Flawless Page 5

  I nodded.

  The police—three or four of them by the sound—fanned into the room. A voice: “Jesus Christ.” Another: “Don’t touch anything.” Then, “Sir, is there anyone else in the house?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Get the paramedics in here!”

  “They’re dead,” I said.

  Some shifting and rustling.

  “They’re dead!” I barked.

  One of the policemen stepped toward me. He was a beefy Asian guy in police tans. He looked down at Murph, then up at me. Voice even, he said, “We’ll get the paramedics—”

  “They’re dead, all right? I’m a fucking doctor and they’re dead.”

  I heard commotion and two people—the paramedics—burst into the room like a couple of overeager schoolchildren. There was a lot of shouting as they dropped their medical kits and a female paramedic set to work manhandling Mrs. Murphy’s body. The male half of the team came over to me. Shock flashed across his face when he saw the earless, eyeless man, the hose jutting from his neck; then he got down to business. “Keep that pressure there,” he told me.

  I wanted to punch him.

  The paramedic—red hair, skinny, too young, sunglasses propped on top of his head even though it was deep into the night—began to flutter around the corpse, assessing Murph’s status.

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  The kid glanced up at me. “Thanks.” And he kept feeling around.

  “I’m a doctor, you idiot. He’s dead.”

  So now the kid wanted to punch me. Great. But at least he stopped the shenanigans. The other paramedic straightened up over Mrs. Murphy. She shook her head.

  Slowly, the Asian cop reached a hand to my arm. I stiffened and he took the hand away.

  “Doctor—?”

  “Yes, I am a goddamned doctor. My name is Nathaniel McCormick. I’m a public health physician. I am not trained for this kind of thing.”

  “It’s all right,” the cop said softly. “You…ah…you did the best…” He turned to someone behind me, nodded. “We can take it from here.”

  “No,” I said.

  The policeman took a moment, then nodded again. There was some quiet shuffling, and I felt a large hand on my shoulder. “Come with me, please, Doctor,” a voice said. The big hand gently pulled me.

  Every instinct I had wanted to fight, to swing my fists, kick, thrash, to keep these bastards from making me give up. But it was in that instant that I knew Murph was dead—knew not just intellectually, but knew—and that my fingers pressing cotton to flesh wouldn’t do a damned thing, that they didn’t do a damned thing.

  I gently released pressure from the shirt. It was a final concession.

  Dull pain flowed into my hands; I looked down at them, clawed, curled, caked in blood. My left, the damaged one, ached. I hadn’t felt the pain until that moment, and I wished the pain were greater.

  I turned from Murph’s body, saw the policeman whose hand had been on my shoulder. He was a big white guy, blond hair. He looked something like Paul Murphy. Or, at least, how Paul Murphy used to look. Another guy, Hispanic, stood at the doorway, gun drawn but held down. He was there, I assumed, to shoot me, if it came to that.

  The big white guy led me to the door. “Careful,” he warned, pointing to the blood-streaked floor. “Try to walk along the sides of the hallway. Evidence.”

  And I left the room with my dead friend, his dead wife, and San Mateo County’s multicultural finest inside, that word—sorry, sorry, sorry—circling through my brain.

  11

  ON THE COUCH IN MURPH’S living room.

  Some life had come back into my hands, enough so that I could hold a coffee cup. The house buzzed like a hive by that time: floodlights had been brought in, police tape, measuring tape, cameras, brushes, evidence bags. The paramedics had gone, to be replaced, I assumed, by a coroner. There were crime scene guys, more police. There were reporters, too, I overheard, but they had been stopped at the main road. And there was Detective Bonita Sanchez, who had brought me the coffee.

  “You ready to talk?” she asked. She was fiftyish, a little overweight, hair pulled back tight against her head. Tough. “As hard as woodpecker lips,” as a friend of mine used to say. But she was nice to me, and I was thankful for that.

  “No,” I said.

  She nodded and walked toward the humans circulating in the other part of the house.

  I felt the heat of the coffee cup bleed into my hands. I leaned my forehead against it, felt its warmth.

  There was a time, in medical school, when one of us would cut a class and we would joke, “Uh-oh, someone’s going to die.” Same thing when it was one a.m. and someone left the group study room. We might have been kidding, but the gist hit home: that little void in your knowledge, that tiny gap opened by cutting class, would end up killing someone.

  All of us—medical students, residents, attending physicians, chiefs of surgery—are haunted by this, by ignorance. Supposedly, it gets better with age and experience. But, still, there are the Morbidity and Mortality conferences. Still, there are the malpractice suits.

  So you worry. You worry that the lecture you slept through in residency contained some scrap of information that would have saved a life. You worry that if you’d just studied a little harder, if you’d just spent a little more time in the hospital, if you’d just taken that extra rotation in trauma surgery, you wouldn’t have been holding your hands around the neck of a dead man, doing nothing more than prolonging his pain for a few more useless minutes. You wonder if you’d been someone else, Paul Murphy and his wife would still be alive.

  At the same time, you tell yourself that nothing could have been done, you wrap yourself up in that comfort blanket. You lie.

  “Dr. McCormick?” Detective Sanchez sat on the ottoman opposite me. I guessed she was ready to talk whether or not I was. “I know this must be very hard, but we have to move quickly.”

  I took a sip of the coffee and nodded.

  Detective Sanchez produced a small pad and a pen. She looked at me. Then she said, “You’re lucky, you know. You could have stumbled in on whoever did this.”

  “And maybe that wouldn’t have been such a bad thing.”

  “Dr. McCormick…” she said. But I guess my face told her any look-on-the-bright-side chitchat was a nonstarter. She got back to business. “How do you know the family?”

  I told her. I told her about Murph and me years ago, about coming back to the West Coast. Detective Sanchez said she knew my name somehow and we finally got around to that Chimeragen thing. Then she switched back to fun things, like who might have slaughtered Paul Murphy.

  I told the detective about Murph being worried about “really bad stuff.” I told her about the white Cadillac. I told her he was going to show me something tonight, to explain it all. I told her about the gun. Everything I said went into the little book. She asked me five different ways about Murph’s big secret, to tease something out if I’d been hiding it. I may be an incompetent physician, but I’m not an idiot.

  “I do not know, Detective Sanchez. He never told me. And if you ask me again, I will leave, and you can arrest me, get Abu Ghraib with me, and still I will not know.”

  The detective’s face tightened. “Okay, Dr. McCormick. Let’s go over it one more time. Just to make sure.”

  Somehow, going over it one more time seemed easier than protesting.

  12

  THREE HOURS AFTER IT BEGAN raining cops, I was allowed to leave. The Corolla was parked near the house, so I spent twenty minutes waiting for drivers—of police cruisers, of the coroner’s van, of the blue, funny-shaped forensic lab van—to move their vehicles and let me out. Bonita Sanchez was helpful here, snapping at various municipal functionaries. Without her, I’d have probably been at Murph’s place until Christmas.

  I drove down the long driveway, through a phalanx of reporters and TV station vans clustered on Laurel Road. There was a lot
of hubbub in the ranks as I made my way out, and I kept it slow to avoid crunching anybody with a boom mike, camera, or tape recorder. What a saint I am.

  For the first time in a while, I was glad to see Brooke’s place. I fumbled with my keys, slouched inside. The only thing I could think of was Murph’s eyeless, tongueless face, the bloodied kids, the dead wife. So I tried to think of nothing.

  Brooke woke when I bumped into the nightstand. She looked at the clock, groaned. “I guess you don’t have to be anywhere tomorrow,” she said. I stood in the dark, contemplated going to the couch. “Nate.”

  She turned on the light. I guess the blood all over my clothes had some effect. She bolted upright in the bed.

  “Oh, my God.” She didn’t ask if I was all right. She knew, I assumed, that I wasn’t. “Oh God, Nate.”

  I walked to the bed and lay flat on the covers. Brooke’s arms enveloped me, her legs curled behind mine. She just held me, arms tight around me like she feared I’d slip away.

  And I, knees pulled to my chest like a fetus, watched the images play before my eyes: Murph, his wife, the kids. They would not leave me, just kept flashing through my brain over and over and over.

  13

  I ROSE AT FIRST LIGHT, feeling cored out. Too much to hope, I guess, that I would sleep well. No one could sleep carrying so many bodies around in their heads.

  My clothes went into the washing machine and I stood by, naked, watching the water fill the basin. After the fill, I cut the cycle and let them soak. You have to do such things to get blood out. Then I took a shower.

  After all my botched and frenzied efforts, after all the police and sirens and reporters, this is what it all comes to, doesn’t it? As I scrubbed in the shower, I wondered when I would finally get the blood from under my fingernails, from inside my pores. Out, out damned spot and all that.

  I toweled off and looked at the ghost of myself in the fogged mirror. Then I turned on the shower and got back in. Under the lukewarm stream, I opened my mouth to the water, tried to wash everything, every part of me, even the insides.

  The door to the bathroom opened and shut, then the door to the shower. “You’re going to turn into a prune,” Brooke said, taking a bar of soap in her hands. As she glided the bar over me, I spun the story of what had happened.

  “What are you doing?” Brooke asked. She’d decided to take the day off to be with me. A small gesture, but I appreciated it. I appreciated not being alone.

  “Checking the paper,” I said, logging into her computer.

  “You sure you want to?”

  “Of course not, but I sort of have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to relive it again, Brooke.”

  She scowled, but cut me some slack. I was in some sort of psychological shock, right?

  I brought up the site for the San Jose Mercury News. Brooke stood behind me, brought her arms around my neck, and laid her head on my shoulder.

  In the “Latest from the Newsroom” section, I found what I was looking for. “‘Family of Four Slain in Woodside Home,’” I read aloud.

  “Why are you doing this to yourself?” Brooke asked.

  “‘Paul Murphy, thirty-five, his wife, Diane, thirty-two, and their children Drew, five, and Stephanie, two, were found murdered in their Woodside home at approximately twelve a.m. this morning. San Mateo Sheriff’s Department officers arrived on the scene after the bodies were discovered by a friend of the family.’ At least they didn’t—oh, shit, they did. ‘According to an official close to the investigation, Paul and Diane Murphy were alive at discovery and died shortly before police arrived. A spokesman for the coroner’s office said the cause of death for all four victims was “severe trauma to the head and neck.”’”

  I continued, “Incompetent physician Nathaniel McCormick, despite his pathetic efforts, was unable to help either Dr. or Mrs. Murphy.”

  “It doesn’t say that,” Brooke said.

  “Subtext.” I scanned the rest of the short article, found nothing I didn’t know, and logged out of the website.

  We had breakfast at a place in Menlo Park. Tables were spread out on a large patio. It was all very airy, light, and normal.

  While waiting for the omelets to arrive, Brooke reached over and took my left hand. She held it lightly in hers, tracing with a finger the scars that crisscrossed the palm, the carpals and metacarpals, the wrist. Because of the scar tissue, my grip was stiff. But—forgive the pun—I have to hand it to the surgeons and physical therapists: I can still type, I can still tie a tie, I can still, evidently, fire a gun. I might have to defer those dreams of playing Carnegie Hall, though.

  “I can’t believe this happened,” she said. “Who has things like this happen to them twice? In two years?”

  “A sinner in the hands of an angry God,” I said.

  “Got religion, Dr. McCormick?”

  “Just dragging up references from an American Studies class I took in college.”

  The waiter, a lanky kid in an emo punk T-shirt that had some laundromat logo on it, dropped the food on our table.

  I said, “Be careful, Brooke. You should break up with me now. Being a friend of mine seems to have serious consequences for health and life.”

  She smiled. Then the smile faded, and she looked down at her plate. Guess the warning struck a little too close to home.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Sure.” I looked at her. “No.”

  She took my hands again.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to do.”

  “There’s always something to do.” I dropped her hand, stood up, and walked away, fishing my cell phone from my pocket.

  “I saw the paper today,” I told Bonita Sanchez. “Any progress on who did this?”

  After a pause, the detective drawled, “I can’t comment on that.”

  “Sure you can,” I said. Sanchez said nothing. “Have you spoken to the Murphys’ friends?”

  “Stay out of it, Doctor.”

  “Come on, Detective. It’s not like I’m some joe off the street—”

  “But you are some joe off the street, Dr. McCormick. You were witness to a crime, nothing more. At least that’s what we hope, right?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ll let the ambiguity stand, Doctor.” So the ambiguity stood, not so ambiguously signaling me to back off.

  “He was my friend,” I said.

  “Look, I can only imagine how upset you must be. And I’m sorry—I truly am—for what you must be going through. I’m sorry for the family, I’m sorry most of all for those two kids. But I am up to my ta-tas in this investigation. I don’t have time to not answer your questions.” She sighed into the phone. “If it’s any consolation, I’m taking this very personally.”

  “Why should that be a consolation?”

  “Because people go to San Quentin when I take things personally. People get the needle.”

  “All those people from Atherton who get the needle?”

  She laughed. “Where’d you learn your manners, mijo? I was twenty years in Oakland before coming here. Now, I realize you saw some pretty dark things last year—”

  Last year? Why did everybody always have to dig up the past?

  “—but you haven’t seen anything. Trust me on that. And trust me that we’ll do everything we can. And, finally, trust me that you do not want to get on my bad side.”

  “I trust you, Detective. Did you find anything out about that white Cadillac?”

  “There are a lot of white Cadillacs in the world, Doctor.” I cursed myself for the thousandth time for not noting the license plate number of the car.

  “I’m hanging up the phone now,” Sanchez said.

  “I know—you’re up to your ta-tas.” I hit End on the phone.

  14

  BROOKE WAS TOOLING ABOUT THE house, cleaning up the kitchen or something. From my station on the couch, I caught a glimpse of her
as I flipped Murph’s business card between my fingers.

  “Tetra Biologics?” I asked.

  “I don’t know anything about them, Nate. I told you. Google them.”

  So I did.

  “The answer to cancer,” I said to myself. Then to Brooke, who was not in sight, “Transcription factor inhibition. I guess this is what Murph was working on. Get this: ‘Tetra Biologics has programs in cancer research, diabetes treatment, tissue regeneration, and novel antivirals.’ Don’t you love that? ‘Novel antivirals,’ like anything that anyone does these days isn’t called ‘novel.’”

  “Fascinating.” Brooke sounded decidedly un-fascinated.

  “They’ve been around for five years,” I said. “They’re not public,” I said. Brooke gave no response, other than the clink-clink of dishes being returned to their places. I went to PubMed, the governmental listing of nearly every scientific paper published in the last thirty years. Forty-one articles came up under Murph’s name. The most recent ones concerned transcription factors and cancer. I pulled up the abstracts and found out what institution Murph was working at when he did the research. “Looks like he was pretty productive at Tetra.”

  “Great.”

  “He probably had friends there.”

  “Probably,” Brooke shouted. I thought I heard tension creeping into her voice.

  “I wonder how long he was there?”

  Silence.

  “I should probably pay them a visit,” I said.

  Brooke appeared in the kitchen doorway, tea towel in hand. “Why?”

  “Because I need to find out what’s going on.”

  “You told the police everything?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you don’t think they’re looking into this?”

  “I don’t know. I forgot to ask the detective whether they were looking at his workplace.”

  “Yes, better call them and tell them to look there. I’m sure they haven’t thought of it.” Sarcasm dripped from her lips.

  “More hands can’t hurt,” I said.

  She huffed, turned, and went back into the kitchen. “Why are you doing this?”