Verses for the Dead

29

Charlotte Fauchet lay in bed at four o’clock in the morning, staring at the faint red glow on the ceiling cast by her digital alarm clock. A nightmare had woken her at two — she had been dissecting a cadaver, and the knife kept slipping until at last the cadaver sat up and berated her for incompetence. She had lain awake ever since, uneasy about the Flayley autopsy.

This wasn’t like her — having nightmares, feeling uneasy. Thanks to that dirtbag of a boss Moberly, she’d developed a pretty thick skin. What Agent Pendergast — who seemed so nice — had done to the man was terrifying... yet perversely karmic. He seemed like the kind of avenging angel who would make an unshakable friend — or an implacable enemy.

Her mind wandered back to the dream. Clearly, the Baxter autopsy had shaken her confidence. She’d confirmed it was a homicide. But was she right? And what about Flayley — had she examined her hyoid bone thoroughly enough? As she reflected on that moment — the appearance of Moberly, the way he’d pushed her aside, his horrid slashing at the corpse’s neck — she realized it had rattled her and, perhaps, broken her concentration. When she finished up the examination of the hyoid bone, she was flustered and hadn’t given it her utmost attention. She might have missed something.

At four thirty, giving up on sleep, she finally got up, took a shower, downed a mug of coffee, got in her car, and headed to the morgue. The night was still soft: times like these were one of the reasons she was able to endure Miami, despite its glitter, traffic, crowds, and crime.

The morgue was quiet and shadowy as she entered, and when she turned on the lights she was briefly dazzled. Working quickly, she slid the cadaver out of its drawer and wheeled it into the operating theater. She mentally went through the forensic checklist. When she was sure all was ready, she brought the A/V system to life, explaining out loud what she was doing and why.

She wheeled the big stereo zoom microscope over the neck and started a new examination of the hyoid bone. The “body” of the bone, the center part, was clearly fractured — she had noted this in her original autopsy — either by Flayley’s struggle at the end of the rope or by the short fall from the bridge. Nothing abnormal there. Now she turned her attention to the horns of the hyoid. The hyoid was one of the most unusual bones in the body, in that it didn’t articulate with any others — it essentially floated between muscles and ligaments, providing an attachment for the tongue, the floor of the mouth, the epiglottis, and the pharynx. It was in the shape of a horseshoe, with a lesser and greater horn on each side. In Baxter, the horns had been symmetrically fractured by a push-choke, the right more than the left, suggesting that a right-handed person had wrapped both his hands around the neck and squeezed, the right thumb exerting the greater pressure. But here, the push-choke — assuming one occurred — had been too weak to fracture the bone. What she really should have done was order up an MRI, but that would have taken a lot of paperwork and time, not to mention raised a lot of questions.

She upped the magnification and started with the right horn, carefully removing the tiniest bits of tissue. She could see where Moberly’s careless cutting had left grooves. Gently, scraping and brushing, she got the tip of the greater horn exposed and worked backward toward the lesser. It was a painstaking process, but by the time she reached the base of the horn she had found nothing. This was the bone that would have been broken by the killer; was it worth doing the same to the left horn?

She sighed, then proceeded. She couldn’t feel secure until she had done everything she could.

About two-thirds of the way down the left horn, she stopped. Was that something? She upped the magnification one stop further and then saw it: the faintest crack on the inside of the bone. It was a greenstick fracture in which the bone had bent rather than broken, but — in this case — with enough force to cause a faint stress fracture that ran longitudinally along the length of the bone rather than across it. It was extremely subtle, almost invisible — so faint as to be beyond the reach of an ordinary digital camera. An MRI, however, would bring it into sharp relief.

She breathed out. Special Agent Pendergast had been right all along. He’d asked her to take a special look at the hyoid bone, and she had done so, seeing nothing. If Moberly hadn’t come in, she might eventually have seen this fracture. But Moberly had pushed her aside and she’d lost focus... Then she shook her head. She couldn’t blame Moberly: he might be a dick, but failing to identify the fracture was on her, and nobody else. She felt the blood going to her face at the thought of how she’d failed Agent Pendergast.

She straightened up, scolded herself for the self-pity, and went back to work. She was a scientist, and emotion should play no role. She finished cleaning and exposing the left horn. After describing everything she saw for the benefit of the recording, she carefully supported and protected the exposed bone with cotton pads and a covering, packed the cadaver back up, and rolled it into its refrigerated niche. Then she sat down at her desk to fill out the paperwork for the MRI.

It was strange how this homicide had not been as cleanly performed as Baxter’s. The push-choke was weaker and had not killed the victim, only rendering her semiconscious. She didn’t actually die until she was hung from the bridge, and a witness saw her dancing around a short while before finally succumbing. Odd, too, it was the left horn this time — not the right. Perhaps the killer was ambidextrous.

At any rate, this was vitally important information. She looked at her watch: seven. Pendergast would be awake — she figured him for an early riser. She opened a drawer and sorted through the pile of business cards she accumulated as part of her work. Finding Pendergast’s, she took out her cell phone to call him, confess her earlier mistake, and offer him this new discovery.