Public Anatomy (33 page)

“The Organist is after his last organ,” Eli said.

“This is some freaky shit.” Lispky shook his head. “French is probably already dead.”

“I don’t think so, Lipsky. The patient in the operation six months ago was alive when her uterus was removed.”

“Come again?”

“I’m talking about the first patient of Dr. French who died. So far, he’s killed everyone who was a part of that operation, except Liza. This is his final revenge.”

“So why didn’t he already kill her?”

“He will—but he wants her to suffer like he thinks the first patient did before she died.”

“He’s going to remove her uterus while French is still alive?”

“Yes,” Eli said. “Question is—where’s he taking her?”

Cate’s brother dragged Liza up a hill covered in dead grass. This time, she screamed from pain, not fear, as her hip scraped the corner of a flat tombstone. He stopped and slapped her in the face. The blow numbed her so she merely moaned when he grabbed her hair and kept pulling her up the hill.

When they reached the top, the Organist smiled at what he saw. The men from Cate’s clinic had come through for him.
They may be homeless
, he thought,
but they’re damn reliable. Especially when they get a fifth of whiskey and some cash
.

Altogether, he counted seven men sitting on the concrete stage beneath the cemetery’s Corinthian columns. He had hoped for ten, but this would do. Foster had brought the dog. It pulled against its leash and tried to greet the others.

“Good,” the Organist said.
At least it’s close to the scene Vesalius created
. There was no monkey, as in the original illustration, but at least the dog was among the audience, an insult to Galen and his canine-based anatomical knowledge. He thought of his mother’s painting of the sixteenth-century public anatomy and how he was recreating the scene in real life.

She would be so proud of me
.

If she was still alive
.

Sadness turned to rage, a familiar, comforting feeling.

He knelt beside Liza, grabbed her shoulder-length hair and yanked it back. “You’re the last one. All the others are dead. They will never, ever, kill another patient. No one else will have to lose a mother, like Cate and I did.” He twisted her head toward him. “Do you hear me? I
have saved the world from those incompetent nurses and doctors. Now, it’s your turn.”

Liza struggled against him. “Don’t kill my baby.”

He released her hair, as though her pregnancy made her toxic.

“You’re lying, bitch. There is no baby. But we shall soon see. Like the great anatomist before me, I will cut your womb and see for myself.”

He gently rocked Liza’s head back to show her the colonnaded stage and the men who waited.

“That’s where you die.”

The call came through on Lipsky’s radio. He had notified the entire Memphis police force to be on the lookout for a black Trans Am. It didn’t take long. A car fitting that description was seen heading south on Dudley Street at a high rate of speed. Problem was the officer who spotted the car was unable to keep up.

Lipsky responded to the call. “Where did they lose him?”

“Last seen at the corner of Dudley and Crump,” the dispatcher said.

Dudley and Crump
. Eli knew this area well. South side of town. Warehouses. Somewhat deserted. Eli and Henry traveled south on Dudley Street once a year, in August, with a single peach-colored rose, their mother’s favorite.

Before Lipsky answered the police dispatch, Eli stopped him. “I know where he’s going.”

Liza began to fight him, her fingernails scrapping five lines of flesh from the side of his neck. The Organist hit her hard in the face and she fell against the concrete platform. From his pocket he removed the syringe of drugs Cate had stolen from her clinic. He stabbed it into Liza’s thigh and depressed the plunger, delivering the full load of strong sedative. She continued to kick at him for a couple of minutes. He held her down until the horse-dose of medicine kicked in, and she became flaccid and unconscious.

The Organist had told the men from Cate’s clinic they were getting paid to be in a movie scene. So-called extras. He needed them for thirty minutes, no longer. He would then give each of them cash and enough liquor for a week—or at least a night. He had given Foster a cell phone so he could communicate with the men before he arrived. Foster answered after the first ring.

“Tell them to stand by the columns and keep their places.”

A full moon reflected off the Corinthian columns and white cement steps. It cast a pleasant light. Even so, the Organist had given Joey the Flicker a two-million-candle-watt lamp, which sat at the edge of the platform and lit the place like a real movie set.

With Liza draped across his arms, he carried her up the steps to the stage. The men kept their places and watched as he laid Liza on the hard stone floor. He removed a black mask from his pocket and pulled it on his head like a cap. The dog started barking and yanked at its leash, which Foster had secured around one of the columns. The Organist adjusted the lights so that Liza was fully illuminated.

He had given Foster a laptop computer and instructed him to bring it. The Organist located the computer off to the side of the stage and connected the camera cable to it. He typed the web address for SurgCast and its home page appeared. He lifted the shoulder-mounted camera up to Foster’s shoulder and made sure he had proper control of it. Then the Organist turned on the camera and manipulated it on Foster’s shoulder toward Liza. A quick glance at the laptop screen thrilled him.

Liza’s supine body was being broadcast live on the Internet.

Eli and Lipsky found the black Trans-Am parked outside the grounds of Elmwood Cemetery, partially hidden behind a group of tall shrubs. Lipsky pulled to a stop behind the sports car and cut the engine.

He had asked for backup and specified no lights, no sirens. So far, no backup at all.

“What’s he doing,” Lipsky wondered. “Burying her alive?”

If they could trap the killer in the cemetery, they had him. If he got spooked and ran, they might never find him—or Liza. Lipsky and Eli got out of the car, careful not to slam the door.

“He won’t take the time to bury her,” Eli answered. “He wants to torture her by cutting out her uterus.”

“Why a cemetery?” Lipsky asked. “Better yet, why this cemetery?”

“The dissection must be carried out in a public place,” Eli whispered. “That was the Vesalius method. The Organist will follow it.”

Just outside the stone wall that surrounded the cemetery, they crossed the arching bridge and entered the grounds. Eli thought of the many times he had been here to visit his mother’s grave. He never imagined he would come to Elmwood on the trail of a killer.

“Spent a lot of time in cemeteries when I was young,” Lipsky said, louder than Eli would have liked.

“Funerals?”

“No, graveyards make a great place to hide when you’re running from the police. No one wants to go in them at night.”

“And here we are,” Eli said.

“Here we are.”

They stopped at the end of the bridge. The only sound was the hum
of traffic on Interstate 240. Light from a full moon reflected off tombstones that dotted the landscape before them. No sign of the Organist or Liza.

“Why Elmwood?” Lipsky asked, this time in a softer, more reverent tone.

Eli began to move quickly along the stone path. “To recreate the scene from Vesalius’s title page, he needs five Corinthian columns standing in a semicircle as a backdrop.”

“Don’t tell me,” Lipsky said. “He can find that here.”

Eli kept moving. “Follow me.”

The Organist unbuttoned Liza’s blouse.

With her chest bare, Joey the Flicker let out a primal, “Yeah!”

The man continued to undress her.

“Let’s see it all,” one of the men said, followed by a round of muffled laughter.

The Meatman wasn’t laughing. “This ain’t right,” he said and walked away. “Y’all can have it.”

The six men from the clinic who remained stopped laughing. They considered the Meatman their unspoken moral leader, if they had one.

Liza was completely unclothed now and the men stared in silence. The Organist made Foster stand with the camera below Liza’s feet so that the image broadcast on the Internet would show him at Liza’s side with the motley cast of spectators scattered among the columns behind him. He checked the image on the computer. It was frightfully similar to Vesalius’s immortalized scene.

“Perfect.”

He pulled the black mask over his face.

Foster asked him what the mask was for, but he received no answer.

Like a symphony conductor, the Organist raised his arms, held them steady, and said, “I need all of you to watch me but don’t move from your positions. We’re broadcasting live.”

From his pocket, he removed a slender leather case and opened it to reveal a scalpel. The spotlight reflected off stainless steel. He admired the surgical tool, held it to the light.

“What do you mean, broadcasting live?” Joey the Flicker asked.