Long past are days when I didn’t think twice about referring to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner as the morgue or a hospital for the dead. It’s part of my employee handbook and a priority in our training that we are appropriate and professional in all we do and say. One never knows who’s listening, and those we serve aren’t stiffs, corpses, crispy critters, roadkill, or floaters. They’re patients or cases. They’re someone’s family, lovers, friends, and I encourage the perception that the CFC isn’t a dead house but a lab where medical examinations are conducted and evidence is scientifically analyzed and those left behind are welcome to learn as much as they can tolerate.
I’ve instituted a spirit of transparency that allows visitors to watch us work through observation windows and the one Lucy and I walk past now is the evidence room where bloody clothing is air-drying from hanging bars inside HEPA-filtered cabinets. Spread out on a white paper — covered table are a pair of broken eyeglasses, a hearing aid, shoes, a wallet, cash, credit cards, and a wristwatch with a shattered crystal. The personal effects of the man whose wrecked car we just saw, I suspect, and next is ID. I nod a good morning at forensic technicians processing fingerprints on a pistol inside a downdraft powder station and at other stations are other weapons. A barbell, a knife, a mop handle, a brass art sculpture, all bloody and being fumed with superglue.
“The Medflight chopper just radioed Logan requesting clearance to the southwest at one thousand feet.” Lucy is monitoring an app on her phone. “Their BK117 took off from a location in Concord, headed back to Plymouth.”
“If it’s not headed to a hospital then it’s either nothing or someone’s dead.” I open the door to large-scale x-ray.
Lucy scrolls down on her phone, checking air traffic control live streams. “It landed in Concord exactly fifty-five minutes ago. Obviously it responded to something there. It could be unrelated. I’ll keep listening.”
I take a seat at Anne’s console. On the other side of a leaded window is the large-bore CT scanner and she’s sliding the table in.
From my perspective I can see a deformed head and gray hair matted with brain tissue and blood. I see a bloody lacerated ear. The sixty-three-year-old psychiatrist who crashed into a guardrail, a possible homicide by kids who thought it was entertaining to puncture a stranger’s tire and possibly rob him. Or alcohol really could be to blame. You don’t have to be legally drunk to fall asleep at the wheel or lose control of your car.
I push the intercom button to talk to Anne on the other side of the glass.
“Who’s posting him?” I ask.
“When Luke finishes the fire death,” her voice sounds from a speaker on her desk. “He already did a blood draw for a STAT alcohol.”
“I heard.”
“Point-oh-four. Barely a decent buzz and not worth dying for.” Anne continues talking as she opens the door connecting her work area to the scanner room. “Anyway, his super-lawyer’s already called.”
“I heard that, too,” I reply.
“And how’s Lucy today?” she asks me as if Lucy isn’t here.
Shy-Anne, as Lucy calls my gifted radiology tech, who couldn’t be more pleasant but talks about people disconnectedly and often won’t look them in the eye. She’s the sort I imagine as the class brain in high school who got the attention of cheerleaders and football players only if they needed help with their homework.
“Life sucks,” Lucy says to Anne. “And you?”
“By the way,” I add, “we don’t talk to lawyers who call about our cases unless they’re prosecutors or defense attorneys, preferably with subpoenas in hand.”
“Bryce didn’t tell her anything that matters but was on the phone long enough to get an earful and then he gave me one,” Anne says as I spot Benton through the observation glass, walking briskly along the corridor, headed toward us in a pair of borrowed black leather sneakers.
“Carin Hegel,” I assume, and Lucy is next to me, looking at what’s on the flat screen, postmortem images of the man whose car we just saw.
Dr. Franz Schoenberg, with a home and office address in Cambridge near Longfellow Park, and I keep seeing him in the photographs I looked at hours ago. Gray-haired with a kindly, pleasant face that couldn’t have looked more stunned or distraught as he stared at his dead patient who had texted him she planned to fly to Paris from her roof. Maybe she was out of her mind on drugs. But it seems what she did was for his benefit, what I call taking someone out with you, and so many suicides are more angry and vindictive than just plain sad.
“We had his patient through here a few days ago,” I comment. “The young fashion designer who committed suicide. She jumped off the roof of her building right in front of him.”
“Maybe that’s why he was fighting with his wife and went out drinking.” Anne sits down beside me and I notice she’s wearing purple scrubs with lace trim, pockets, and pleats, what I call her Grey’s Anatomy attire.
“It didn’t help matters, that’s for sure.” I study Dr. Franz Schoenberg’s scans.
Open comminuted fractures of the left temporal and parietal bones, axons and blood vessels sheared due to extreme rotational forces. His head accelerated and decelerated violently on impact and probably struck the side window, not the windshield. I wonder how fast he was going. The skid marks should tell us. I note very little cerebral edema. His survival time was minimal.
“Carin Hegel was trying to reach me earlier,” I tell Anne. “At around five-thirty this morning as I was headed to the scene at MIT. She told Marino she wanted to talk to me. I assumed it was about Gail Shipton.”
“Business is booming for ambulance chasers,” Anne says.
“She isn’t exactly an ambulance chaser.” I’m amused but puzzled.
Hegel and I usually don’t have cases in common for the simple reason that most of my patients and their families can’t afford an attorney like her. Most of what I deal with is on the criminal side and the super-lawyers of the super-rich very rarely appear on my radar and yet she has twice today.
Anne slides out a call sheet and other paperwork from a file holder on her desk as Benton walks in. Not far behind him is Bryce, with big sunglasses parked on top of his head, in extra-slim jeans, a chunky cable-knit sweater, and red suede loafers. He’s carrying a pizza box, napkins, and paper plates, and Lucy steps into the doorway to intercept him, making sure he doesn’t escape until we’re fed.
“Are you aware of anything going on in Concord?” I ask Benton and the way he looks at me conveys that something is.
“Approximately an hour ago.” He positions himself behind my chair. “A call for an active shooter that turned out to be false.”
“Explaining why Medflight was deployed and then turned back,” I suggest.
“I assume so.”
But the way he says it makes me think there’s more.
“What else do we know about this case?” I then ask Anne for more details about the patient in her scanner, Dr. Schoenberg.
“DOA at Cambridge Hospital at around four a.m.” She shuffles through paperwork. “Apparently he left the pub around two but it took a while to get him out of his car. If you look at it in the evidence bay, you can see why. One of these classic old Jags, a real beaut before hydraulic tools opened it up like a can of soup.”
“A Jag E, early 1960s.” Lucy is standing back from us, in the doorway. “It was probably what he envied when he was old enough to drive and didn’t have the money. The problem is these antiques don’t have air bags.”
“Which pub?” I ask Anne.
“The Irish one Marino likes so much. He’s taken me there a few times pretending it’s not a date. I admit their lager mac and cheese is to die for — and I didn’t just say that, sorry, Fado’s. They’ve got a killer slow-roasted pork belly in a cider-reduction sauce…I’m going to stop talking now because my Tourette’s is acting up.”