"Cut on his chest?" Ducci pointed to a tiny irregularity among a sparse furring of chest hairs below his sternum.
The ME moved under the light to look at it. "Looks like a little nothing," Rosa munnured, running a gloved finger lightly over the area Ducci indicated. "Maybe a pimple, I don't see any blood here."
"Mark it and measure it," Mike said.
Flash. The very first picture of the naked body was the chest area photographed with an arrow pointing to the spot of Ducci's query. "Very thorough." Rosa nodded her approval and turned to Ducci again.
"We're honored to have you with us, Freddy. What brings you into the light of day?" she asked again.
The macabre autopsy room—gruesomely fitted out with electric saws, carts of cutting instruments in all sizes, aspirators, containers to save tissue and fluid samples from many sources, and the ageless metal dissecting table, ducted and plumbed for the draining and sluicing of body 'fluids—intensely flood-lit as it was for the best possible investigation of the examinant of the moment, was hardly the light of day.
"Very funny." Ducci guffawed politely at the joke. "Gotta make sure you guys do your job right, don't I?"
The ME laughed politely herself. "You know I do my job right." Even distorted, her tone held the sharp edge of defensiveness.
Ducci made an offering. "I liked your talk in Nashville."
"Well, it's a damned shame autopsy is becoming a dying art. No one's doing them anymore. Insurance companies won't foot the bill in hospitals. Families don't want them." Rosa widened her audience to include Mike. "With all the lab tests, MRI scans, X rays—everybody figures they already know what killed their loved ones. Nobody wants to learn any more." Angry at the loss to science, she glared at them through her glasses.
"Lot of good work being done," Mike said soothingly of the forensic field in general.
"Maybe in some areas, but a lot of people out there who should know the difference between the bruise from a fall and the battering from a club don't know.
A lot of people out there are getting away with murder. Makes me mad."
"Well, not here in New York, Rosa. That should be a comfort to you."
"No, it isn't. Those ignorant coroners in the big field look at a female body or child's covered with bruises—scars accrued over months, years maybe— husband, father says, 'She fell off a ladder. Can I bury her now?' idiot buys it, doesn't even do X rays. People beat and kill every day and get away with it. Makes me really mad."
A thousand times Ducci had heard the complaints from MDs about coroners in the great Midwest. MDs called the Midwest "the big field" and said it was the best place in the country to commit murder. There, coroners were elected. They were untrained in medicine, certainly untrained in forensic medicine, and they had no idea how to assess the questions and answers on the death reports they filled out. Everybody had a soapbox. He glanced at Mike and changed the subject.
"I'm surprised Malcolm isn't here doing the honors himself." The chief medical examiner, Malcolm Abraham, was a well-known celebrity hound who hated to miss an important body.
Flash. The photographer started photographing the rest of Petersen's naked body.
"Believe me, he wanted this one. He's in the hospital, high fever. They're not sure what it is. Lucky for me. I got to do the girlfriend yesterday. Malcolm wanted to wait another day for this guy, but you know how it is. You can't fight City Hall. Lucky for me." Rosa snorted at her luck, then turned back to the dead man. "Well-built fellow, looks like no one abused him."
Mike scratched his neck as they turned the corpse over to photograph the other side. The ME was right. He didn't see any other mark on the body anywhere. No sign of struggle, no defensive wounds. Unbroken manicured nails. Mike looked away as the techs washed the body.
When they were done swabbing, Rosa moved back to the table and switched on the tape, began talking into it as she picked up a scalpel and carefully made the Y incision that cut the late Tor Petersen open from each shoulder down to the pit of the stomach and through the pelvis. For a second the whole of his lower body cavity was visible. Stomach gases and feces further sickened the air. Fluids began gushing into the area faster than they could be suctioned out. Mike breathed in and out through his mouth, pinching his nose in his mind.
Ducci remained motionless, seemingly oblivious to the stench as Rosa Washington clipped the dead man's rib cage apart from bottom to top, dividing it into two sections.' Clotted blood and other fluids reeking of iron covered her rubber-gloved hands. Clamps cracked the ribs apart, and the lungs and liver were revealed. Mike swallowed, swallowed again. Body fluids spewed out, splashing the sleeves of the ME's surgical gown and filling the channels on the table. A tech turned on the tap to wash down the table.
"How's it going?"
Mike was startled by the familiar voice behind him.
"What are you doing here?' ' He gaped at April, who hadn't made it yesterday, then swallowed again, gagging a little in spite of himself.
"I got a message from the doc here to join the party" April offered him her vomit pan. "You know the rules. You use it, you clean it."
Mike waved it away with his own. "I'm fine."
"Shush, please. The microphone picks up everything." Up to her elbows in stinking gore, Rosa Washington peeled away the lungs, lifted out the liver, weighing it in her hands and exclaiming over it.
"Just what I would have guessed. Must have been a big drinker, look at the size of this." She told her recorder the liver was enlarged, examined it carefully, took some sections for further examination under the microscope, and dropped it on the scale with a splat. Very enlarged indeed.
Then she dug into the chest cavity for the heart and dissected it free with a series of swift cuts. This, too, she held up to the light in her two hands like a trophy she had just won.
"I think we'll find this to be the heart of the matter," she told them. "You noticed, of course, the amount of blood when I opened the chest area. Hello, April Woo, glad you were able to make it. I like to have the detectives on a case with me. It isn't often I get the pleasure of really conscientious ones, however. You all right?"
April had sneezed into her mask. "Yeah."
"Where was I? Oh, yes. The heart of the matter. I think we'll find a perforated infarction here." The ME put the heart and pericardium down on a separate table and began to dissect them.
"What, you ask, is a perforated infarction? Possibly a ruptured aneurism caused the blood to flow out into the pericardial sac until the pressure was elevated to a point where the heart can't beat anymore under natural circumstances. The heart dies so fast it actually perforates—tears. Yes, yes, it's perforated. Here's the hole."
She fell silent for a long time, forgetting her audience as she examined the heart, then told her recording machine in technical terms what she found. Finally she moved on, methodically, removing each organ, examining and weighing it and taking tissue samples for slides. She opened the stomach and examined the contents.
"What's your take?" Mike had been fidgeting.
"He'd just finished quite the hearty meal. Nothing's digested here. Looks like chicken, cooked apples. Rice. Beans, greens. Hmm, bananas. Looks like soul food."
"I mean, is there anything for us to stay for?"
"Oh, we've got a long way to go. Got to x-ray, got to do testes and aspirate his bladder for urine samples. We got to open his head and take a look at his brain. More than once I've missed a cause of death until I opened the head. Once there was blood all over the place, but I couldn't find a point of entry on the corpse anywhere. It turns out the guy had been shot in the mouth with a twenty-two. Bullet was lodged in his skull. "