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?'
'Boy, you ask a different breed of question than the cops,' Horace said. David resisted the urge to ask him what Yale and Dalton had inquired about, letting Horace continue. 'Douglas avoided students like the plague. Especially the girls. He liked to come in during off hours, when the place was empty.' He gestured to the door, behind which the lab clamored with students picking at bodies. 'They harassed him, now and then. Pretty upsetting, when you think about it, them being future doctors. But I'll tell you, doctors ain't the picture of empathy these days. Not like it used to be.' He nodded deferentially.
'How would they harass him? The students?'
'Well, it didn't happen much, to be fair. But now and then they'd stop him, try to get him to talk, assess his speech patterns, posture, things like that. You know how med students are-thought they were being subtle and helpful. He found the scrutiny unbearable. A girl tried to practice on him with her ophthalmoscope once. Reduced him to tears. She got apologetic after, of course, but it didn't seem to help.' Horace's eyes traced over the split body before them. 'Poor bastard.'
When Horace looked up, David was surprised to see that he seemed upset.
'I've worked hard for this job. Hard like you wouldn't believe. And when Douglas started going loose on me, I had to protect my position. There was nothing else I could have done.' His face looked tired, maybe from his working on guilt, or guilt working on him.
Before David could respond, Horace revved up the saw and turned back to the body. David left quietly.
He found Ralph down in the ER, leaning against a cart, arms folded across his chest. He seemed perturbed and didn't look over when David stood beside him.
'Goddamn cops,' Ralph said. 'Get a guy in that uniform, takes about two days before he's a USDA-certified prick.'
'What happened?' David asked.
'They just want what they want, and they want it immediately. No consideration for the fact that I've got other responsibilities here. I'm running security for this facility, I'm not an errand boy for LAPD.' Ralph jerked his thumb at his chest. 'I was Third Battalion, Second Marines, Charlie Company. Two tours. Two fucking tours, and some doughnut-muncher expects me to how-high his shit.'
'Who?'
'Yale. Dalton.'
'What did they want?'
Ralph cast a look in both directions, and David took a step closer so Ralph could lower his voice. The conspiratorial nature of the exchange diluted Ralph's anger considerably. 'They confiscated records on a dude, name of Douglas DaVella,' Ralph said. 'He's a suspect, I guess. Used to work upstairs with Horace the Hacker.'
'Oh? Anything interesting?'
Ralph homed in on David's interest like a dog spotting prey. 'Oh no, Doc. You don't want to step into this too far. You're playing with a new brand of fire here.'
David studied Ralph closely. 'I was in over my head before I knew what was going on. I can either sink or swim. What would you do?'
Ralph rubbed his nose and it gave easily, the cartilage flexible from a few breaks. He studied David's face for a moment and seemed to reach some conclusion. 'They were mostly after his address and phone and stuff,' he said. 'But the guy was a bit uneven. He had a couple of complaints filed against him. Nothing I investigated personally,
