“This is what’s significant.” I wipe my fingers on a napkin. “Starting with a fairly dense material that fluoresces in UV. Some kind of dust that was all over her.”
I point out intense white areas on Gail Shipton’s scan, the residue in her nostrils and mouth. The vague, dark, air-filled space in the pleural cavity is the small pneumothorax in the upper lobe of the right lung, I go on to explain. Clicking on a different image, a cross section of the thorax and a coronal section, I can see the problem more clearly.
“The buildup of air in the closed space would have put pressure on the lung, making it impossible to expand,” I explain to Benton and Lucy.
“Making it harder to breathe,” she says.
“Even I know that,” Bryce exclaims.
“She already had some problems breathing,” Lucy informs me. “She would get winded. She sighed a lot as if it were hard to catch her breath.”
“I’m not sure I see what you’re talking about.” Benton puts on his reading glasses. “And would a pneumothorax kill someone?”
“If left untreated, it would have caused her severe respiratory distress,” I reply. “It would have put pressure on her heart and other major vessels.”
“I’m still trying to see it.” Benton leans over me, peering at the flat screen, and I feel his breath in my hair.
“This black area here,” Anne helps him out. “That’s air density. See? It’s the same inside and outside the chest. And it’s not supposed to be like that.”
“There should be no black area at all in the pleural space,” I add. “This lighter area here in the soft tissue of the chest is hemorrhage. She suffered some type of trauma that collapsed her lung. The first order of business is to find out how she got that.”
29
Inside the anteroom I grab protective clothing from shelves. It’s half past noon.
I put on booties, a face shield, and gloves. Lucy and Benton do the same but I know when he doesn’t plan to stay long. He’ll learn what he can from Gail Shipton’s body and then he’s got Bureau swords to clash with and maybe something more. I can always sense when a dark front has rolled through him. It’s as if the air has shifted the way it does before a storm, and I think about the DNA and what Dr. Venter told me.
“Is there anything on the news?” I ask Lucy.
“Just what he mentioned.” She looks at Benton to see if he has anything to add. “About an hour and a half ago nine-one-one got a call about an active shooter in Concord. Police responded and said there’s no gunman and nothing further.”
“Where in Concord?”
“Minute Man Park, where there were a bunch of schoolkids.”
“And Medflight responded?”
“That’s pretty much all there is to it,” Benton speaks up. “A suspicious person in dark clothing was spotted running through the park. Supposedly a car backfire on Liberty Street was mistaken for gunshots. Kids were screaming, teachers panicking, thinking it was another Newtown.”
“Did they catch the person?” I ask.
“They didn’t.”
“And that’s the whole story.” I look at him.
“I doubt it. Area-wide emergency radio communications between departments tell me NEMLEC is responding to something but the FBI hasn’t been called. I don’t know what it is. They might not know what it is at this point. Granby’s being pushy about meeting with you.”
“Why is he going through you?” I feel myself getting stubborn. “He needs to call my office.”
“He’s decided I shouldn’t be there,” Benton says. “That’s the latest.”
“You schedule a meeting and then aren’t invited,” I reply. “That’s choice.”
“He should work on not being so subtle,” Lucy says. “What a tool.”
I push a hands-free button with my elbow and steel doors automatically swing open to the sounds of running water and steel instruments clicking and clacking against cutting boards. An oscillating saw whines, then grinds loudly through bone. Voices of doctors and autopsy technicians blend in a low murmur and I detect decomposing blood and fermentation. I smell burnt flesh.
Natural light filters through one-way glass windows and banks of high-intensity lamps in the thirty-two-foot ceilings blaze as my staff works at stainless-steel sinks and portable tables along a wall. Luke Zenner is finishing an autopsy at his station, number 2, next to mine, where Gail Shipton’s body holds its rigid pose still wrapped in plasticized sheets. The bag was removed from her head, probably by Dr. Adams when he charted her teeth.
She’s not looking quite as pristine now that she’s in a warmer place and tampered with by a forensic dentist who had to break the rigor in her jaw to force open her mouth. Her lips are drying, beginning a slow retraction as if she’s snarling at the violation, what couldn’t be a more necessary or degrading one.
“Glad to see you’re still in the land of the living,” Luke’s vivid blue eyes look at me through large safety glasses, his blond hair covered with a colorful surgical cap.
“It’s not exactly the land of the living in here,” Lucy says. “’Tis the season.” She stares at the charred body on Luke’s table, the chest cavity empty and bright cherry red, the ribs showing through curved and white.
“What about a CO level?” I ask him.
“Sixty percent. Ja, in der Tat, meine Freundin,” says Luke, whose first language is German. “He was still breathing when he caught his house on fire. Smoking and drinking, his STAT alcohol point-two-nine.”
“That will do it.”
“The thought is he passed out and the cigarette started smoldering on the couch.” Luke wipes his bloody gloved hands on a bloody towel and calls out to Rusty on the other side of the room, asking him to close up for him. “One big drunk tank in here today, what I’ve come to expect right before the holidays.” Luke pulls off his bloody apron and drops it in the biohazard trash. “Dr. Schoenberg is up next. How’s that for a twist of fate? A shrink with poor coping skills.”
I signal Harold that I need some help.
“I’m not sure there isn’t some cause and effect at work.” Moving a surgical cart close, I retrieve a pair of scissors and begin cutting through tape. “You took care of one of his patients last week, Sakura Yamagata, the woman who jumped off the roof of her apartment building.”
“Good Lord.” Luke’s eyes widen. “The twenty-two-year-old so-called fashion designer, thanks to her biopreneur molecular millionaire daddy who basically bought a career for her? Most recently he paid half a million dollars to some reality star to make a personal appearance at a fashion show and endorse his daughter’s label, which is a horror. In the inimitable words of Bryce, all high-tech drama and no story, or the Jetsons meet Snooki.”
“How do we know all this?” I ask.
“Googled it,” Luke says. “Amazing what’s out there about our patients.”
“I’ve notified tox to check for hallucinogens such as mephedrone, methylone, MDPV in her case.”
“Good idea, and we’re going to need to talk when you’ve got a minute. I fear this Dr. Schoenberg’s going to be high-maintenance.”
“Vitreous, blood, urine, liver, no stone unturned.” I fold the sheets and hand them to Harold. “Not to mention his gastric. Had he eaten recently? Did he order food at the pub? Maybe he didn’t go there to drink but to eat alone and calm down before he went back home to patch things up with his wife. Maybe he was trying to sort through why it wasn’t his fault that a patient killed herself right in front of him.”
I remove the ivory cloth from Gail Shipton’s body, nude except for the pale peach panties she has on, an expensive, high-thread-count cotton, Swiss-made. The wound on her left upper chest is so faint it easily could have been missed.