Carved in Bone

CHAPTER 16

Dr. Jess Carter had offered to let me observe the autopsy, an invitation I accepted eagerly. I wasn’t qualified to testify in court about pathology — the medical aspects of disease and trauma, manifested in bodies that were fresher than the ones I usually studied — but I seized every opportunity I could to learn more about it. After all, what separated Jess’s work from mine was only a few days of decomposition — or even a few hours, in conditions of extreme heat, or a few saw cuts, in cases of dismemberment. So the more I knew about finding forensic evidence in fresh tissue, the better I’d be able to spot evidence in not-so-fresh tissue. Besides, Jess was a hoot — funny and irreverent, yet also dead serious about the quality of her work. She had a keen wit, a quick scalpel, and sharp eyes, and she wielded them all with equal deftness.

Her red Porsche Carrera was already parked behind the morgue when I pulled in, followed by the Cadillac hearse bearing Ledbetter’s sodden coffin. As the hearse backed into the loading dock, the metal door opened and Jess emerged in scrubs, followed by Miranda, whom I hadn’t seen since the night she walked in on Sarah and me kissing. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be in on this autopsy after all.

They looked up as I approached, so I waved. “Hi,” I called to Jess, “welcome to the hornet’s nest. You’re pretty gutsy to get mixed up in all this.”

She shrugged. “Or not too bright. Never did like to take the safe route — usually boring.” She gave me a smile. A very tight smile, first cousin to a grimace. “Miranda’s been telling me about some of your recent doings. Sounds like you’ve got a handful of trouble yourself.” I looked at Miranda, whose eyes flashed when they met mine. My face flushed, and I turned toward the hearse. Why was that infernal driver taking so long to unload the damn coffin?

I cleared my throat. “Well, I do have an interesting, um, case right now. I’ll t-t-tell you about it later. Right now, let me go get changed so I don’t keep you waiting.” With that, I fled into the morgue, slinking into the safety of the men’s changing room. What a mess I’d made of things with Miranda. What an idiot.

When I entered the autopsy room, taking refuge behind a surgical mask, I saw only Jess, scalpel in hand and headlamp on her forehead, leaning over the body. The coffin sat in a corner by a floor drain, still oozing a bit of water, or something. “Looks like you’re my diener today,” she said.

“What’s a diener?” The word rhymed with “wiener,” which is what I felt like; it was also the way a foreigner might say “dinner,” a realization that did little to ease my apprehension as she and the scalpel turned in my direction.

“Autopsy assistant. German word. Actually means ‘servant.’ Just so you’re clear on the pecking order at the moment.” She sounded mad and looked even madder.

“Where’s Miranda?” I asked.

“She said she had a lab to teach. Does she? Or does she just not want to be here?” Her eyes glittered above her mask.

“I…I don’t know. She…I guess maybe she didn’t want to be here.”

She slammed the scalpel down onto the steel table. “Damnit, Bill, this is ridiculous and unprofessional.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m very ashamed.”

“I respect you and I like you, but that doesn’t make me any threat to her.”

“I know. I — huh?”

“She’s got no reason to dislike me.”

“You? What are you talking about?”

“That…that girl. While you were taking your sweet time about changing, she practically started a catfight with me. Like I was here to snatch away her boyfriend or something.” Again she slammed the scalpel down on the metal table — it seemed to make her feel better — and again I flinched. “Goddamnit, this is not junior high school.”

I had misunderstood utterly, had misinterpreted the tension and angry looks completely. A wave of giddy relief washed over me. I started to laugh, and found I couldn’t stop. I laughed so hard my stomach muscles began to ache; my mask grew so wet with tears that I had to rip it off just to breathe.

She stared openmouthed at me. Then, slow and bright as sunrise, a smile dawned across her face. She waggled a gloved finger at me, shook her head, and said, “And what were you talking about? Are you her boyfriend?”

“No. No!” I thought I was starting to laugh again, but I was crying. She laid a hand on my arm and left it there till I got hold of myself. “Oh, God, Jess, I’ve made a royal mess of things.”

“You screwing a student? Hey, it’s not like you’re the first professor to take a bite out of that shiny apple. Just between you and me, back in my own reckless youth…”

I stared at her. “You?!”

“Dr. Crowder. Microbiology. And talk about microscopic!” She laughed. “So you and Miss Priss got something going on? That why she bared her fangs at me?”

“No. At least, not like that. It’s complicated.” She raised her eyebrows quizzically, and so I told her everything: how I came unglued in class; how Sarah came to my office that night to return the bones; how we fell into a torrid clutch; how Miranda reacted to the sight. “Jesus, Jess. I’ve compromised myself with a student — an undergraduate, at that — and simultaneously alienated my best graduate assistant. I don’t know how to fix things.”

She fixed me with a stern, no-bullshit look. “Bill, when’s the last time you got laid?”

I flushed. “It’s been awhile. Not since Kathleen died. A few months before Kathleen died.”

She held the look. “So, what, two years or more? That’s a long damn time for a man in his prime. And you’re around young women — smart, attractive young women, women who look up to you — day in and day out. I’m amazed you haven’t thrown some poor lass to the floor and ravished her by now. Jesus, Bill, give yourself a break. Yeah, you kissed a student. Probably as much her doing as yours — take my word for that. And yeah, your timing sucked. Too bad. You want to apologize to one of them, or both of them, go ahead. And then go on.” Her voice softened. “Bill, Bill. We all make mistakes. Even you. Grieving, lonely, stiff-upper-lip you. And if getting caught in a kiss knocks you off that pedestal your diener’s put you on, well, maybe that’s best.” She leaned closer, right into my face. “Understandable as it is, Bill, it’s not healthy for her to idolize you.”

I blinked. A lot had just happened: confession, understanding, forgiveness, counsel. “I thought you were supposed to be a pathologist. Sound more like a shrink. A damn good one, by the way.”

She smiled. “Nope, just a woman who’s been around the block a time or two. If I weren’t happily lesbian now, I might take you for a spin myself, try to put a smile back on your face. But enough with the therapy. We’ve got a corpse to dissect.”

She left me with my jaw hanging open—“happily lesbian now”? Whatever happened to the husband she’d introduced me to at that forensic conference a year or so ago? — and turned her attention to Ledbetter’s corpse. The Y incision from Dr. Hamilton’s autopsy had been stitched shut with coarse black baseball-style sutures, which Jess cut with a flick of the scalpel. Stuffed into the abdomen was a red plastic biohazard bag; extricating it and laying it on the table, she said, “Well, at least he bagged the organs instead of just dumping them into the cavity. We might as well look at the lungs first, although I’m not feeling optimistic about what kind of shape they’re in.”

“Nine months is a long time,” I agreed. “I’ll be surprised if they’re not completely putrefied.”

“Me too. Looks like our man got the bare minimum of cosmetic embalming — just enough in the neck to keep his face presentable for the funeral. And the organs were already removed and bagged at that point, so they didn’t get any formalin at all.” She cut the zip tie at the neck of the bag. “Brace yourself — this is going to be pretty ripe.” Opening the bag wide, she revealed the contents to our eyes and our nostrils.

The lungs — or, rather, what had once been the lungs — were now a few handfuls of gelatinous gray goo. They had been sliced apart during the original autopsy, and the dissection and decay had combined to render them useless as any source of additional forensic information. “Shit,” she said. “And I mean that descriptively as well as editorially.” She tied the bag shut again and strode toward a stereomicroscope at a desk against one wall of the autopsy suite. “At least your girlfriend did me one favor before she stomped out of here. She got us the slides.” Jess switched on the light source and peered into the eyepieces. “Come take a look.”

I took her place at the scope and leaned in, tweaking the focus a bit to compensate for my lack of reading glasses. The field of view was filled with lacy, delicate circles of pale pink; the insides of the circles were nearly opaque brown. “Tell me what I’m seeing.”

“Cross-section of the alveolar sacs from the lower right lobe of the lungs. Five microns thick — one two-hundredth of an inch. The water in the tissue has been replaced with paraffin.”

“So the pink circles?”

“The business part of the lungs — the sacs where air exchange takes place.”

“That was what I figured. And the brown?”

“Blood.”

“Perimortem?”

“Nope. Clotted. Definitely antemortem.”

“Any way to tell how long antemortem?”

“Top of the head, I’d guess two weeks,” she said. “I wish Dr. Hamilton had kept the save jar.”

“Save jar?”

“Yeah — a highly technical term for the jar where we packrat-type pathologists sometimes pickle bigger slices of organs in formalin. I’ve got thousands of ’em — I tend to keep mine for years, at least in forensic cases. But I think Hamilton incinerates the larger sections as soon as he finishes writing the report. Keeps the shelves clear, he told me once. Also makes it harder for somebody else to second-guess him, I’d say.”

“What would a bigger section tell you?”

“Maybe nothing, but maybe — if we got really lucky — it might have included traumatized tissue. Which might have lent credence to his stabbing theory — or might have shown what a completely idiotic idea that was.”

She leaned closer, practically inserting her head into the cavern that had once housed the rubbery heart and spongy lungs, and played her headlamp over the interior. “The soft tissues inside the body cavity show signs of advanced decomposition,” she dictated, “however, the parietal pleural membrane appears to be intact, showing no sign of a penetration wound on the posterior wall of the chest cavity.” She lifted her foot from the Dictaphone’s pedal. “You wanna help me roll him over?”

We rolled the corpse onto its stomach, or what was once its stomach, so she could examine the back. A ragged gash, roughly two inches long and an inch wide, punctuated the lower left side of the back, just above the hip. Jess teased it open with the tip of a probe. As she worked the probe around inside the wound, a muffled grating sound emerged from the corpse. “Hark,” she said, eyes dancing above her mask. “Do you hear what I hear?” I nodded. “Let’s see what we’ve found.”

Trading the probe for a scalpel, she cut gently at the top and bottom of the wound to widen it slightly, then inserted a small spreader to open it. Something glimmered dully deep within the rotting flesh. Reaching in with a pair of forceps, Jess grasped and pulled, wiggling gently to help tease the object from the tissue. “Come to Mama,” she murmured as she worked it free, then, “Eureka.” It was a shard of glass, a quarter-inch thick and two inches long. The end she held in the forceps was perhaps an inch across; the piece tapered, over its two-inch length, to a wicked point. “That had to hurt,” she said.

“Meacham said that Ledbetter had collapsed onto a glass-topped coffee table. That’s got to be a piece of it. Could it have killed him?”

“Don’t see how — not right there. It’s completely lodged in the erector spinae — the main group of muscles of the lower back — so even though it’s a bad puncture wound, it wouldn’t have severed any major blood vessels. Eventually he might have bled out or died of infection, but he didn’t. For all his sloppiness in this case, Dr. Hamilton did get the cause of death right: it was a pulmonary hemorrhage that killed him. What he got badly wrong were the cause and the timing of the hemorrhage. This glass was just icing on the cake. In fact, this guy might have already been dead, or close to it, when he hit the coffee table.”

“So there’s no evidence of a knife wound, Jess?”

“Well, you never know. Maybe the guy stabbed him and then stuck this in there to cover his tracks. Sounds far-fetched, but I still get surprised once in a while. You’re gonna check for knife marks on the bone, right?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I wasn’t trying to get out of the work. Just trying to make sense of what we’re seeing here.”

She wrapped up her dictation with a matter-of-fact notation that the remains had been transferred to forensic anthropologist William Brockton of the University of Tennessee for further examination, to ascertain whether the spine or ribs had sustained trauma, then switched off the recorder. “Bill, you want me to save you a little time?”

I wasn’t sure what she meant. “What do you mean?” I asked. Reaching to one side of the instrument tray, she picked up a long, straight-bladed knife that must have measured eighteen inches from stem to stern. I vaguely recalled seeing its twin one morning in Panera Bread, where a baker deftly dissected a cinnamon-raisin loaf into perfect slices. “Looks like a kitchen knife,” I said.

“Oh, please,” she said. “It’s a highly specialized implement with a precise medical name: bread knife.” Her arm extended and then swiftly drew back, and suddenly the corpse’s legs and pelvis lay separated from the upper body by a crisp, narrow gap. The one-eighth-inch cartilage disk between the twelfth thoracic vertebra and the first lumbar vertebra had been slit neatly in half.

“Wow,” I said. “Remind me never to make you mad.”

“Don’t ever make me mad,” she obliged. “I keep hoping some creep will try to mug me in the hospital parking lot some night, but it never happens.”

“Tough break,” I commiserated. “But don’t give up hope. You’re far too young and beautiful to become embittered by life’s disappointments.”

“Thanks.”

“Say, you think you could do that again, up here between the thoracic and cervical vertebrae?”

“Gee, I dunno,” she said, “that mighta just been beginner’s luck.” I pulled my finger back a split second before the knife flashed again. The head rolled free of the shoulders. “Two in a row — whattaya know?” Jess washed and dried the knife and began shucking her scrubs and paper booties. Underneath, she’d kept on a pair of black jeans, a blue silk blouse, and a pair of square-toed leather boots. “Okay, sport, he’s all yours. Have fun.” I nodded, already mentally dissecting the rib cage. “Oh, and Bill?” I turned to look at her as she sheathed the blade and tucked it into the belt of her jeans. “Don’t forget what I said. Do what you need to do to straighten things with these students. Then cut yourself some slack. And for pete’s sake, get yourself laid!” She winked broadly and pushed open the door, leaving me standing red-faced above the disarticulated torso of Billy Ray Ledbetter.

I didn’t need to deflesh the entire skeleton, just the thoracic region which Jess had cut free for me. Curling my fingers under the rib cage, I lifted the ripe section of torso and lugged it to a nearby counter, where a mammoth steam-jacketed steel kettle stood waiting. Resting my burden on the rim, I shifted my grip and lowered it in, then filled it to within a few inches of the rim, using a short hose hanging on the wall behind it. I added a splash of bleach from a Clorox bottle — I liked the fresher, green-labeled variety — and what I guessed to be a tablespoon from a jar of Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer. The Adolph’s would cut the time and the bleach would cut the odor, as well as lightening the bones’ caramel color to the shade of aging ivory that lawyers and jurors seemed to prefer. I twisted the thermostat at the base of the kettle to 180 degrees. Below that, the tissue would take too long to soften; any higher, and I’d be risking a nasty boil-over.

As I left Billy Ray Ledbetter to simmer, I realized I’d been doing a lot of stewing myself. I’d kept a tight lid on my emotions ever since Kathleen died — outwardly, at least — hoping that by doing so, I could keep my life from getting messy. Jess’s advice, and my own behavior lately, had shown me that I, too, had come close to boiling over. Maybe she was right. Maybe I needed to loosen up. Maybe I did need to get laid.