The Off-Season Autopsy
A Medical Thriller

About this book:

**The Off-Season Autopsy**

Mount Laurentian Lodge should be dead in November—three hundred rooms of cedar and stone shuttered against the Vermont winter, its only pulse the aging maintenance man, Arthur Phelan, and the squirrels in the crawl spaces. But this year the boilers run hot. The north wing is leased to the "Northern Health Alliance," eighteen convalescents paying triple rates in cash. They don't eat in the dining room. Their windows are taped shut from the inside. And the night shift brings biohazard containers up the service elevator.

When a desperate man slips out of Room 214 with kidneys failing and a stolen vial labeled *USAMRIID FIELD TRIALS*, Arthur finds himself the only witness to a clinical trial with no controls, no consent, and no intention of leaving survivors. The phone lines are cut. The gate is chained. A blizzard is sealing the valley. And somewhere in the lodge, a doctor reports body counts to Fort Detrick every evening at six.

Arthur knows these pipes, these wires, these walls better than the men hunting him. He has a master key ring, a pipe wrench, and thirty years of keeping machinery running when the cold tries to stop it. But he's never had to keep human beings alive in a building designed to bury the evidence.