A Case of Need: A Novel by Michael Crichton, Jeffery Hudson Read Free Book Online Page A

corridors, above ground and below, connect the dozen separate buildings of the hospital. At every corner, there are large green signs pointing directions, but they don’t help much; it is still hopelessly confusing.
    As I cut through the corridors and buildings, I remembered my rotation through the hospital as a resident. Small details came back. The soap: a strange, cheap, peculiar-smelling soap that was used everywhere. The paper bags hung by each sink, one for paper towels, the other for rectal gloves. As an economy, the hospital saved used gloves, cleaned them, and used them again. The little plastic name tags edged in black, blue, and red depending on your service. I had spent a year in this hospital, and during that time I had done several autopsies for the medical examiner.
    T HERE ARE FOUR MEDICAL SITUATIONS in which the coroner claims jurisdiction and an autopsy is required by law. Every pathology resident knows the list cold:
    If the patient dies under violent or unusual circumstances.
    If the patient is DOA. 4
    If he dies within twenty-four hours of admission.
    If a patient dies outside the hospital while not under a doctor’s care.
    Under any of these circumstances, an autopsy is performed at the City. Like many cities, Boston has no separate police morgue. The second floor of the Mallory Building, the pathology section of the hospital, is given over to the medical examiner’s offices. In routine cases, most of the autopsies are performed by first-year residents from the hospital in which the patient died. For the residents, new to the game and still nervous, a coroner’s autopsy can be a tense business.
    You don’t know what poisoning or electrocution looks like, for instance, and you’re worried about missing something important. The solution, passed down from resident to resident, is to do a meticulous PM, to take lots of pictures and notes as you go, and to “save everything,” meaning to keep pieces of tissue from all the gross organs in case there is a court action that requires reexamination of the autopsy findings. Saving everything is, of course, an expensive business. It requires extra jars, extra preservative, and more storage space in the freezers. But it is done without question in police cases.
    Yet even with the precautions, you worry. As you do the post, there is always that fear, that dreadful thought at the back of your mind that the prosecution or the defense will demand some piece of information, some crucial bit of evidence either positive or negative, that you cannot supply because you did not consider all the possibilities, all the variables, all the differentials.
    F OR SOME LONG-FORGOTTEN REASON , there are two small stone sphinxes just inside the doors of Mallory. Each time I see them, they bother me; somehow sphinxes in a pathology building smack of Egyptian embalming chambers. Or something.
    I went up to the second floor to talk to Alice. She was grumpy; the post hadn’t been started because of some delay; everything was going to hell in a wheelbarrow these days; did I know that a flu epidemic was expected this winter?
    I said I did, and then asked, “Who’s doing the post on Karen Randall?”
    Alice gave a disapproving frown. “They sent someone over from the Mem. His name, I believe, is Hendricks.”
    I was surprised. I had expected someone big to do this case.
    “He inside?” I asked, nodding toward the end of the hall.
    “Umm,” Alice said.
    I walked down toward the two swinging doors, past the freezers on the right which stored the bodies, and past the neatly labeled sign: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT . The doors were wood, without windows, marked IN and OUT . I pushed through into the autopsy room. Two men were talking in a far corner.
    The room was large, painted a dull, institutional green. The ceiling was low, the floor was concrete, and the pipes overhead were exposed; they don’t spend much on interior decoration here. In a neat row were five