Dead Med, page 21
I’m trying to decide if I should ask her out when she reaches out and touches my arm. “So when are you going to ask me for my number… Doctor?”
“Um,” I say. Wow. I’m not used to girls being quite so forward—I think I’m going to like being a med student. “Can I have your number, Erin?”
Erin scribbles her digits on a blank page in one of the textbooks I’m buying, and I think to myself how perfect she is. She’s beautiful, tall, reasonably articulate, and I bet anything she’s really easy. This is the kind of girl any guy would be thrilled to have a date with.
So why can’t I stop thinking about Sasha? What is wrong with me?
66
My life is still mostly studying. I got the highest grade in the class on the first exam, and I want to make a similarly strong showing on the second one. My only regret is that I can’t break my own record. I go to the library every day after class and stay there until I can barely keep my eyes open.
Sasha continues to keep me company in my corner of the library. We still talk, and she still brings me coffee when she goes to get herself a cup, but we haven’t had sex since the dinner with my parents.
“Black, no sugar,” she says as she places the cup in front of me.
“Thanks, Sasha,” I say. “You’re the best.”
“Am I?”
I always have to bite my tongue to keep from asking her if she wants to go to the locker room with me. I figure if I ask, she’ll say no. I blew that aspect of our relationship, and I can’t admit to her how desperately I miss it. I made a huge mistake that night at my parents’ house. But I’m glad that I at least have her company during the lonely nights in the library.
A few days before the test is scheduled, I’m sitting in the back of the library, studying the muscles of mastication when I hear a voice from over my shoulder: “Holy shit… anatomy. Whenever I think my life is the worst it could possibly be, I remember that class, and I feel a little better.”
A tall guy with a shaved head is standing over me, wearing green scrubs and a long white coat. The ID badge hanging from his lapel proclaims him to be “Resident, Department of General Surgery.” He has his arms crossed and is shaking his head in amusement.
“You a first-year?” he asks me.
“That’s right.” I look the guy up and down. “You a resident?”
“Bingo.” He holds out his hand. “The name’s Norm. I’m a surgery resident.”
That will be me someday. Except somewhere better than here. I take Norm’s hand. “I’m Mason.”
“So is Conlon still torturing you guys?” Norm asks, dragging a chair over so he can sit down.
“He’s not so bad.”
“He got nicer.” Norm rubs his bald head thoughtfully. “You don’t know what he was like in his first year teaching.”
“No kidding?”
“Oh, yeah. Frankly, I think it’s his fault this school has a drug problem.”
I raise my eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know… It didn’t seem like it was so bad before he started working here.” Norm shrugs. “But practically as soon as he started, it felt like there were drugs circulating everywhere.”
“Are you saying you think he’s… selling them?”
Norm seems surprised by my question. “Oh, I didn’t mean that. But now that you mention it…”
“What?”
He grins. “I don’t know. I heard the salary they pay professors at DeWitt is crap. I wouldn’t be surprised if he decided to make a few extra bucks on the side. And hey, wouldn’t that be perfect? He creates a class that’s super stressful, then everyone has to buy speed from him to get through it!”
It would be kind of perfect. DeWitt has a major drug problem, and there’s a lot of whispering about how a professor must be one of the sources.
Norm notices the look on my face and says, “Hey, I’m just kidding. I don’t think Dr. Conlon would do that. He’s too much of a square.”
Is he really? Or is that all just an act? “Yeah…”
Dr. Conlon projects the stereotypical image of a dorky professor. But I’ve always wondered how much of it is genuine. And he’s always walking around with that cane, but I haven’t figured out why he needs it. It’s not clear from looking at him, and he’s never shared it with anyone in the class. Maybe that’s all an act too.
“Plus, it would be a huge risk,” Norm says. “If he sold drugs to a bunch of kids and they ended up dying because of it, can you imagine how much trouble he’d be in? He’d probably go to prison.”
That’s true. If Dr. Conlon really is selling drugs to students, he would need to be very careful. If the police found out, he’d be in deep trouble.
“Hey, man, you okay?” Norm is frowning. “Sorry, did I freak you out?”
“I’m fine,” I say quickly. “I think I need to get more sleep.”
“I hear that,” Norm says, grinning. “Anyway, it’s been nice meeting you. Maybe I’ll see you in your third-year surgery clerkship. It’s loads of fun.”
I barely manage a distracted goodbye.
I close my anatomy text and rub my fingers into my temples. I have always believed I’ve got good intuition, and my intuition is screaming out that there’s something fishy going on with Dr. Matthew Conlon. I have to focus on my upcoming exam, but all I can think of is all those kids who died of overdoses in the classes before me.
If he sold drugs to a bunch of kids and they ended up dying because of it, can you imagine how much trouble he’d be in?
The look in Dr. Conlon’s eyes when I started questioning him about Frank’s cause of death was chilling. I asked an innocent question, and he jumped down my throat. Seems suspicious if you ask me. For some reason, there’s a dead cop in our anatomy lab, and I have no idea why.
I stand up so fast that my chair falls over behind me. My heart is pounding in my chest. I look around the library and see that it is almost empty now—even Sasha has gone home for the night. It’s so empty that nobody even noticed when my chair fell to the floor. I wipe my brow with the back of my hand, and it comes away wet with sweat.
An anatomy professor has got to have some connections to the local morgue, right? Maybe there are strings he can pull to get a body to come to him rather than risking an autopsy. And once a body gets ripped apart in the anatomy lab, there’s no chance of finding out the real cause of death.
Unless there’s a med student in the class who gets too curious.
But Conlon would never allow that to happen.
I back away from the table, my hands trembling. My breaths are coming quickly—too quickly. I’m hyperventilating. I recently learned that during hyperventilation, the lungs blow off too much carbon dioxide. As the amount of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream goes down, the blood vessels going to the brain constrict, cutting off the brain’s oxygen supply.
I’ve got to calm down.
This is ridiculous. My anatomy professor isn’t a drug dealer or a murderer. He’s just a nice, dorky guy who wears bowties to class every day. He’s not murdering students and hiding bodies in the cadaver lab. Stuff like that doesn’t happen in real life.
And that’s when I hear that deep voice again:
Think about it. What sorts of things can kill a man but won’t show up on a routine anatomy lab dissection? Seems like Conlon would know.
“Shut up!” I whisper.
The sound of my own voice startles me, but it seems to put a stop to my racing thoughts. My thumping heart slows down, and I suddenly feel completely exhausted. Maybe four hours of sleep every night isn’t enough. I have to start taking better care of myself before I blow everything I’ve worked so hard for.
67
I had hoped that a night of sleep would clear my mind, but the next day, I wake up feeling just as uneasy as the night before. I wish Abe were around, because I want to talk this out with someone—try to get someone else’s perspective. But it seems like I haven’t seen Abe around the apartment in days. Where the hell is he anyway?
When I get to school, I check my watch and see that I still have twenty minutes before my first class. When I arrive early, I usually make a stop in the cafeteria for some much-needed breakfast and a strong cup of coffee. However, this morning, I make a beeline for Dr. Conlon’s secretary’s office, which is right next to his.
Dr. Conlon’s secretary, Anita, looks like a grandma. She’s short and chubby with poofy white hair and is always offering us “sweets.” I’ve talked to her a handful of times, and she’s always real nice to me.
“Hello, Mason!” Anita says when I walk through her open door.
I flash my most charming smile. Old women always love me. “Hi, Anita. How are you?”
“Mason, Mason…” Anita leans forward across her desk. “You don’t have a girlfriend, do you? Oh, I’m sure a handsome young man like you is already attached…”
“Actually, I don’t,” I say.
“Oh?” She raises an eyebrow. “Well, I don’t know if you’d be interested, but my niece is a very sweet girl. She’s about your age. You’d really like her.”
I hate it when older women try to set me up with their daughters, nieces, and granddaughters. But I force a smile. “Sure, give me her number.”
Anita’s face lights up, and she pulls out a sticky note to write out the number of some girl named Margo.
“You’ll love her, Mason,” Anita gushes. “She’s such a cute girl. And so funny! And smart too… Oh, but you boys don’t like smart girls, do you? Don’t worry. I’m sure she’s not smarter than you are. After all, you’re a—”
“Anita,” I interrupt, unable to tolerate another second of hearing about this girl I’ll never call. “I was wondering if you could look up some information on our cadaver.”
Anita looks confused. “Oh? What information?”
“I was just curious if you have the cause of death listed,” I say. My stomach fills with butterflies as I wait for her response.
“Well, we should,” Anita says thoughtfully. “I mean, we have to know that so that there’s no chance of the person having a communicable disease.”
“So, um…” I bite my lip. “Could you look it up for me?”
Anita is about to respond when Dr. Conlon limps into the office. He looks surprised to see me standing there. I swear silently to myself.
“Hi, Mason,” Dr. Conlon says with a friendly smile. “What are you doing here? Anything I can help you with?”
I look down at my hands and see they’re trembling. I’m about to reply when Anita speaks up. “Mason is just trying to find out some information about his cadaver.”
The smile vanishes instantly from Conlon’s face. His eyes darken the same way they did before. He looks like he wants to reach out and strangle me.
“Mason,” he says quietly. “Didn’t I tell you before that all cadaver information is confidential?”
“Well, I was trying to—”
“Don’t you have a biochemistry test tomorrow?” Dr. Conlon raises an eyebrow.
“Uh, yes.”
Dr. Conlon looks over at Anita. “Any information on the cadavers in the lab is strictly confidential. Nobody is to receive that information.” He looks back up at me. “Is that clear?”
My stomach feels like lead.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s clear.”
Dr. Conlon is still staring at me in a way that is pretty terrifying. He knows I’m onto him—I can see it in his eyes. I’ve turned myself into a threat, and now he has to deal with me.
But I won’t go down without a fight.
68
I’ve been watching Dr. Conlon very carefully recently.
Right now, Abe and Heather are hunched over Frank’s split-open skull, reviewing the cranial nerves, while Sasha reads from the lab manual. I’m at the other end of the cadaver, flipping through the anatomy atlas, but my mind is somewhere else. Our second midterm in anatomy is in a few days, but I already know the material cold. That’s not my biggest worry anymore.
Dr. Conlon is dressed in blue scrubs, and he makes his usual rounds from cadaver to cadaver, gripping his cane in his left hand. His cane is cumbersome—made of dull metal and ending in four prongs arranged in a square formation. The fact that he relies on that cane makes him seem really impaired, and I have to wonder if that’s the idea. If he visited a store to find a cane that would enhance his story that he can’t walk very well and isn’t capable of harming a fly, that’s probably the cane he’d end up with.
See, I’m about ninety-five percent sure at this point that Dr. Conlon isn’t disabled at all.
For starters, if you watch him walk, it’s clear he’s faking—he alternates which leg he limps on. Sometimes, it’s his right, sometimes, his left. I’m pretty sure of that. And the pretense that his right hand isn’t functional is equally bullshit. In his short-sleeved scrub top, it’s clear that all the muscles in his right arm are intact. I admit, he holds his hand in a way that makes it look impaired, but if I bend my wrist as far as it will go and curl up my fingers, it doesn’t look so different from his hand.
Of course, I can’t prove anything. I followed Conlon out to his car a few times, hoping to catch him in the act—like, tossing his cane aside and walking without it. I had my phone ready to snap photos the second he did it. But he’s really dedicated to the illusion of appearing disabled or else he sensed someone was watching, and he never abandoned that cane. He’s even got handicapped plates on his car—not that those are hard to get. My father says half his cardiac patients have them.
“Dr. Conlon!” Sasha flags down our professor as he “limps” by our table.
Dr. Conlon stops and smiles at Sasha. Lately, everything about Dr. Conlon seems ominous to me, even his smile. “Yes, Dr. Zaleski?”
Sasha launches into a question about the circle of Willis, and my stomach clenches as I notice how close Dr. Conlon is standing to her. He needs to back up at least a foot, seriously. Sasha seems pleased by the attention, but she doesn’t get it. Dr. Conlon’s attention is not something she wants. And Sasha is so small and sweet and vulnerable—and she wants so desperately to do well in anatomy. If Dr. Conlon offered her some drugs with the promise of a higher score on the next exam, would she be able to refuse?
If he touches a hair on Sasha’s head, I swear to God, I will kill him.
69
I didn’t even realize I drifted to sleep until the ringing of my phone jogs me awake. I’m sitting up in bed, my laptop resting on my legs, still in the clothes I had been wearing last night. I recall a dream I had been having about Frank, although I can’t remember the details. I fumble for the phone and hold it to my ear.
“Hello?” I mumble.
“Mason? It’s Erin. Where are you?”
Erin… shit! I completely forgot we were supposed to get together for an early lunch today at a coffee shop that’s a five-minute drive from my dorm. I look at my watch and realize I’m fifteen minutes late.
“I’m sorry, I…” I try to come up with an excuse, and my mind goes blank. “I’ll be there in five minutes, okay?”
Erin reluctantly agrees, and I shove my feet into my shoes. No time to change clothes. I pull on a light jacket as I hurry out the door, since the weather has started to get pretty nippy lately. I can’t believe I managed to stand up my first real date since starting med school. Lately, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to focus.
When I pull up to the coffee shop, I spot Erin through the window, sitting in a booth and glancing down at her watch as she pouts. This is not a girl who is used to being stood up. I again search my brain for a plausible excuse for not showing up. I can’t think of one. And I can’t exactly tell her I forgot all about her.
I yank the door open and nearly trip over a chair hurrying over to her table.
“Hi, Erin,” I say breathlessly. “Sorry I’m late…”
She looks up at me, obviously ready to give me a piece of her mind, but her jaw falls open slightly when she sees me. I didn’t look in a mirror before leaving the apartment, and now I’m sorry—I probably look like a mess. I self-consciously run a hand through my hair in a half-hearted effort to comb it out.
I slide into the seat across from her.
“I’m really sorry,” I say again.
“You know, some guys will put on clean clothes for a girl,” Erin says. “And shave.”
I touch the stubble on my chin and try to recall the last time I took a razor to my face.
“Sorry,” I say again.
Although I’m beginning to realize I’m not all that sorry. I couldn’t care less about Erin. She’s pretty, yeah. But so what? There are thousands of pretty girls out there.
And anyway, she’s got nothing on Sasha. I still can’t believe I blew that.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if Erin had gotten up and walked out on me. But instead, she leans forward and crosses her arms.
“So how was your big exam?”
I struggle to come up with an answer to her question. The anatomy exam was two days ago, and I’m only slightly distressed by the fact that I barely remember it. It doesn’t seem important anymore. My life is in danger. Doesn’t she get that?
No, I guess she doesn’t.
As Erin babbles about something or other, my mind wanders. I can’t help but think that Frank is the key to all of this. Frank was a cop, and I bet he knew something. He must have been investigating the drug sales, and he figured out what’s going on. That’s why Conlon had him killed. And Conlon is willing to get rid of anyone who’s on the verge of figuring out his secret. And now, that includes me.
“Who’s Frank?” Erin asks.
I stare at her. “What?”
“You just said something about ‘the case Frank was investigating,’” she says.
