The Last Precinct - Cornwell Patricia. Страница 26

I realize I am obsessing. I am sitting at my desk, angrily going through stacks of backed-up work as I anguish over how much trouble I went to preparing Righter for yet another case, promising I would be there for him, just as I always have been. It is a shame he does not seem inclined to return the favor. I am a free lunch. All of Chandonne's Virginia victims are free lunches. I just can't accept it and am beginning to resent the hell out of Jaime Berger, too. "Well, check with the courts," I say to Rose. "And by the way, he's being released from MCV this morning." I resist saying Jean-Baptiste Chandonne's name. "Expect the usual phone calls from the media."

"I heard on the news this New York prosecutor's in town." Rose flips through my date book. She doesn't look up at me. "Wouldn't that be something if she gets snowed in?"

I get up from my desk, take off my lab coat and hang it on the back of my chair. "I don't guess we've heard from her."

"She hasn't called here, not for you." My secretary hints she knows that Berger did track down Jack or at least someone besides me.

I am very skilled at becoming prepossessed with business and deflecting any effort on another person's part to probe an area I choose to avoid. "To expedite things," I say before Rose can give me one of her pregnant looks, "we'll skip the staff meeting. We need to get these bodies out of here before the weather gets any worse."

Rose has been my secretary for ten years. She is my office mother. She knows me better than anyone but doesn't abuse her position by pushing me in directions I don't want to go in. Curiosity about Jaime Berger fizzes on the surface of Rose's thoughts. I can see questions rising in her eyes. But she won't ask. She knows damn well how I feel about trying the case in New York instead of here, and that I don't want to talk about it. "I think Dr. Chong and Dr. Fielding are already in the morgue," she is saying. "I haven't seen Dr. Forbes yet."

It occurs to me that even if the Mayo Brown case goes forward today_even if the courts don't close because of snow_Righter isn't going to call me. He will stipulate my report and resort to putting the toxicologist on the stand, at best. There is no way in hell Righter is going to face me after I called him a coward, especially since the accusation is true and a part of him must know it. He will probably figure out a way to avoid me the rest of his life, and that unpleasant thought leads to another one as I cross the hallway. What does all this bode for me?

I push through the ladies' room door and make the transition from civilized paneling and carpeting, through a series of changing rooms, into a world of biological hazards, starkness and violent attacks on the senses. Along the way, one sheds shoes and outer clothing, stowing them safely in teal-green lockers. I keep a special pair of Nikes parked near the door that leads inside the autopsy suite. The shoes are not destined to walk through the land of the living ever again, and when it is time to get rid of them, I will burn them. I clumsily arrange my suit jacket, slacks and white silk blouse on hangers, my left elbow throbbing. I straggle into a full-length Mega Shield gown that has viral-resistant front panels and sleeves, sealed seams and a gripper neck, which is a snug stand-up collar. I pull on shoe covers, then an O.R. cap and surgical mask. The final touch of my fluid-proofing is a face shield to protect my eyes from splashes that might carry such frights as hepatitis or HIV.

Stainless steel doors automatically open, and my feet make paper sounds over the tan vinyl floor of the biohazard epoxy-finished autopsy suite. Doctors in blue hover over five shiny stainless steel tables fastened to steel sinks, water running, hoses sucking, X rays on light boxes a black-and-white gallery of organ-shaped shadows and opaque bones and tiny, bright bullet fragments that, like loose metal chips in flying machines, break things and cause leaks and vital gears to seize. Hanging from clips inside safety cabinets are DNA specimen cards that have been stained with blood. They look oddly like a bunting of tiny Japanese flags as they air-dry beneath a hood. From closed-circuit television monitors mounted in corners a car engine rumbles loudly in the bay, a funeral home here to deliver or take away. This is my theater. It is where I perform. As unwelcome as the average person might find the morbid odors, sights and sounds that rush to greet me, I am suddenly and immensely relieved. My heart lifts as doctors glance up at me and nod good morning. I am in my element. I am home.

A sour, smoky stench taints the long, high-ceilinged room, and I spot the slender, naked, sooty body on a sheet-covered gurney that has been rolled out of the way of traffic. Alone, cold and silent, the dead man waits his turn. He waits for me. I am the last person he will ever talk to in a language that matters. The name on the toe tag scrawled in permanent Magic Marker, pitifully, is John Do. Someone couldn't spell Doe right. I tear open a packet of latex gloves and am gratified I can stretch one over my cast, which is further protected by the fluidproof sleeve. I am not wearing the sling and will have to resort to doing autopsies with my right hand for a while. Although being left-handed in a right-handed world has its difficulties, it is not without advantages. Many of us are ambidextrous or at least reasonably functional on both sides. My aching fractured bones radiate reminders that all isn't right in my world, no matter how tenaciously I go about my business, no matter how intensely I focus on my work.

I slowly circle my patient, leaning close, looking. A syringe is still embedded in the crook of his right arm, and second-degree burns blister his upper body. They have bright red margins, and his skin is streaked black with soot that is thick inside his nose and mouth. He is telling me he was alive when the fire started. He had to be breathing to inhale smoke. He had to have a blood pressure for fluid to be pumped into his burns, causing them to blister and have a bright red margin. The circumstances of a set fire and the needle in his arm certainly could suggest suicide. But on his right upper thigh, he has a contusion that is swollen to the size of a tangerine and crimson. I palpate it. Indurated, hard as a rock. It appears recent. How did it happen? The needle is in his right arm, suggesting that if he injected himself, he most likely is left-handed, yet his right arm is more muscular than his left one, hinting he is right-handed. Why is he nude?

"We still don't have an ID on him?" I raise my voice to Jack Fielding.

"No further info." He snaps a new blade into a scalpel. "The detective's supposed to be here."

"Found unclothed?"

"Yup."

I run my gloved fingers through the dead man's thick, carbon-dusted hair to see what color it is. I won't be certain until I wash him, but his body and pubic hair are dark. He is clean-shaven with high cheekbones, a sharp nose and square jaw. Burns on his forehead and chin will need to be covered up with funeral home makeup before we can circulate a pho- tograph of him for identification purposes, if it comes to that. He is fully rigorous, arms straight by his sides, fingers slightly curled. Livor mortis, or the blood settling to dependent regions of the body due to gravity, is also fixed, causing the sides of his legs and buttocks to be a deep red, the backs of them blanched wherever they rested against the wall or the floor after death. I hold him tilted on his side to check for injuries to his back and find parallel linear abrasions over the scapula. Drag marks. There is a burn between his shoulder blades and another one at the base of the back of his neck. Clinging to one of the burns is a fragment of a plastic-like material, narrow, about two inches long, white with small blue type on it, such as you might see on the back of a food product's packaging. I remove the fragment with forceps and hold it up to the surgical lamp. The paper is more like thin, pliable plastic, a material I associate with candy or snack wrappers. I make out the words this product, and 9-4 EST and a toll-free number and part of a website address. The fragment goes inside an evidence bag.