The Surgeon

Twenty-one

The secretary in the Emory University Medical School Office of Student Affairs was a Doris Day lookalike, a sunny blonde who’d matured into a gracious southern matron. Winnie Bliss kept a coffeepot brewing by the students’ mail slots and a crystal bowl of butterscotch candies on her desk, and Moore could imagine how a stressed-out medical student might find this room a welcome retreat. Winnie had worked in this office for twenty years, and since she had no children of her own, she’d focused her maternal impulses on the students who visited this office every day to pick up their mail. She fed them cookies, passed along tips about apartment vacancies, counseled them through bad love affairs and failing test scores. And every year, at graduation, she shed tears because 110 of her children were leaving her. All this she told Moore in a soft Georgia accent as she plied him with cookies and poured him coffee, and he believed her. Winnie Bliss was all magnolia and no steel.

“I couldn’t believe it when the Savannah police called me two years ago,” she said, settling gracefully into her chair. “I told them it had to be a mistake. I saw Andrew come into this office every day for his mail, and he was just about the nicest boy you could hope to meet. Polite, never a bad word from that boy’s lips. I make a point of looking people in the eye, Detective Moore, just to let them know I’m really seeing them. And I saw a good boy in Andrew’s eyes.”

A testament, thought Moore, to how easily we are deceived by evil.

“During the four years Capra was a student here, do you remember any close friendships he had?” Moore asked.

“You mean, like a sweetheart?”

“I’m more interested in his male friends. I spoke to his ex-landlady here in Atlanta. She said there was a young man who occasionally visited Capra. She thought he was another medical student.”

Winnie rose to her feet and crossed to the filing cabinet, where she retrieved a computer printout. “This is the class roster for Andrew’s year. There were one hundred ten students in his freshman class. About half of them were men.”

“Did he have any close friends among them?”

She scanned the three pages of names and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I just don’t recall anyone on this list being particularly close to him.”

“Are you saying he didn’t have any friends?”

“I’m saying I don’t know of any friends.”

“May I see the list?”

She handed it to him. He went down the page but saw no name except Capra’s that struck him as familiar. “Do you know where all these students are living now?”

“Yes. I update their mailing addresses for the alumni newsletter.”

“Are any of them in the Boston area?”

“Let me check.” She swiveled to face her computer, and her polished pink nails clicked on the keys. Winnie Bliss’s innocence made her seem like a woman from an older, more gracious era, and it struck him as odd to watch her navigating computer files with such skill. “There’s one in Newton, Massachusetts. Is that close to Boston?”

“Yes.” Moore leaned forward, his pulse suddenly quickening. “What’s his name?”

“It’s a she. Latisha Green. Very nice girl. She used to bring me these big bags of pecans. Course, it was really naughty of her, since she knew I was watching my figure, but I think she liked to feed people. It was just her way.”

“Was she married? Did she have a boyfriend?”

“Oh, she has a wonderful husband! Biggest man I ever did see! Six foot five, with this beautiful black skin.”

“Black,” he repeated.

“Yes. Pretty as patent leather.”

Moore sighed and looked back at the list. “And there’s no one else from Capra’s class living near Boston, as far as you know?”

“Not according to my list.” She turned to him. “Oh. You look disappointed.” She said it with a note of distress, as though she felt personally responsible for failing him.

“I’m batting a lot of zeros today,” he admitted.

“Have a candy.”

“Thank you, but no.”

“Watching your weight, too?”

“I don’t have a sweet tooth.”

“Then you are clearly not a southerner, Detective.”

He couldn’t help laughing. Winnie Bliss, with her wide eyes and soft voice, had charmed him, as she surely charmed every student, male and female, who walked into her office. His gaze lifted to the wall behind her, hung with a series of group photographs. “Are those the medical school classes?”

She turned to look at the wall. “I have my husband take one every graduation. It’s not an easy thing, to get those students together. It’s like herding cats, my husband likes to say. But I want that picture, and I make ’em do it. Aren’t they just the nicest group of young people?”

“Which is Andrew Capra’s graduating class?”

“I’ll show you the yearbook. It has the names, too.” She rose and went to a bookcase covered with glass doors. With reverence she removed a slim volume from the shelf and lightly ran her hand across the cover, as though to brush away dust. “This is the year Andrew graduated. It has pictures of all his classmates, and tells you where they were accepted for internship.” She paused, then held out the book to him. “It’s my only copy. So please, if you could just look at it here, and not take it out?”

“I’ll sit right over there in that corner, out of your way. You can keep an eye on me. How about that?”

“Oh, I’m not sayin’ I don’t trust you!”

“Well, you shouldn’t,” he said, and winked. She blushed like a schoolgirl.

He took the book over to the corner of the room, where the coffeepot and a plate of cookies were set in the small sitting area. He sank into a worn easy chair and opened the Emory Medical School student yearbook. The noon hour came, and a parade of fresh-faced students in white coats began dropping in to check their mail. Since when had kids become doctors? He could not imagine submitting his middle-aged body to the care of these youngsters. He saw their curious glances, heard Winnie Bliss whisper: “He’s a homicide detective, from Boston.” Yes, that decrepit old man sitting in the corner.

Moore hunched deeper into the chair and focused on the photos. Next to each was the student’s name, hometown, and the internship he or she had been accepted to. When he came to Capra’s photo, he paused. Capra looked straight at the camera, a smiling young man with an earnest gaze, hiding nothing. This was what Moore found most chilling — that predators walked unrecognized among prey.

Next to Capra’s photo was the name of his residency program. Surgery, Riverland Medical Center, Savannah, Georgia.

He wondered who else from Capra’s class had gone to a residency in Savannah, who else had lived in that town while Capra was butchering women. He flipped through the pages, scanning the listings, and found that three other medical students had been accepted into programs in the Savannah area. Two of them were women; the third was an Asian male.

Yet another blind alley.

He leaned back, discouraged. The book fell open in his lap, and he saw the medical school dean’s photograph smiling up at him. Beneath it was his printed graduation message: “To heal The World.”

Today, 108 fine young people take the solemn oath that completes a long and difficult journey. This oath, as physician and healer, is not taken lightly, for it is meant to last a lifetime….

Moore sat up straight and re-read the dean’s statement.

Today, 108 fine young people…

He rose and went to Winnie’s desk. “Mrs. Bliss?”

“Yes, Detective?”

“You said that Andrew had one hundred ten students in his freshman class.”

“We admit one hundred ten every year.”

“Here, in the dean’s speech, he says one hundred eight graduated. What happened to the other two?”

Winnie shook her head sadly. “I still haven’t gotten over it, what happened to that poor girl.”

“Which girl?”

“Laura Hutchinson. She was working in a clinic down in Haiti. One of our elective courses. The roads there, well, I hear they’re just awful. The truck went into a ditch and turned right over on her.”

“So it was an accident.”

“She was riding in the back of the truck. They couldn’t evacuate her for ten hours.”

“What about the other student? There’s one more who didn’t graduate with the class.”

Winnie’s gaze fell to her desk, and he could see she was not anxious to talk about this particular topic.

“Mrs. Bliss?”

“It happens, every so often,” she said. “A student drops out. We try to help them stay in the program, but you know, some of them do have problems with the material.”

“So this student — what was the name?”

“Warren Hoyt.”

“He dropped out?”

“Yes, you could say that.”

“Was it an academic problem?”

“Well…” She looked around, as though seeking help and not finding any. “Perhaps you should talk to one of our professors, Dr. Kahn. He’ll be able to answer your questions.”

“You don’t know the answer?”

“It’s something of a… private matter. Dr. Kahn should be the one to tell you.”

Moore glanced at his watch. He had thought to catch a plane back to Savannah tonight, but it didn’t look like he would make it. “Where do I find Dr. Kahn?”

“The anatomy lab.”

He could smell the formalin from the hallway. Moore paused outside the door labeled ANATOMY, bracing himself for what came next. Though he thought he was prepared, when he stepped through the door he was momentarily stunned by the view. Twenty-eight tables, laid out in four rows, stretched the length of the room. On the tables were corpses in advanced stages of dissection. Unlike the corpses Moore was accustomed to viewing in the Medical Examiner’s lab, these bodies looked artificial, the skin tough as vinyl, the exposed vessels embalmed bright blue or red. Today the students were focusing on the heads, teasing apart the muscles of the face. There were four students assigned to each corpse, and the room was abuzz with voices reading aloud to one another from textbooks, trading questions, offering advice. If not for the ghastly subjects on the table, these students might be factory workers, laboring over mechanical parts.

A young woman glanced up curiously at Moore, the business-suited stranger who had wandered into their room. “Are you looking for someone?” she asked, her scalpel poised to slice into a corpse’s cheek.

“Dr. Kahn.”

“He’s at the other end of the room. See that big guy with the white beard?”

“I see him, thank you.” He continued down the row of tables, his gaze inexorably drawn to each cadaver as he passed. The woman with wasted limbs like shriveled sticks on the steel table. The black man, skin splayed open to reveal the thick muscles of his thigh. At the end of the row, a group of students listened attentively to a Santa Claus lookalike who was pointing out the delicate fibers of the facial nerve.

“Dr. Kahn?” said Moore.

Kahn glanced up, and all semblance to Santa Claus vanished. This man had dark, intense eyes, without a trace of humor. “Yes?”

“I’m Detective Moore. Mrs. Bliss in Student Affairs sent me.”

Kahn straightened, and suddenly Moore was looking up at a mountain of a man. The scalpel looked incongruously delicate in his huge hand. He set the instrument down, stripped off his gloves. As he turned to wash his hands in a sink, Moore saw that Kahn’s white hair was tied back in a ponytail.

“So what’s this all about?” asked Kahn, reaching for a paper towel.

“I have a few questions about a freshman medical student you taught here seven years ago. Warren Hoyt.”

Kahn’s back was turned, but Moore could see the massive arm freeze over the sink, dripping water. Then Kahn yanked the paper towel from the dispenser and silently dried his hands.

“Do you remember him?” asked Moore.

“Yes.”

“Remember him well?”

“He was a memorable student.”

“Care to tell me more?”

“Not really.” Kahn tossed the crumpled paper towel in the trash can.

“This is a criminal investigation, Dr. Kahn.”

By now, several students were staring at them. The word criminal had drawn their attention.

“Let’s go into my office.”

Moore followed him into an adjoining room. Through a glass partition, they had a view of the lab and all twenty-eight tables. A village of corpses.

Kahn closed the door and turned to him. “Why are you asking about Warren? What’s he done?”

“Nothing to our knowledge. I just need to know about his relationship with Andrew Capra.”

“Andrew Capra?” Kahn snorted. “Our most famous graduate. Now there’s something a medical school loves to be known for. Teaching psychos how to slice and dice.”

“Did you think Capra was crazy?”

“I’m not sure there is a psychiatric diagnosis for men like Capra.”

“What was your impression of him, then?”

“I saw nothing out of the ordinary. Andrew struck me as perfectly normal.”

A description that seemed more chilling every time Moore heard it.

“What about Warren Hoyt?”

“Why do you ask about Warren?”

“I need to know if he and Capra were friends.”

Kahn thought it over. “I don’t know. I can’t tell you what happens outside this lab. All I see is what goes on in that room. Students struggling to cram an enormous amount of information into their overworked brains. Not all of them are able to deal with the stress.”

“Is that what hapened to Warren? Is that why he withdrew from medical school?”

Kahn turned toward the glass partition and gazed into the anatomy lab. “Do you ever wonder where cadavers come from?”

“Excuse me?”

“How medical schools get them? How they end up on those tables out there, to be cut open?”

“I assume people will their own bodies to the school.”

“Exactly. Every one of those cadavers was a human being who made a profoundly generous decision. They willed their bodies to us. Rather than spend eternity in some rosewood coffin, they chose to do something useful with their remains. They are teaching our next generation of healers. It can’t be done without real cadavers. Students need to see, in three dimensions, all the variations of the human body. They need to explore, with a scalpel, the branches of the carotid artery, the muscles of the face. Yes, you can learn some of it on a computer, but it’s not the same thing as actually cutting open the skin. Teasing out a delicate nerve. For that, you need a human being. You need people with the generosity and the grace to surrender the most personal part of themselves — their own bodies. I consider every one of those cadavers out there to have been an extraordinary person. I treat them as such, and I expect my students to honor them as well. There’s no joking or horsing around in that room. They are to treat the bodies, and all body parts, with respect. When the dissections are completed, the remains are cremated and disposed of with dignity.” He turned to look at Moore. “That’s the way it is in my lab.”

“How does this relate to Warren Hoyt?”

“It has everything to do with him.”

“The reason he withdrew?”

“Yes.” He turned back to the window.

Moore waited, his gaze on the professor’s broad back, allowing him the time to form the right words.

“Dissection,” said Kahn, “is a lengthy process. Some students can’t complete the assignments during scheduled class hours. Some of them need extra time to review complicated anatomy. So I allow them access to the lab at all hours. They each have a key to this building, and they can come in and work in the middle of the night, if they need to. Some of them do.”

“Did Warren?”

A pause. “Yes.”

A horrifying suspicion was beginning to prickle Moore’s neck.

Kahn went to the filing cabinet, opened the drawer, and began searching through the crammed contents. “It was a Sunday. I’d spent the weekend out of town, and had to come in that night to prepare a specimen for Monday’s class. You know these kids, many of them are clumsy dissectors, and they make mincemeat of their specimens. So I try to have one good dissection on display, to show them the anatomy they may have damaged on their own cadavers. We were working on the reproductive system, and they’d already begun dissecting those organs. I remember it was late when I drove onto campus, sometime after midnight. I saw lights in the lab windows, and thought it was just some compulsive student, here to get a leg up on his classmates. I let myself in the building. Came up the hall. Opened the door.”

“Warren Hoyt was here,” ventured Moore.

“Yes.” Kahn found what he was looking for in the filing cabinet drawer. He took out the folder and turned to Moore. “When I saw what he was doing, I — well, I lost control. I grabbed him by the shirt and shoved him up against the sink. I was not gentle, I admit it, but I was so angry I couldn’t help myself. I still get angry, just thinking about it.” He released a deep breath, but even now, nearly seven years later, he could not calm himself. “After — after I finished yelling at him, I dragged him here, into my office. I had him sit down and sign a statement that he would withdraw from this school effective eight A.M. the next morning. I would not require him to give a reason for it, but he had to withdraw, or I would release my written report of what I saw in this lab. He agreed, of course. He didn’t have a choice. Nor did he even seem very disturbed by the whole thing. That’s what struck me as the strangest thing about him — nothing disturbed him. He could take it all calmly and rationally. But that was Warren. Very rational. Never upset by anything. He was almost…” Kahn paused. “Mechanical.”

“What was it you saw? What was he doing in the lab?”

Kahn handed Moore the folder. “It’s all written there. I’ve kept it on file all these years, just in case there’s ever any legal action on Warren’s part. You know, students can sue you for just about anything these days. If he ever tried to be readmitted to this school, I wanted to have a response prepared.”

Moore took the folder. It was labeled simply: Hoyt, Warren. Inside were three typewritten pages.

“Warren was assigned to a female cadaver,” said Kahn. “He and his lab partners had started the pelvic dissection, exposing the bladder and uterus. The organs were not to be removed, just laid bare. That Sunday night, Warren came in to complete the work. But what should have been a careful dissection turned into mutilation. As if he got his hand on the scalpel and lost control. He didn’t just expose the organs. He carved them out of the body. First he severed the bladder and left it lying between the cadaver’s legs. Then he hacked out the uterus. He did this without any gloves on, as though he wanted to feel the organs against his own skin. And that’s how I found him. In one hand, he was holding the dripping organ. And in his other hand…” Kahn’s voice trailed off in disgust.

What Kahn could not bring himself to say was printed on the page that Moore now read. Moore finished the sentence for him. “He was masturbating.”

Kahn went to the desk and sank into his chair. “That’s why I couldn’t let him graduate. God, what kind of doctor would he make? If he did that to a corpse, what would he do to a live patient?”

I know what he does. I’ve seen his work with my own eyes.

Moore turned to the third page in Hoyt’s file and read Dr. Kahn’s final paragraph.

Mr. Hoyt agrees that he will voluntarily withdraw from school, effective 8:00 A.M. tomorrow. In return, I will maintain confidentiality regarding this incident. Due to cadaver damage, his lab partners at table 19 will be reassigned to other teams for this stage of dissection.

Lab partners.

Moore looked at Kahn. “How many lab partners did Warren have?”

“There are four students to a table.”

“Who were the other three students?”

Kahn frowned. “I don’t recall. It was seven years ago.”

“You don’t keep records of those assignments?”

“No.” He paused. “But I do remember one of his partners. A young woman.” He swiveled around to face his computer and called up his medical student enrollment files. The class list from Warren Hoyt’s freshman year appeared onscreen. It took Kahn a moment to scan down the names; then he said:

“Here she is. Emily Johnstone. I remember her.”

“Why?”

“Well, first because she was a real cutie. A Meg Ryan lookalike. Second because after Warren withdrew, she wanted to know why. I didn’t want to tell her the reason. So she came out and asked if it had something to do with women. It seems Warren had been following Emily around campus, and she was getting the willies. Needless to say, she was relieved when he left school.”

“Do you think she’d remember her other two lab partners?”

“There’s a chance.” Kahn picked up the phone and called Student Affairs. “Hey, Winnie? Do you have a current contact number for Emily Johnstone?” He reached for a pen and jotted the number, then hung up. “She’s in private practice in Houston,” he said, dialing again. “It’s eleven o’clock her time, so she should be in…. Hello, Emily?… This is a voice from your past. Dr. Kahn at Emory…. Right, anatomy lab. Ancient history, huh?”

Moore leaned forward, his pulse quickening.

When Kahn at last hung up and looked at him, Moore saw the answer in his eyes.

“She does remember the other two anatomy partners,” said Kahn. “One was a woman named Barb Lippman. And the other…”

“Capra?”

Kahn nodded. “The fourth partner was Andrew Capra.”