“Huh,” Jack said. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ll be examining females at Women’s Hospital too.”
He jerked a shoulder. “They won’t be crawling with lice and crabs. It’s the best place in the country—maybe in the world—for the kind of surgery that interests me. The only thing that interests me. And mostly I’ll be operating, anyway. And doing research. Some of the most important advances in the field come out of Women’s. I’ve got a few ideas. You never know, I may end up revolutionizing surgery.”
Jack said, “Sounds like you’ve got your career planned.”
Graham gave a soft laugh, his mouth working like a twist of gristle. “There’s always room at the top, as my mother used to say. I put in forty-eight hours here without sleep, easy as falling off a log.”
His head swung toward Jack and the expression he normally wore—alert, sharply observant, constrained by respect and convention—was back in place.
“So what brings the best of the New York Police Department detective squad to Bellevue on a damp Sunday morning?”
Oscar produced his widest, least sincere smile. “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”
“Not another case like the Campbell woman.”
“Why would you think that?” Jack said.
He shrugged. “Can’t think of much other than murder that would bring you up here. It’s not like you have room in the jails for all the rutting drunkards we see here. Inbred idiots.” Graham hesitated, waited for some kind of response, and then cleared his throat.
“Nice to see you again, I’ve got some sleeping to catch up on.”
“Give Mrs. Jennings our regards,” Oscar said.
Neill Graham studied Oscar for a moment, nodded, and walked away.
? ? ?
ON THE WAY to Nicholas Lambert’s office Oscar said, “The little shit. And there he’s been under our noses the whole time.”
Jack was thinking the same thing. “He made my skin crawl. You like him for the Campbell case, then.”
“To my mind it was as good as a confession.”
“There’s still the pesky matter of evidence.”
Oscar shrugged that fact away. “He hates women. Hates examining them but he wants to spend a career cutting them open. He’s a braggart of the first order, the kind who thinks he can do anything. To listen to him there was never a more talented doctor put on earth and everybody recognizes him for a genius, except when they’re duping him out of surgeries that should be his. He can work two days without a nap and he’s put out that he couldn’t get more than two hours last night. He can’t keep track of his lies. And don’t forget, Jack my boy, he assisted in the emergency surgery on Janine Campbell. He works an ambulance a couple days a week. That’s worth looking into, at least.”
Jack remembered Anna talking about that at the inquest, and he remembered the way Campbell had described her when he testified. In sober but complimentary terms. Now he wondered if that had all been an act.
“If it was him who did Campbell, he found an unusual way to return to the scene of the crime without raising suspicions,” Jack said.
“We should have thought of it,” Oscar said. “Mrs. Stone wasn’t in the bedroom when he went in to examine Janine Campbell. Maybe she recognized him, but we’ll never know now. And who but a surgeon can take a knife to a woman, do his worst, and get away with it?”
“He was sizing us up,” Jack said. “We’ll have to be careful not to scare him off. He could disappear and start all over someplace else.”
“Oh, no,” Oscar said. “I’m not having that. I won’t be happy until he steps on that trapdoor and falls straight into Satan’s loving arms.”
? ? ?
AS THEY HEADED downstairs to Lambert’s office, it was like walking through an invisible curtain into a swamp, the air both cooler and almost dense enough to eat.
“Neill Graham,” Oscar muttered. “Putting his hands on women.” He shook his head in disgust.
Nicholas Lambert was a wiry, athletic fifty-year-old with a full head of dark hair and a short-cropped beard to match. In stark contrast his complexion was very pale and as fine as a child’s. Like Anna’s, his hands were red and swollen.
“More than one good surgeon has given up practice because of dermatitis,” Lambert said, with the slightest trace of an accent. He had been aware of Jack’s study of his hands, but he hadn’t taken offense. “An unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of the antiseptic method.”
Oscar huffed, surprised. “Why antiseptic when you’re cutting on the dead? What harm can you do?”
“That’s not the issue,” Lambert said. “Some diseases outlast death. The microorganisms that cause smallpox, for example.”
“A dead man can give you smallpox?”
“Or cholera, or hepatitis. Other diseases too. The antiseptic methods are the first line of defense, and that’s why my hands looked like boiled crabs. The odd thing is, I grew up on a dairy farm, and my father and brothers have hands that look only slightly more swollen and red than mine.”