Beyond Suspicion

27

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A blast of chilly air followed Todd Chastan out of the autopsy room. He wadded his green surgical scrubs into a loose ball and tossed them into the laundry bag in the hallway outside the door. A soiled pair of latex gloves sailed into the trash. His pace was brisk as he headed down the gray-tiled hallway.

Dr. Chastan was an associate medical examiner in Atlanta. The office served all of Fulton County and, on request, certain cases from other counties. Chastan had spent nearly the entire morning exploring the internal cavity of a sixteen-year-old boy who’d botched his first attempted robbery of a convenience store. He’d left a loaded.38 caliber pistol, twenty-eight dollars, and about two pints of blood on the sidewalk outside the shattered plate-glass window. Just a few hours later, his young heart, lungs, esophagus, and trachea were resting on a cold steel tray. The liver, spleen, adrenals, and kidneys would be next, followed by the stomach, pancreas, and intestines. His brain had already been sliced into sections, bagged, and tagged. It was all part of a typical medical-legal autopsy required in the seventy or so homicides the office might see in an average year. Over the same period of time, ten times that number of examined deaths might be classified as “natural.”

An urgent message from a medical-legal investigator didn’t usually spell “natural.”

Dr. Chastan made a quick right at the end of the hall, knocked once, and entered the investigator’s office. “You paged me?”

Eddy Johnson looked up from the papers on his desk. “It’s about the Falder case.”

“Falder?” he said, straining to recall.

“The woman you did yesterday. The one with AIDS.”

“Yeah, yeah. Her medical history painted a bleak picture. By all accounts, she was on borrowed time. Full autopsy didn’t seem necessary. I did an external and sent some tissue and blood samples to the lab.”

“Got the report right here,” Johnson said as he pulled a file out from under two empty coffee cups and the sports section.

“Something give you concern?” He smiled impishly, but realized that he was in a medical-legal investigator’s office, and answered his own question. “Obviously, something gives you concern.”

Johnson was deadpan. “Plate’s under the microscope. Have a look-see for yourself.”

Chastan maneuvered around the swollen folders on the floor and stepped up to the microscope that was resting on the countertop, right beside Gray’s Anatomy. He closed one eye, brought the other to the eyepiece, and adjusted the lens. He twisted it to the left and then to the right, but something didn’t seem quite right. He stood up, scratched his head, then gave another look. Finally, he faced Johnson and asked, “What the hell is that?”

“It’s the blood you drew from Ms. Falder.”

He blinked, confused. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

“That’s why I have the file,” he said with a wink. Johnson was known around the office as a strange-case specialist.

“What do you think it is?”

“I couldn’t even guess. Some kind of virus, maybe.”

“We need to send it off to the Center for Disease Control right away.”

“I already did, this morning. But there’s more to this case that troubles me.”

“Such as?”

“She came here with just over two liters of blood in her body.”

“I took only three vials.”

“That’s my point. Where are the other three and a half liters?”

“I don’t know. I looked at the photos. No blood at the scene of her death.”

“That’s right.”

“She couldn’t have donated it before she died. AIDS aside, nobody walks around with sixty percent of the blood in their body missing.”

“Right again,” said Johnson.

“Which means what? Somebody took it?”

He gave the doctor a serious look. “I think you and I are now on the same page.”

“She had multiple injection marks all over her body. I didn’t think anything of it. She had AIDS. She was getting injections almost every other day.”

“Looks like one of those holes was used to siphon out her blood.”

“That changes everything. If that much blood was drawn while she was alive, it would have sent her into cardiac arrest.”

“Which means the cause of death was anything but natural.”

“I need that body back,” said Chastan. “We need a full medical-legal autopsy. I can get on it this morning.”

“Go to it.”

He started for the door, then stopped. “Ed, why do you think someone might have wanted this woman’s blood?”

“Don’t know. But I have a feeling we’ll have a better idea when we hear back from disease control.”

“You think someone out there is into collecting blood infected with strange organisms?”

“Collecting. Or harvesting.”

With all that he’d seen over the years-dismembered bodies, charred babies-it took a lot to get a reaction from Dr. Chastan. But the thought of someone cultivating disease in human hosts was up there. “This could be one sick son of a bitch.”

“You got that right.” Johnson switched off the light on the microscope and put the blood plate back in the file. “I’ll put homicide on notice.”

“Sure,” he answered. “The sooner the better.”