-room icon, and typing in first PTSD,
and then: womanhelp. And I'm in. I communicate with other
women by typing messages and sending them through the
Internet. Our words appear onscreen, where we can all see
them."
"PTSD? I take it that stands for--"
"Post-traumatic stress disorder. A nice clinical term for what
the women in that room are suffering."
"What trauma are we talking about?"
She raised her head and looked straight at him. "Rape."
The word seemed to hang between them for a moment, the
very sound of it charging the air. One brutal syllable with the
impact of a physical blow.
"And you go there because of Andrew Capra," he said
gently. "What he did to you."
Her gaze faltered, dropped away. "Yes," she whispered.

Once again she was looking at her hands. Moore watched
her, his anger building over what had happened to Catherine.
What Capra had ripped from her soul. He wondered what she
was like before the attack. Warmer, friendlier? Or had she
always been so insulated from human contact, like a bloom
encased in frost?
She drew herself straighter and forged ahead. "So that's
where I met Elena Ortiz. I didn't know her real name, of
course. I saw only her screen name, Posey Five."
"How many women are in this chat room?"
"It varies from week to week. Some of them drop out. A few
new names appear. On any night, there can be anywhere from
three to a dozen of us."
"How did you learn about it?"
"From a brochure for rape victims. It's given out at women's
clinics and hospitals around the city."
"So these women in the chat room, they're all from the
Boston area?"
"Yes."
"And Posey Five, was she a regular visitor?"
"She was there, off and on, over the last two months. She

didn't say much, but I'd see her name on the screen and I
knew she was there."
"Did she talk about her rape?"
"No. She just listened. We'd type hellos to her. And she'd
acknowledge the greetings. But she wouldn't talk about
herself. It's as if she was afraid to. Or just too ashamed to say
anything."
"So you don't know that she was raped."
"I know she was."
"How?"
"Because Elena Ortiz was treated in this emergency room."
He stared at her. "You found her record?"
She nodded. "It occurred to me that she might have needed
medical treatment after the attack. This is the closest hospital
to her address. I checked our hospital computer. It has the
name of every patient seen in this E.R. Her name was there."
She stood up. "I'll show you her record."
He followed her out of the call room and back into the E.R. It
was a Friday evening, and the casualties were rolling in the
door. The TGIF-er, clumsy with booze, clutching an ice bag to
his battered face. The impatient teenager who'd lost his race

with a yellow light. The Friday night army of the bruised and
bloodied, stumbling in from the night. Pilgrim Medical Center
was one of the busiest E.R.'s in Boston, and Moore felt as
though he was walking through the heart of chaos as he
dodged nurses and gurneys and stepped over a fresh splash
of blood.
Catherine led him into the E.R. records room, a closet-
sized space with wall-to-wall shelves containing three-ring
binders.
"This is where they temporarily store the enounter forms,"
said Catherine. She pulled down the binder labeled: May 7
�May 14. "Every time a patient is seen in the E.R., a form is
generated. It's usually only a page long, and it contains the
doctor's note, and the treatment instructions."
"There's no chart made up for each patient?"
"If it's just a single E.R. visit, then no hospital chart is ever
put together. The only record is the encounter form. These
eventually get moved to the hospital's medical records room,
where they're scanned and stored on disk." She opened the
May 7�May 14 binder. "Here it is."
He stood behind her, looking over her shoulder. The scent
of her hair momentarily distracted him, and he had to force
himself to focus on the page. The visit was dated May 9, 1:00
A.M. The patient's name, address, and billing information were
typed at the top; the rest of the form was handwritten in ink.

Medical shorthand, he thought, as he struggled to decipher
the words and could make out only the first paragraph, which
had been written by the nurse:
22-year-old Hispanic female, sexually assaulted two
hours ago. No allergies, no meds. BP 105/70, P 100, T.
99.
The rest of the page was indecipherable.
"You'll have to translate for me," he said.
She glanced over her shoulder at him, and their faces were
suddenly so close he felt his breath catch.
"You can't read it?" she asked.
"I can read tire tracks and blood splatters. This I can't read."
"It's Ken Kimball's handwriting. I recognize his signature."
"I don't even recognize it as English."
"To another doctor, it's perfectly legible. You just have to
know the code."
"They teach you that in medical school?"

"Along with the secret handshake and the decoder ring
instructions."
It felt strange to be trading quips over such grim business,
even stranger to hear humor come from Dr. Cordell's lips. It
was his first glimpse of the woman beneath the shell. The
woman she'd been before Andrew Capra had inflicted his
damage.
"The first paragraph is the physical exam," she explained.
"He uses medical shorthand. HEENT means head, ears,
eyes, nose, and throat. She had a bruise on her left cheek.
The lungs were clear, the heart without murmurs or gallops."
"Meaning?"
"Normal."
"A doctor can't just write: `The heart is normal'?"
"Why do cops say `vehicle' instead of just plain `car'?"
He nodded. "Point taken."
"The abdomen was flat, soft, and without organomegaly. In
other words--"
"Normal."
"You're catching on. Next he describes the . . . pelvic exam.

Where things are not normal." She paused. When she spoke
again, her voice was softer, drained of all humor. She took a
breath, as though to draw in the courage to continue. "There
was blood in the introitus. Scratches and bruising on both
thighs. A vaginal tear at the four o'clock position, indicating
this was not a consensual act. At that point Dr. Kimball says
he stopped the exam."
Moore focused on the final paragraph. This he could read.
This contained no medical shorthand.
Patient became agitated. Refused collection of rape kit.
Refused to cooperate with any further intervention. After
baseline HIV screen and VDRL drawn, she dressed and
left before authorities could be called.
"So the rape was never reported," he said. "There was no
vaginal swab. No DNA collected."
Catherine was silent. She stood with head bowed, her
hands clutching the binder.
"Dr. Cordell?" he said, and touched her shoulder. She gave
a start, as though he had burned her, and he quickly took his
hand away. She looked up, and he saw rage in her eyes.
There was a fierceness radiating from her that made her, at

that moment, every bit his equal.
"Raped in May, butchered in July," she said. "It's a fine world
for women, isn't it?"
"We've spoken to every member of her family. No one said
anything about a rape."
"Then she didn't tell them."
How many women keep their silence? he wondered. How
many have secrets so painful they cannot share them with the
people they love? Looking at Catherine, he thought about the
fact that she, too, had sought comfort in the company of
strangers.
She took the encounter out of the binder for him to
photocopy. As he took it, his gaze fell on the doctor's name,
and another thought occurred to him.
"What can you tell me about Dr. Kimball?" he said. "The one
who examined Elena Ortiz?"
"He's an excellent physician."
"He usually works the night shift?"
"Yes."
"Do you know if he was on duty last Thursday night?"

It took her a moment to register the significance of that
question. When she did, he saw she was shaken by the
implications. "You don't really think--"
"It's a routine question. We look at all the victim's prior
contacts."
But the question was not routine, and she knew it.
"Andrew Capra was a doctor," she said softly. "You don't
think another doctor--"
"The possibility has occurred to us."
She turned away. Took an unsteady breath. "In Savannah,
when those other women were murdered, I just assumed I
didn't know the killer. I assumed that if I ever did meet him, I'd
know it. I'd feel it. Andrew Capra taught me how wrong I was."
"The banality of evil."
"That's exactly what I learned. That evil can be so ordinary.
That a man I'd see every day, say hello to every day, could
smile right back at me." She added, softly: "And be thinking of
all the different ways he'd like to kill me."
It was dusk when Moore walked back to his car, but the heat
of day still radiated from the blacktop. It would be another

uncomfortable night. Across the city, women would sleep with
windows left open to the night's fickle breezes. The night's
evils.
He stopped and turned toward the hospital. He could see
the bright red "ER" light, glowing like a beacon. A symbol of
hope and healing.
Is that your hunting ground? The very place where women
go to be healed?
An ambulance glided in from the night, lights flashing. He
thought of all the people who might pass through an E.R. in the
course of a day. EMT's, doctors, orderlies, janitors.
And cops. It was a possibility he never wanted to consider,
yet it was one he could never dismiss. The profession of law
enforcement holds a strange allure for those who hunt other
human beings. The gun, the badge, are heady symbols of
domination. And what greater control could one exercise than
the power to torment, to kill? For such a hunter, the world is a
vast plain teeming with prey.
All one has to do is choose.
There were babies everywhere. Rizzoli stood in a kitchen that
smelled like sour milk and talcum powder as she waited for
Anna Garcia to finish wiping apple juice from the floor. One

toddler was clinging to Anna's leg; a second was pulling pot
lids out of a kitchen cabinet and clanging them together like
cymbals. An infant was in a high chair, smiling through a mask
of creamed spinach. And on the floor, a baby with a bad case
of cradle cap was crawling around on a treasure hunt for
anything dangerous to put in his greedy little mouth. Rizzoli did
not care for babies, and it made her nervous to be surrounded
by them. She felt like Indiana Jones in the snake pit.
"They're not all mine," Anna was quick to explain as she
limped over to the sink, the toddler hanging on like a ball and
chain. She wrung out the dirty sponge and rinsed her hands.
"Only this one's mine." She pointed to the baby on her leg.
"That one with the pots, and the one in the high chair, they
belong to my sister Lupe. And the one crawling around, I baby-
sit him for my cousin. As long as I'm home with mine, I thought
I might as well watch a few more."
Yeah, what's another smack on the head? thought Rizzoli.
But the funny thing was, Anna did not look unhappy. In fact, she
scarcely seemed to notice the human ball and chain or the
clang-clang of the pots slamming against the floor. In a
situation that would give Rizzoli a nervous breakdown, Anna
had the serene look of a woman who is exactly where she
wants to be. Rizzoli wondered if this was what Elena Ortiz
would have been like one day, had she lived. A mama in her
kitchen, happily wiping up juice and drool. Anna looked very
much like the photos of her younger sister, just a little plumper.
And when she turned toward Rizzoli, the kitchen light shining