Powers momentarily looked to Dr. Coudriet as if for permission, then snapped to it. “Ahh… yes, certainly, Dr. Coran.”
“ These close-ups of the wrists and throat will be helpful. I want to compare them to what we found in Islamorada.”
“ But Powers has already done a full set of photos,” protested Ted Thorn. “They’re in Dr. Coudriet’s portfolio on the corpse.”
“ I’m starting my own FBI collection, for the record.” She looked over to Dr. Coudriet now and added, “I believe we’re done here, Doctor.”
“ Good, and thank you…” he impishly replied.
“ For what?”
“ Showing my boys here a good time, and teaching them something in the bargain, Doctor.”
“ Well… thank you,” she replied, surprised at his courteous remark, and knowing also that her having further disfigured the body by opening up the throat took him off the hook with the senator from Florida, Allison’s bereaved father. She sensed that the elder M.E. would have no difficulty in passing information along to the senator. No wonder he’d worked it so that he would not even be in the room when she took to the body.
Coudriet walked her toward the changing room. “You’ll have to pardon my young assistants. We’re all on edge for many reasons, not the least being that we’ve had to stare into the bowels of a demon the likes of which no one truly wants to deal with, yet we are in no position to walk away, either.”
“ I can appreciate that.” She started to push through the door, but he quickly grabbed it and held it open for her.
“ I have since heard about what was found at the shark research center in the Keys. You will share what you have found there with us?”
“ Absolutely, and not to worry about Thorn and Powers. Floaters are the worst kinds of corpses to work on, even worse than burn victims. I understand their reluctance to work on the same floater twice,” Jessica tried to assure him. “Kinda like double jeopardy in the emotions department.”
“ And dealing with this floater on this table was particularly difficult work, because the Norris girl is… was, rather, the granddaughter of Congressman Bill Norris, and the niece of a former governor of the state as well as… well, you already know all that, now don’t you.”
Actually, she had not known the girl was quite so well- connected; still, beyond this indisputably political fact, the corpse was so damnably mannequinlike in appearance that it no longer resembled anything human, but rather a gelatin mold in places, a slick of albino tar in others. Strong political ties could no longer help her.
Coudriet laughed mildly at some deep inner thought. “You wish to share something funny, Doctor? I could use a laugh,” she said, unable to fathom what could possibly be funny in this affair.
“ No, not at all. It’s just that this is more than just a case of a simple floating victim perturbing my boys.
The two of them see this as an opportunity to advance their careers, if they can impress the former governor and Congressman Norris, or the senator, you see. “But you don’t?” He laughed further, more uproariously now. “Me? What can a congressman or a senator do for this old shell? No, my dear, I believe you could do more for me and my libido than all of the congressmen in all the states combined, thank you.” He laughed more-an infectious laugh-and this time Jessica joined him. Maybe she was wrong about him, she thought now.
Still, she thought the use of the term boys for Thorn and Powers spoke volumes, and she wondered if the doctors were some sort of threesome outside the office, say golfing buddies. But she rather doubted that. Coudriet likely simply thought of them as his underling children. “In a way, I’d rather work on a faceless, featureless corpse than the other extreme,” he said, confiding what she thought to be an odd statement, even for a medical examiner.
“ Really?” she replied, pulling wide another door and stepping into the closet where she could strip away her surgical garb and dump it into a basket.
He’d followed her in after taking a long, lingering look at her backside. “A floater like this isn’t near so bad as a victim with identifiable features,” he continued, trying to convince her of his sincerity but unable to fully do so. He was mostly talking to hear himself, she gathered. “Especially when the corpse has a familiar face, say that of an acquaintance. Ever happen to you, Coran?”
“ Once or twice, yes.”
“ Then you know what I mean. Good. Experience shows in you. Now, with this Norris girl’s cadaver here, unless you saw the pictures in the papers of this young woman before this happened to her, you could just treat her like a mannequin, like one of those corpses we had in medical school, right, Doctor?” He looked to Jessica for affirmation, but Jessica didn’t give him the satisfaction. He took another long, lingering look to admire her form as she removed the green gown, displaying her crisp, white blouse and beige slacks beneath. In the other room, she could hear the click-click-click of Powers’s Polaroid at work.
“ But if they’ve got looks, these sweet features,” continued Coudriet, coming around to face her, “well, it’s just harder for me, personally. I’m a grandfather now, three times over, and I look into those innocent eyes and faces, and I think if God ever put one of those innocent little sweethearts of mine on my slab, I’d run out of here screaming. Be right off to the loony farm. Felt the same way when I saw those little baby children blown to bloody shards in Oklahoma City. What’s so frightening about it all is that in today’s world, I have a one-in-five chance of seeing one of my grandchildren violently killed before I die.”
She mentally questioned his statistics but had to agree that he wasn’t far off. He was a half inch or so taller than she, his eyes a burnt umber, the brown orbs shining orange under the dim light of the dressing area. The little orange flecks glowing in his eyes matched his limitless freckles and augmented what was left of his red hair. In his time he’d been a powerfully built, handsome man, and he still managed to bring together enough stage presence to make others curiously jealous of him. His eyebrows were bushy across a thick ridge of forehead. He was a genius and he knew it, and he wasn’t certain he wanted Jessica’s competition on the case. His little display of first trying to make her feel uncomfortable and threatened, then the mild form of sexual innuendo, followed by ruminations about his grandchildren and their vulnerability, meant that he felt vulnerable. The Night Crawler cases had so escalated as to eclipse any and all others his department was working on- or had ever worked on during his twenty-nine-year reign as chief medical examiner for the city of Miami.
She guessed that he might’ve retired with an outstanding record, but then this had come up, and he felt duty-bound to see it through, like the president of a failing business trying desperately to see black again before retirement. She both respected and disliked his stubborn Irish. And she realized that he was understandably feeling like a man under a microscope, the intense heat of which could burn away a lifetime career.
She did her best to allow for this. “I guess I know what you mean,” she said, humoring him regarding his preference for a corpse without a face to one that possessed fine, comparatively healthy features.
He suddenly took her by the arm and escorted her back into the autopsy room, where he stood and pointed at the bloated, fishy creation of the sea that lay across the slab. Powers was just finishing his snapshots.
The senior medical man began a new diatribe. “She has no hue in her bloated eyelids, no eyebrows, lashes or color; this girl has neither a pointed nor a flat nose, no ears jutting out or lying back in feline majesty; no moles, fissures, pockmarks, overbites, underbites; the lips are neither dark nor light, thick nor thin, nor meaningful, since you can’t say where they begin or end; and as for the eyes… God, were they ever so deep-set in life as now when they are missing altogether, pecked out by crabs and microscopic sea life?”