He shook his head. “Should have come up with at least part of the answer a lot sooner. The night of the gourmet dinner, I had a dream that might have lasted all of five seconds, but it was a big clue; the sound of an explosion and the image of a black iron bar hurtlin’ into the air. I just didn’t know what it meant. The night after seein’ the slides of Halliday’s brain, I dreamt about the same thing, but this time there was a train in it. When I read the material the institute sent me, I realized those dreams were tryin’ to remind me of Phineas Gauge.”
“Phineas Gauge…” Kit repeated the name slowly. “I’ve heard that name somewhere before.”
“He was a nineteenth-century railroad worker who had an accident,” Broussard said. “An explosion drove a three-foot iron bar into his cheek and out the top of his head, scramblin’ his left prefrontal cortex. Incredibly, he survived, but his whole personality was changed. Before his accident, he was steady and reliable. After he recovered, he was so irresponsible he lost his job.”
“I remember,” Kit said. “… he’s generally considered to be the first recorded prefrontal lobotomy.”
“Didn’t they used to lobotomize mental cases?” Gatlin said.
“Certain kinds, yes,” Broussard replied. “… in the forties and fifties.”
“Not with an iron bar, I hope.”
“Only slightly more refined,” Broussard said. “Folks that were hearin’ voices before the operation could still hear ’em afterward, but they no longer seemed to matter. It also became clear that many of the patients who had the operation came out of it shorn of the concepts of fear and caution. Sort of like they’d lost an internal governor. Such a person wouldn’t think twice about goin’ up on a catwalk over a shark tank with somebody he shouldn’t trust… or signin’ a suicide note somebody else wrote for him… or…”—he looked pointedly at Kit—“talkin’ too much about a case they were workin’ on….”
“We get the picture,” Kit said.
“The drug the institute was usin’ transiently affected some of the same cells whose output is prevented in a lobotomy and also blocked short-term memory circuits.”
“But where does Iverson come in?” Kit said. “How did he know about the drug?”
“He was the author of the report from that institute,” Broussard said. “Before he went into neurosurgery, he was a biochemical psychologist. I knew he’d worked in industry for years before becomin’ a neurosurgeon, but I didn’t know where.”
“That explains how he, Jordan, and Halliday came to be housemates as medical students even though he was a lot older,” Kit said. “But if the drug leaves a marker in the affected cells, why did he use it? Surely he knew you’d find it.”
“I don’t believe he’d ever seen slides of a human brain that’d been exposed to the drug. He was long gone from the institute when that volunteer died. So he probably didn’t know.”
Kit sat back and thought about what Broussard had said. Suddenly, she remembered. “Wait a minute. What about Jarrell’s check to Peyton, Browning lying when he came to see me, and Haley Dagget?… Good grief! I forgot… I had an appointment last night with Dagget.”
Always looking as though he believed smiling was a felony, Gatlin’s mouth drooped even more at the news that she had ignored his orders more thoroughly than he’d thought. But he said nothing.
“Anyway, what about Dagget not being at the hospital like he said he was, the night Paul Jarrell was killed?” Kit said. “Where does all that fit in?”
“It doesn’t,” Gatlin said. “The check from Jarrell to Peyton was for Jarrell’s mother, who was a patient of Peyton’s.”
“Why didn’t he tell me he had a woman patient named Jarrell?”
“Because he didn’t have one. She had divorced Paul Jarrell’s father and married again… not well, as it turned out, since he couldn’t even pay her doctor bills. Walter Browning was telling you the truth about why he came to see you. He was simply mistaken when he said he was having lunch with the chairman of orthopedics. He was actually meeting the deputy chairman, who schedules his own appointments. As for Dagget, he’s been bedding one of the medical students doing a clerkship with him. He was with her the night he told you he was at the hospital. He and Peyton are up for some piss-ant award from the local medical society and Peyton was just trying to stir up trouble for Dagget when he sent you after him.”
“How could three men who seemed so involved in this case be so uninvolved?” Kit said. “How could I be so misled?”
“You know, somethin’ like this once happened to Babe Ruth,” Broussard began. As Kit’s face fell, he chuckled and said, “But maybe I’ll tell you about that later. Actually, you were doin’ fine. Given time, you’d have figured it out. Phillip’s just had more experience.”
“I’m so flattered,” Gatlin said.
“I don’t know, maybe you’re right,” Kit said. “Would you mind if I take some personal time this morning?”
“Seems to me, after yesterday, you ought to take at least the whole day.”
“No. I want to get back to work, but I have to do something first.”
“Will I see you at lunch?” Broussard asked. “I’m buyin’. Phillip’s already agreed to come.”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
Kit returned to her car and drove home, where she changed into shorts, a tank top, and running shoes. On the way to get her straw hat out of the closet, she paused at the telephone, then picked up the receiver and pecked out a number. When her party answered, she said, “Teddy, this is Kit.”
“Kit! God, it’s good to hear your voice. Does this mean you’ve got everything figured out… about your life, I mean… what it is you want?”
“No, I don’t have anything figured out, but I’ve realized that I’ve got plenty of time to work on it. Meanwhile, if you’d like to come over Saturday…”
“I would. I most definitely would.”
“Then it’s a date, and Teddy… bring a thick shirt.”
That taken care of, she put on her straw hat and went into the backyard. The mounded earth was still soft and her shovel bit into it easily. Lifting as much dirt as she could manage, she thought briefly of two women who looked similar enough to be sisters, then began filling the pit.
Epilogue
Victoria French and her assistants recovered the remains of twenty-three young women from Iverson’s rose garden. Upon receiving a letter from Phil Gatlin, the authorities in Sheridan, Wyoming, thoroughly searched the places where Iverson was known to have lived while working at the Cotswald Institute. They found nothing. The notice of Haley Dagget’s divorce was in the paper a month after the case ended. Six months later, the Louisiana Rose Society awarded John Tully second prize for his hybrid Kit’s Choice. This rose is currently under further development by Jackson and Perkins.
About
The Author:
D.J. Donaldson
I grew up Sylvania, Ohio, a little suburb of Toledo, where the nearby stone quarries produce some of the best fossil trilobites in the country. I know that doesn’t sound like much to be proud of, but we’re simple people in Ohio. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree at the U. of Toledo, I became a teacher of ninth grade general science in Sylvania, occupying the same desk my high school chemistry and physics teacher used when he tried unsuccessfully to teach me how to use a slide rule. I lasted six months as a public school teacher, lured away into pursuit of a Ph.D. by Dr. Katoh, a developmental biologist I met in a program to broaden the biological knowledge of science teachers. Katoh’s lectures were unlike anything I’d ever heard in college. He related his discipline as a series of detective stories that had me on the edge of my chair. Stimulated to seek the master who trained Katoh, I moved to New Orleans and spent five years at Tulane working on a doctorate in human anatomy. Stressed by graduate work, I hated New Orleans. When Mardi Gras would roll around, my wife and I would leave town. It wasn’t until many years later, after the painful memories of graduate school had faded and I
’d taught microscopic anatomy to thousands of students at the U. of Tennessee Medical school in Memphis (not all at the same time) and published dozens of papers on wound healing that I suddenly felt the urge to write novels. And there was only one place I wanted to write about... mysterious, sleazy, beautiful New Orleans. Okay, so I’m kind of slow to appreciate things.
Practically from the moment I decided to try my hand at fiction, I wanted to write about a medical examiner. There’s just something appealing about being able to put a killer in the slammer using things like the stomach contents of the victim or teeth impressions left in a bite mark. Contrary to what the publisher’s blurb said on a couple of my books, I’m not a forensic pathologist. To gear up for the first book in the series, I spent a couple of weeks hanging around the county forensic center where Dr. Jim Bell taught me the ropes. Unfortunately, Jim died unexpectedly after falling into a diabetic coma a few months before the first book was published. Though he was an avid reader, he never got to see a word of the book he helped me with. In many ways, Jim lives on as Broussard. Broussard’s brilliant mind, his weight problem, his appreciation of fine food and antiques, his love for Louis L’Amour novels... that was Jim Bell. When a new book comes out, Jim’s wife always buys an armful and sends them to Jim’s relatives.
My research occasionally puts me in interesting situations. Some time ago, I accompanied a Memphis homicide detective to a rooming house where we found a man stuck to the floor by a pool of his own blood, his throat cut, and a big knife lying next to the body. Within a few minutes, I found myself straddling the blood, holding a paper bag for the detective to collect the victim’s personal effects. A short time later, after I’d listened to the cops on the scene discuss the conflicting stories they were getting from the occupants, the captain of the general investigation bureau turned to me and said, “What do you think happened?” The house is full of detectives and he’s asking my opinion. I pointed out a discrepancy I’d noticed in the story told by the occupant who found the body and next thing I know, he’s calling all the other detectives over so I can tell them. Later, we took this woman in for questioning. I wish I could say I solved the crime, but it didn’t turn out that glamorous. They eventually ruled it a suicide.
Books by D.J. Donaldson and published by Astor + Blue Edition- www.astorandblue.com
*Bad Karma in the Big Easy
*Louisiana Fever
*New Orleans Requiem
*Sleeping With The Crawfish
*Cajun Nights
*Blood On The Bayou
*No Mardi Gras For The Dead
Listen to all these books on Audible.com
No Mardi Gras for the Dead Page 22