Verses for the Dead

17

Dr. Charlotte Fauchet did not like to work with rubberneckers around, be they cops or feds. The green ones often made involuntary noises, breathed loudly, or even vomited. Worse, the experienced ones tried to show off their nonchalance with jokes and asinine comments.

She waited, arms crossed, by the gurney, with the subject still zipped in a body transport bag. The chief FBI agent entered first. He was a typical fed, crisp blue suit peeking from under his scrubs, salt-and-pepper hair trimmed short, square jaw, broad shoulders. He was followed by a strikingly pale man in a black suit who looked uncommonly like many of the undertakers she dealt with — except no undertaker she’d ever met had quite such piercing silver-blue eyes. Clearly these two were big fish, indicative of the case’s high profile. Important or not, they’d get no privileges in her morgue. Nor would there be chummy introductions or shaking of hands, which, at any rate, was forbidden in the autopsy chamber.

This duo was followed by a younger man, with longish black hair parted in the middle, whose ethnicity she was uncertain of. They all looked gratifyingly uncomfortable in their scrubs, and she gave them an unfriendly stare as they lined up. “Gentlemen,” she said as soon as they’d introduced themselves, “the rules are simple.” She looked at them in turn. “Rule number one: no talking or questions unless absolutely necessary. Rule number two: silence. That means no whispering or rustling. Rule number three: no sucking on menthol drops. If you start to feel sick, please leave immediately.”

Nodded acquiescence.

“I will be speaking out loud during the procedure. Please understand that I am not talking to you; I am talking to the videorecorder.”

More nods. They seemed agreeably cooperative — at least, so far.

“Thank you. Now I will begin.”

She turned to the body, lying on a trolley next to the gurney. It was an unusual shape. Her supervisor, Chief Forensic Pathologist Dent Moberly, had warned her the remains were in poor condition and would be challenging to work with. So much the better. Fauchet, an assistant M.E. only five years out of medical school, had ambitions of running her own department in a great city — preferably New York. It was the difficult, the celebrated cases that would get her where she wanted to go. She was glad that, for once, Dr. Moberly had not insisted on seizing the spotlight.

She began by reading off the information on the medical card — the subject’s name, personal data, date and recorded cause of death. Then she unzipped the body bag and nodded to the diener waiting in the background. The morgue assistant came forward and expertly transferred the remains from the bag to the gurney.

She began her general observations. “I note that the corpse has sustained significant deterioration,” she said. “This includes what is evidently a series of wet-dry cycles, decomposition followed by desiccation.” There was still a smell of embalming fluid, but it had not been able to hold back the ravages of decay. The corpse was in two pieces, and examining it grossly, she saw that the poor state of the body rendered the original — and evidently hasty — autopsy almost academic. She would essentially be starting from scratch.

All the better.

She began with a new Y-incision, and the diener handed her shears to open the chest cavity. The bones were brittle and snapped like dry twigs. The organs had already been removed in the autopsy eleven years before, then returned to the body cavity — now they were little more than shriveled black lumps adhering to the peritoneal wall, in an advanced state of decomposition. Soon she was “in the zone,” as she called that moment when her entire attention became focused on the body and all else faded away. She slowed down when she reached the genital area and performed a very careful dissection. This was a forensic autopsy, and as such there was always the possibility of sexual assault. But this body was too far gone to see much beyond the original M.E.’s work and the grossest of injuries.

The clock ticked. The three spectators remained gratifyingly silent. And her boss, thank God, remained elsewhere.

Finally she moved up to the head. According to the records, the decedent had hanged herself. She saw with a frown that the doctor who’d performed the initial autopsy had barely examined the neck, beyond confirming its role in the woman’s death. She made a U-shaped incision in the frontal aspect of the neck and began a meticulous dissection, freeing the sternocleidomastoid muscle from its lower attachments, exposing the carotid sheath and artery, the vagus nerve, and the omohyoid and sternothyroid. She finally exposed the cervical spine and noted the trauma still visible from the hanging.

“Dr. Fauchet, a question?”

She turned. It was the pale one, the one she believed was named Pendergast, who spoke. She was about to reiterate her rules, but something in his eye — soft and entreating — caused her to hesitate. “Yes.”

“Do you see any evidence of strangulation prior to hanging?”

“No.”

“None? From what I saw, the neck showed considerable abrasive trauma.”

“According to the coroner’s report, it was what we call an incomplete hanging — one where there wasn’t a long drop involved. Typical in a suicide. The abrasion and trauma you see here... and here—” she pointed with a scalpel — “was caused by the subject thrashing about during the period of suffocation. There is no traumatic spondylolisthesis of C2, that is, a fracture of the spine, between cervical one and two, because the drop was not long enough. For the same reasons, I do not observe any severe ligature injuries. Again, all of this is consistent with a suicidal hanging.”

“Thank you.”

She turned to continue her work when a sensor chimed and the door was flung open by her boss.

“Ah, Charlotte, I see you are well along!” The chief forensic pathologist spoke loudly as he strode into the room, filling it with the scent of Old Spice. “This is Charlotte,” he added condescendingly to the chief fed. “Our first African American pathologist. Top notch.” He turned back to her. “May I?”

“Go ahead, sir,” said Fauchet, keeping her voice studiously neutral.

She should have expected this. Naturally, he was all gowned up and ready to go, and he quickly moved in, crowding her back from the body, picking up a scalpel with a flourish, and starting to poke and prick and cut here and there, making disapproving noises — mostly, whether he realized it or not, relating to the hastily done 2007 autopsy.

“The dissection of the carotid should be diagonal,” he told her. Naturally, he was wrong — that technique was twenty years old — but Fauchet had learned never to contradict her boss while the tape was running.

He fussed and poked, slicing away in the neck area she had already half finished. She winced as she saw his scalpel make a hash of her work. “You forgot to fully expose the first cervical,” he said. “Let me do it.”

She was about to say that she was in the middle of doing so, but again held her tongue.

He worked for a few minutes as everyone watched. “I was speaking earlier about this case with ADC Pickett, here,” he said, “and it seems to me there are no surprises. Everything I see here is consistent with death by hanging. Do you agree, Charlotte?”

“Yes.” And she did in fact agree.

Moberly poked at the corpse a bit more, and then straightened up and looked around, pulling down his mask. “Agent Pickett warned me this would be a waste of our time, and it appears he was correct.” He looked around. “So, Charlotte — are we done with the gross examination?”

She glanced at the neck. Her dissection was still not complete, even though Moberly had done his best to ruin an already-spoiled cadaver with his fancywork. “Just a few minutes more,” she said.

To her surprise, the silvery-eyed fed leaned in toward her. “Dr. Fauchet, would you do me the favor of examining the hyoid bone?”

“I’ve exposed most of it.” She stepped up and pointed her scalpel, using forceps to deftly expose the rest. “It’s fractured, if that’s your question.”

“Is that normal in such a hanging?”

“It depends. The hanging itself doesn’t normally fracture the hyoid, but in an incomplete hanging such as this, the violent struggles of the subject will sometimes result in such a fracture.”

“But you see no reason to question the cause of death?” interjected the senior agent — the one named Pickett. “Suicide by hanging?”

“No.”

She could see Pickett shoot a poisonous glance at Pendergast. She was sorry her findings didn’t support whatever he was looking for — he seemed like a kind enough man.

“Well, well,” said Moberly, “thank you, Charlotte, for your assistance.” He waved a hand. “You can wrap up here.”

He led the group of feds toward the door. Just before leaving, the one named Pendergast glanced back at her with a sympathetic expression, and — if she hadn’t known better — she would have felt sure that he’d winked.

Coldmoon did not enjoy autopsies, and this one had left him a little queasy. He followed Pendergast and Pickett out the hospital door. Once in the fresh air he breathed deeply, trying to flush the smell of formalin and death from his lungs.

As they waited for a driver, Pickett turned to Pendergast. “Satisfied?”

“I’m rarely satisfied.”

“Well, I’m satisfied. Moberly is one of the top forensic pathologists in the country, and that assistant of his looked pretty sharp, too.”

Pendergast paused. “I should like to go to Ithaca.”

Pickett stared at him. “I’m sorry — what did you say?”

“The Baxter death occurred on November seventh, 2006. The Flayley death on March twelfth, 2007. Four months apart.”

“Meaning what?”

“The timing appears unusually close. And both were Florida residents, killed outside of the state.”

“Coincidence. You’ve been around long enough to know that cases like this throw up meaningless coincidences. Agent Pendergast, it’s crystal clear that both victims committed suicide. That’s the connection. Our guy has a fixation with suicide. Look how sorry he feels for them. Besides, the women didn’t know each other. A trip to Ithaca isn’t going to shed light on anything of relevance.”

“Nevertheless, I would like to go.”

Coldmoon listened to all this with an impassive face. He had to agree with Pickett. It was a waste of time to go to Ithaca, and he wasn’t about to go out on a limb again after getting burned the last time.

“I can complete my investigation in a day,” Pendergast went on. “There and back.”

Pickett hesitated, as if considering something. Then he shook his head in disbelief. “Very well. If you feel that strongly, go ahead. No overnight — if Brokenhearts strikes again, you need to be here when it happens. But before you go, I want you to check in with the forensic lab to see if anything worthwhile has come up.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Agent Coldmoon, you’ll accompany Pendergast to Ithaca, of course.”

“Yes, sir.” Coldmoon silently indulged in a lengthy, and highly descriptive, Lakota curse.

Pickett’s car arrived and he got in. “I’m heading back to New York. It should go without saying I don’t want to have to come down here again.”

He slammed the door without another word, and the car immediately sped off.