"Detective Stanfield, I hope?" I hold up a flap of skin and free it from ribs with small, quick strokes of the scalpel.
"Good morning." He catches himself as he stares at the body. "Well, I guess not for him."
Stanfield hasn't bothered with protective clothing over his ill-fitting herringbone suit. He wears no gloves or shoe covers. He glances at my bulky left arm and refrains from asking me how I broke it, telling me he already knows. I am reminded that my life has been all over the news, which I am adamant in my refusal to follow. Anna has halfway accused me of being chicken, as much as a psychiatrist is allowed to accuse, and she would never actually use the word "chicken." "Denial" is her word. I don't care. I am staying away from newspapers. I don't watch or listen to a goddamn thing that is said about me.
"Sorry it took so long, but the roads out there are bad on their way to awful, ma'am," Stanfield says. "Hope you got chains on your tires, 'cause I didn't and got stuck. Had to get the tow truck and then get the chains put on, so that's why I wasn't here earlier. You found out anything?"
"His CO's seventy-two percent." Vernacular for carbon monoxide. "Notice how cherry-red the blood is? Typical in high levels of CO." I pick up rib shears from the surgical cart. "STAT alcohol's zero."
"So it was the fire that got him, for sure?"
"We know he had a needle in his arm, but carbon monoxide poisoning is his cause of death. Doesn't tell us much, I'm afraid." I cut through ribs. ''He's got anal tunneling_evidence of homosexual activity, in other words_and his wrists were bound at some point prior to his death. It appears he was gagged." I point out the abrasions on the wrists and the cor- ners of the mouth. Stanfield's eyes pop open, "The abrasions on his wrists aren't crusty," I go on. "They don't look old, in other words. And because he has fibers in his mouth, you can be pretty certain he was gagged at or around the time of death." I hold a lens over the anticubital fossa, or crook of the arm, and show Stanfield two tiny blood spots. "Fresh injection sites," I explain. "But what's interesting is he has no old needle tracks to suggest a history of drug abuse. I'll put a block of liver through to check for triaditis_mild inflammation of the structural support system of bile duct, artery and vein. And we'll see what comes back on his tox."
"Guess he could have AIDS." This is foremost on Detective Stanfield's mind.
"We'll do an HIV on him," I reply.
Stanfield backs up another step as I remove the triangular-shaped breastplate of ribs. This a stage cue for Laura Turkel, on loan to us from the graves registration unit at the Fort Lee Army Base in Petersburg. She is so attentive and officious and almost salutes me when she suddenly appears at the end of the table. Turk, as everyone knows her, always refers to me as "Chief." I suppose for her Chief is a rank and doctor isn't.
"Ready for me to open up the skull, Chief?" Her question is an announcement that requires no answer. Turk is like a lot of the military women we get in here_tough, eager, quick to eclipse the men, who often, truthfully, are the squeamish ones. 'That lady Dr. Chong's working on," Turk says as she plugs the Stryker saw into the overhead cord reel, "she's got a living will and even wrote her own obituary. Got all her insurance papers in order, everything. Put 'em all in a binder and left it and her wedding band on the kitchen table before she laid herself down on the blanket and shot herself in the head. Can you imagine? Really, really sad."
"It's very sad." The organs are a shimmering bloc as I lift them out en masse and set them on a cutting board. "If you're going to be in here, you really should cover up." I direct this at Stanfield. "Did anybody show you where things are in the locker room?"
He blankly stares at the cuffs of my blood-soaked sleeves, at the blood splashed on the front of my gown. "Ma'am, if you don't mind, I'd like to go over what I got," he says. "If we could maybe sit down for a minute? Then I need to head on back before the weather gets any worse. Pretty soon, you're gonna need Santa's sleigh to get anywhere."
Turk picks up a scalpel and makes an incision around the back of the head, ear to ear. She reflects back the scalp and pulls it forward, and the face goes slack, collapsing into tragic protest before it is inside out like a folded-down sock. The exposed dome of the skull glistens pristinely white, and I take a good look at it. No hematomas. No indentations or fractures. The whir of the electric saw sounds like a hybrid of a table saw and a dentist's drill as I pull off my gloves and drop them in a red biohazard trash can. I motion Stanfield to follow me to the long countertop that runs the length of the wall opposite the autopsy stations. We pull out chairs.
"I gotta be honest with you, ma'am," Stanfield begins with a slow, negative shake of his head. "We don't got a clue where to start on this one. All I can tell you right now is this man"_ he indicates the body on the table_"checked into The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground yesterday at three P.M."
"Where exactly is The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground?"
"On Route Five West, no more than ten minutes from William and Mary."
"You talked to the clerk at this motel, The Fort James Motel?"
"The lady in the office, yes ma'am, I did." He opens a large manila envelope and scoops out a handful of Polaroid photographs. "Her name's Bev Kiffin." He spells it for me, slipping reading glasses out of an inner jacket pocket, hands trembling slightly as he flips through a notepad. "She said the young man come in and said he wants the sixteen-oh-seven special."
"I'm sorry. The what?" I rest my ballpoint pen on the notes I am making.
"One hundred and sixty dollars and seventy cents Monday through Friday. That's five nights. Sixteen-oh-seven. The usual rate's forty-six dollars a night, which is mighty high for a place like that, you ask me. But you know tourist traps."
"Sixteen-oh-seven? As in the date Jamestown was founded?" It seems odd to hear a reference to Jamestown. I just mentioned Jamestown to Anna last night when I was talking about Benton.
Stanfield nods deeply. "As in Jamestown. Sixteen-oh-seven. That's the business rate, or so they call it. The amount for the business week, and let me add, ma'am, this isn't a very nice motel, not at all, no ma'am. A fleabag is what I would call it."
"Does it have a history of crime?"
"Oh no. No ma'am. No history of crime I'm aware of, not at all."
"Just seedy."
"Just seedy." He nods deeply.
Detective Stanfield has a distinct way of speaking with emphasis, as if he is used to teaching a slow child who needs important words repeated or emphasized. He neatly arranges photographs in a lineup on the countertop and I look at them. "You took these?" I assume.
"Yes ma'am, I sure did."
Like him, what he has captured on film is emphatic and to the point: the motel door with the number 14 on it, the view of the room through the open doorway, the scorched bed, the smoke damage to the curtains and walls. There is a single chest of drawers and an area to hang clothes that is nothing more than a rod in a recessed area just inside the door. I note that the mattress on the bed has remnants of a cover and white sheets but nothing else. I ask Stanfield if perhaps he submitted the bedcovers to the labs to test for accelerants. He replies that there was nothing on the bed, nothing to submit except burned areas of the mattress, which he placed inside a tightly sealed aluminum paint can_"according to procedure" are his exact words, the words of someone very new at detective work. But he does agree it is odd that the bedcovers were missing.