Trace - Cornwell Patricia (серии книг читать онлайн бесплатно полностью txt) 📗

Pogue cranks the engine and shoves the white Buick into reverse.

52

Dr. Stanley Philpott's office in the Fan is in a white brick row house on Main Street. He is a general practitioner and was very gracious when Scarpetta reached him on the phone late yesterday and asked if he would talk to her about Edgar Allan Pogue.

"You know I can't do that," he said at first.

"The police can get a warrant," she replied. "Would that make you more comfortable?"

"Not really."

"I need to talk to you about him. Could I come by your office first thing in the morning?" she said. "I'm afraid the police are going to talk to you about him one way or another."

Dr. Philpott doesn't want to see the police. He doesn't want their cars near his office and he doesn't want police showing up in his waiting room and scaring his patients. A gentle-looking man with bright white hair and a graceful way of carrying himself, he is quite polite when his secretary lets Scarpetta in through the back door and shows her into the tiny kitchen where he is waiting for her.

"I've heard you speak several times," Dr. Philpott says, pouring coffee from a drip coffeemaker on the counter. "Once at the Richmond Academy of Medicine, another time at the Commonwealth Club. You'd have no reason to remember me. What do you take?"

"Black, please. Thank you," she says from a table by a window that overlooks a cobblestone alleyway. "Thai was a long time ago, the Commonwealth Club."

He sets the coffees on the table and pulls out a chair, his back to the window. Light breaking through clouds shines on his neatly combed thick white hair and starchy white lab coat. The stethoscope is loosely forgotten around his neck, his hands big and steady. "You told some rather entertaining stories, as I recall," he says thoughtfully. "All in good taste. I remember thinking at the time that you were a brave woman. Back then not too many women were invited to the Commonwealth Club. Still aren't, really. You know, it actually crossed my mind that maybe I should sign up as a medical examiner. That's how inspirational you were."

"It's not too late," she replies with a smile. "I understand they have quite a shortage, more than a hundred short, which is a significant problem since they're the ones who sign out most deaths and respond to scenes and decide if a case needs to come in for an autopsy, especially out in the hinterlands. When I was here, we had about five hundred docs statewide who volunteered as medical examiners. The troops, I called them. I don't know what I would have done without them."

"Doctors don't want to volunteer their time for much of anything anymore," Dr. Philpott says, cradling the coffee mug in both hands.

"Especially the young ones. I'm afraid the world's become a very selfish

i " place.

"I try not to think that or I get depressed."

"That's probably a good philosophy. What can I help you with exactly?" His light blue eyes are touched by sadness. "I know you're not here to give me happy news. What has Edgar Allan done?"

"Murder, it appears. Attempted murder. Making bombs. Malicious wounding," Scarpetta replies. "The fourteen-year-old girl who died several weeks ago, not far from here. I'm sure you've heard about it on the news." She doesn't want to be any more specific.

"Oh God," he says, shaking his head, staring down into his coffee. "Dear God."

"How long has he been your patient, Dr. Philpott?"

"Forever," he says. "Since he was a boy.' I saw his mother too."

"Is she still alive?"

"She died, I want to say ten years ago. A rather imperious woman, a difficult woman. Edgar Allan is the only child.'

"What about his father?"

"An alcoholic who committed suicide quite a long time ago. Maybe twenty years ago. Let me tell you right off that I don't know Edgar Allan well. He's come in from time to time for routine problems, mainly for flu and pneumococcal pneumonia vaccines. The vaccines he's done as regular as clockwork every September."

"Including this past September?" Scarpetta asks.

"As a matter of fact, no. I went over his chart right before you got here. He came in on October fourteenth, got a pneumonia vaccine but not the flu shot. I'm afraid I was out of influenza vaccine. You know, there's been a shortage. I ran out. So he just got the one vaccine for pneumonia and left."

"What do you remember about that?"

"He came in, said hello. I asked how he was doing with his bad lungs. He has a pretty significant case of pulmonary interstitial fibrosis from chronic exposure to embalming fluid. Apparently he worked in a funeral home once."

"Not quite," she replies. "He worked for me."

"Well, I'll be darned," he says, surprised. "Now that I didn't know. I wonder why he… Well, he said he worked in a funeral home, was an assistant director or something."

"He didn't. He worked in the Anatomical Division, was there when I became chief back in the late eighties. Then he retired on disability in ninety-seven, right before we moved into our new building on East Fourth Street. What story did he give you about how he got his lung disease? Chronic exposure?" "He said he got splashed one day and inhaled formaldehyde. It's in his chart. He had a rather grotesque story about it. Edgar Allan's a bit strange, I'll give you that. I've always known that. According to him, he was working in the funeral home and embalming a body and he forgot to stuff something in the mouth, this is according to him, and embalming fluid started bubbling out of the mouth because the rate of flow was too fast, or something grotesque like that, and a hose blew. He can be quite dramatic. Well, why am I telling you? If he worked for you, you know more than I do. I really don't need to repeat his fanciful tales."

"I've never heard that story before," she says. "All I remember is the chronic exposure part and that he did have fibrosis, or I should say he does have pulmonary fibrosis."

"There's no question about that. He has scarring of the interstitial tissue, significant damage to the lung tissue as evidenced by biopsy. He isn't faking."

"We're trying to find him," Scarpetta says. "Is there anything you can tell me that might give us a lead as to where to look?"

"I don't mean to state the obvious. But what about people he worked with?"

"The police are checking all of that. I'm not hopeful. When he worked for me he was a loner," she replies. "I know his prescription for prednisone is due to be renewed within days. Is he religious about doing that?"

"It's been my experience he goes through phases with his meds. He'll be fastidious for a year, then maybe he backs off from the stuff for months because it makes him gain weight."

"Is he overweight?"

"Last time I saw him, he was very overweight."

"How tall is he and how much did he weigh?"

"He's maybe five-eight. When I saw him in October, he looked like he weighed in excess of two hundred pounds and I told him that just put more of a strain on his breathing, not to mention his heart. I've gone back and forth with him about the corticosteroids because of the weight problem, and he can get very paranoid when he's on his meds."

"You worry about steroid psychosis?"

"Always worry about that with anyone. If you've ever seen steroid psychosis, you worry. But I've never decided if Edgar Allan is off when he's on his meds or just oft. How did he do it, if you don't mind my asking? How did he kill the girl, the Paulsson girl?"

"You've heard of Burke and Hare? Early nineteenth-century Scotland, the two men who killed people and sold their bodies for medical dissection? There was quite a scarcity of bodies for dissection and in fact the only way some medical students could learn anatomy was from robbing fresh graves or getting bodies in other illicit ways."