Read The Surgeon for Free Online Page B

June, the killings ended.
    Thirty-one-year-old Catherine Cordell, the chief surgical resident in Savannah’s Riverland Hospital, was startled by someone knocking at her door. When she opened it, she found Andrew Capra, one of her surgery interns, standing on her porch. Earlier that day, in the hospital, she had reprimanded him about a mistake he’d made, and now he was desperate to find out how he could redeem himself. Could he please come in to talk about it?
    Over a few beers, they’d reviewed Capra’s performance as an intern. All the errors he’d made, the patients he might have harmed because of his carelessness. She did not sugarcoat the truth: that Capra was failing and would not be allowed to finish the surgery program. At some point in the evening, Catherine left the room to use the toilet, then returned to resume the conversation and finish her beer.
    When she regained consciousness, she found herself stripped naked and tied to the bed with nylon cord.
    The police report described, in horrifying detail, the nightmare that followed.
    Photographs taken of her in the hospital revealed a woman with haunted eyes, a bruised and horribly swollen cheek. What he saw, in these photos, was summed up in the generic word:
victim
.
    It was not a word that applied to the eerily composed woman he had met today.
    Now, re-reading Cordell’s statement, he could hear her voice in his head. The words no longer belonged to an anonymous victim, but to a woman whose face he knew.
     
    I don’t know how I got my hand free. My wrist is all scraped now, so I must have pulled it through the cord. I’m sorry, but things aren’t clear in my mind. All I remember is reaching for the scalpel. Knowing that I had to get the scalpel off the tray. That I had to cut the cords, before Andrew came back. . . .
    I remember rolling toward the side of the bed. Falling half onto the floor and hitting my head. Then I was trying to find the gun. It’s my father’s gun. After the third woman was killed in Savannah, he insisted I keep it.
    I remember reaching under my bed. Grabbing the gun. I remember footsteps, coming into the room. Then—I’m not sure. That must be when I shot him. Yes, that’s what I think happened. They told me I shot him twice. I guess it must be true.
     
    Moore paused, mulling over the statement. Ballistics had confirmed that both bullets were fired from the weapon, registered to Catherine’s father, that was found lying beside the bed. Blood tests in the hospital confirmed the presence of Rohypnol, an amnesiac drug, in her bloodstream, so she might very well have blank spots in her memory. When Cordell was brought to the E.R., the doctors described her as confused, either from the drug or from a possible concussion. Only a heavy blow to the head could have left such a bruised and swollen face. She did not recall how or when she received that blow.
    Moore turned to the crime scene photos. On the bedroom floor, Andrew Capra lay dead, flat on his back. He had been shot twice, once in the abdomen, once in the eye, both times at close range.
    For a long time he studied the photos, noting the position of Capra’s body, the pattern of the bloodstains.
    He turned to the autopsy report. Read it through twice.
    Looked once again at the crime scene photo.
    Something is wrong here, he thought. Cordell’s statement does not make sense.
    A report suddenly landed on his desk. He glanced up, startled, to see Rizzoli.
    “Did you get a load of this?” she asked.
    “What is it?”
    “The report on that strand of hair found in Elena Ortiz’s wound margin.”
    Moore scanned down to the final sentence. And he said: “I have no idea what this means.”
     
    In 1997, the various branches of the Boston Police Department were moved under one roof, located inside the brand-new complex at One Schroeder Plaza in Boston’s rough-and-tumble Roxbury neighborhood. The cops referred to their new digs as “the marble palace” because of the