Do No Harm

Chapter 36

David tossed his keys on the marble counter, closed the door to the garage behind him, let out an exasperated sigh, and hit the light switch. Nothing happened. He stepped forward into the living room, his hand scrabbling along the dark wall for another switch.

The voice came at him out of the darkness. "Don't bother."

David dropped his briefcase, the metal corner striking the hardwood floor, and he felt the flutter of papers settling around his feet. His eyes picked through the dark living room, coming to rest on the dark mass on the shadow of the leather chair.

"Why don't you sit down, Spier?" The voice was civilized and exceedingly calm. It wasn't Clyde, that much was certain. David wasn't sure whether he should be relieved by that, or more frightened.

"Do you want money?" David asked.

"Why don't you sit down?" the voice repeated. An arm rose from the formless shadow, indicating the couch across from the chair. David found himself obeying. He sat rigidly forward on the couch, trying to discern a face in the darkness. "It's come to my attention that you've been making… inquiries about me," the voice continued.

"Look, I don't know what- " David stopped. "Ed? Pinkerton?"

"That'll do."

David took a moment to gather his thoughts. "How's your wound? Is it healing?"

"Don't try to manipulate me," Ed said. "You're wondering: Am I going to hurt you? The answer: No."

"And why should I believe you?"

"You came looking for me, Spier. I didn't come looking for you." A moment of silence. "Why don't you have an alarm?"

"It's a safe neighborhood. Plus, we have Edison Armed Patrol."

"Yeah, they're doing a bang-up job."

"How's your kid?" David asked. "Your little boy?"

"Clever, Spier. We both know I told you I had a little girl. I always use the same lies. They're easier to keep track of." His affect was different from that he'd displayed in the ER. More shrewd.

"You used me," David said.

"I use a lot of people."

"But I went out on a limb for you. So you owe me."

"A phrase I wouldn't expect from you, Spier. What have you gotten yourself into? A dead hooker in the trunk of your Mercedes?"

"You've heard of the Westwood Acid Thrower? He came in and-"

"So now you feel responsible," Ed interrupted.

Coverage of the case must have been even more detailed than David thought. "Yes," David admitted. "I do. This guy's out there disfiguring women."

"You want revenge." Halfway between a statement and a question.

"No, no. God, no. I want him located and locked up."

"Why do you think I can help you?" Ed's questions came out of the darkness at him, one after another, baseballs from a pitching machine. David was struggling to keep up, to pull concise answers from the muddle of his emotions and motives.

"You'd said you were on parole, and that book you were reading.. you seemed accustomed to dealing with things outside the law. I don't know many people like that."

"Why don't you trust the police?"

"The first victim is a cop's sister. They're out to eviscerate the guy."

"And you don't think he needs eviscerating?"

"I think he's fucked up. Dysfunctional, possibly schizophrenic. I think he needs to be put under lock and key, and provided with psychiatric care."

"Lye thrown in women's faces. That's pretty evil."

David sat forward, shoulders hunched. "Evil comes in many guises. It can be banal. Why not pathetic?"

"And you want to… what?"

"I want to find him and get him into the hands of the right authorities."

"How?"

"I haven't figured that out yet," David admitted. "But if I can get in touch with him, I think I can talk him in. Safely. He seems to trust me."

"A renowned physician like yourself taking a walk on the wild side." Ed's hands went to his shadowy head, arms bent to the sides. "Sometimes people have to pay consequences whether they make the right decision or not. You learn that in my line of work."

"What is your line of work? What exactly do you do?"

"Extreme shit." A rustling sound as Ed ran his hand along the fine leather arm of the chair. "Expensive shit."

"Why did you steal your chart from the hospital? It didn't contain your real name."

"Our bodies are full of clues, Spier. X rays and written records can be damning. You'd be amazed at what the FBI can use to ID a body-dental fillings, stomach staples."

"I'm not certain, but I don't recall any dental fillings in your ass."

Ed laughed, a loud, sharp laugh, and David felt a sudden relief. "Will you help me?" David asked. "Or point me to someone who can?"

Ed's shadow rustled, and David made out several shapes on the table beside Ed. Small and rounded. David wondered briefly if they were grenades. He found his surprising lack of fear to be empowering.

"I'll talk to you. Some. While I decide whether or not I trust you. If I decide I trust you, I might be willing to point you in a few directions. But first, some rules. I don't do violence. You saw my build-I'm not a fighter."

"Fine," David said. "I don't want violence."

"I have no involvement with the police. Ever. Is that understood? This thing gets out of hand, it's coming down on you. Believe me, I'll vanish." Ed waited for David to agree. "Now tell me about this guy."

"Overweight, disheveled, about 6' 1"."

"You'll have to do better than that. You want to play detective, Spier? Get observant. There are thousands of things you could've noticed. Was he clean-shaven? Did he have soft hands, rough hands, clean hands, dirty hands? Did he chew gum? Any scarring? Unusual facial features? Piercing? Tattoos? Length of hair? Type of shoes? Work shoes, cheap shoes, dress shoes, Velcro shoes? Did they match his outfit? Did he wear designer clothes? Did they have any paint on them? Plaster? Mud? Was he laid-back or intense? Were his clothes tight or loose? Did he have a watch? Did he wear it on the left wrist or right? Did he wear a belt? Pager? Cell phone? Rings? Necklaces? Did you undress him? Did you put anything in the property locker? Dumb as it sounds, cops sometimes forget to check it. What was he talking about? Any unusual remarks?"

David sat in silence for a moment, processing. Ed did not rush him. Finally, David said, "His speech was rambling and disorganized. He seemed extremely agitated, especially in the presence of a psychiatrist. He wore no rings or jewelry. A tattoo was reported by his first victim, but he didn't have one when he came in. He has bad acne and pitted fingernails. I don't know if he's right- or left-handed, and I don't remember his shoes. He wore hospital scrubs, loose, with no belt. They smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. The scrubs may indicate that he feels identified with the hospital somehow. My guess is, he works there. I don't know if he chewed gum, but his breath smelled of orange candy-very strong. His hair was thinning and greasy. His hygiene was terrible."

David's eyes were adjusting slowly to the dark, and he saw Ed nod approvingly. "You're a doctor. Use that. Give me more."

David pressed his hands together and rested his chin atop his fingertips. "Let's see. He wanted the lights dimmed, so maybe he has recurring migraines. His balance was off, and he slurred slightly. He might be obsessive-compulsive or delusional-he repeated what seemed to be ritualistic phrases and displayed concreteness of thought. He claimed he'd been locked up in darkness with snakes, and he mentioned lights and noises. His fixation on women, on punishing women, is extreme and conscious. And he seems to have deficits accurately interpreting the intentions of others."

"What does that mean?"

"He misinterprets benign questions as hostile, and this elicits aggression from him. For instance, I was checking his mental status, and asked him if he knew what month it was. He became hostile and asked if I thought he was stupid."

"If he doesn't understand something, it's an insult," Ed said.

"Precisely. Even when the presented cues-tone of voice, facial expression, conversational context-would lead an ordinary person to realize that the questioning is benign, even benevolent, he finds it antagonistic. Which means he finds himself constantly moving through a hostile landscape, where he perceives that people are antagonizing him. Imagine how that would be, if you thought people were always insulting you, attacking you. It would make you pretty aggressive."

A hint of irony crept into Ed's voice. "It sure would."

"He's also extraordinarily insecure and defensive, and he adamantly denies taking any drugs or pills, which leads me to believe he probably does. He seems simultaneously afraid and desirous of being alone, and betrays an intense fixation."

"On who?"

"On me."

"Better," Ed said. "Now we have a profile shaping up."

"So you'll help me?"

"No. I need more from you first. A fingerprint, decent photo, or at least a name."

"What can you do with that?"

"I have certain advantages over the police because I don't have to move through legal channels."

"I'm not asking you to do anything illegal or unethical," David said.

Ed's laugh echoed around the living room. "Everything's ethical. The question is: What kind of ethics?"

Ed reached over and plucked one of the items off the table at his side. He tossed it at David. David lost track of it in the darkness, and the object struck him in the chest and fell to the couch. "Ed? Ed?"

No sound in the darkness. David felt along the cushion, finally finding the thing Ed had thrown at him. A lightbulb.

David crossed the room, bumping into a lamp and nearly knocking it over, but he caught it by the thin metal post. He managed to remove the shade in the darkness and screw the lightbulb in place.

He turned the switch and was not surprised to find Ed gone.

Lying on the reading table were three other lightbulbs. Tucked under one of them was an unprinted business card, blank save for a phone number written across the bottom in black ink.

Sadly, it took one Jewish doctor more than ten minutes to screw in three lightbulbs. Afterward, David checked the doors and windows but was unable to find any signs of forced entry. No scratches on any of the locks. Whoever Ed Pinkerton was, he knew what he was doing.

Rather than sleep, David prepared a list of all Clyde's symptoms he had observed and then translated the more difficult terms into nonmedical phrases in case he had to show it to others. The list read: nystagmus-pupils jerking headaches difficulty concentrating clouding of consciousness dysarthria-slurred speech akathisia-restlessness ataxia-drunken walking

Beneath that, David wrote some potential diagnoses, including CNS lupus, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, brain tumor, Huntington's, Wilson's, metachromatic leukodystrophy, subdural hematoma, viral encephalitis or an obscure central nervous system infection, aqueductal stenosis, temporal lobe epilepsy, thyrotoxicosis, multiple sclerosis, drug toxicity, insecticide poisoning.

Given the vagueness of the information David currently had, it was impossible to narrow the list further.

He thought about Clyde's compulsive repetition, the counting backward from three. What did that represent?

David set down the pad of paper and checked his watch. It was close to midnight. He undressed in his bedroom. When he got into bed, he was struck by its vastness, and the empty space at his side.

He thought of his wife on the MICU bed, the monotonous hum of the monitor at her side. He thought of Clyde, an ugly, broken man shuffling through life, barely capable of looking other people in the face, and he wondered if he had a responsibility to emerge from the hibernation that had been his life for the past few years. His hard shell of Spartan regularity protected him, mostly, from the empty stretch of bed at his side. But it also shielded him from other, vital, things.

Though he'd been awake for nearly forty-five hours, his whole body was humming with energy. He lay for a few minutes with his thoughts, then threw back the sheets and got dressed again. The ride back to the hospital was dreamlike, the streets shimmering black and silver.

There was little activity in the ER lobby, and the examination rooms were mostly empty. Don had fallen asleep on a high stool in the CWA, slumped on the back counter. Nurses and interns lethargically filled out charts and shuttled them from tray to tray.

"Was there anything put in the property locker?" David asked, announcing his presence. "From Clyde?"

Don lazily raised his head, his eyelids heavy. "What?"

David continued, addressing the others. "Maybe something fell out of his pockets, or someone took something off him and stored it in the property lockers."

"Looking for clues, Dr. Spier?" one of the nurses asked. The others looked at him with barely concealed amusement.

"Was there?" he asked again.

A man David recognized as the lab tech he'd pulled in to help irrigate Clyde answered. "The property lockers are all empty. We didn't take anything off him, remember? And the cops confiscated everything that was left in the room."

"Why are you worrying about this at two in the morning?" Don asked.

David placed a hand on the counter, feeling the weight of the stares aimed in his direction. Meeting the fixed looks with resolve, he thought about how Clyde shied away from eye contact, how he found it threatening. What had Clyde said? I don't stay around people anymore. Not people that can look at me back.

The realization hit David with such force that he drew back his head. Where would Clyde have gone to hide out after his escape from the ER? Somewhere that people couldn't look back at him. Somewhere suited to a person simultaneously afraid and desirous of being alone. A place where he'd be among dead people. Dalton had mentioned that they'd found traces of blood in the Three Corridor-back by the freight elevators. The freight elevators were used to cart bodies up to the anatomy crypt on the seventh floor.

David took a step back, knocking over a tray of charts, and left the room at a brisk walk, leaving the others to exchange puzzled glances behind his back.