Dust

28

Through a cloud of soft lighting we follow gray walls and recycled glass tile glazed a grayish-brown called truffle. The acoustical ceiling conceals RFID trackers and miles of wiring while hushing our progress as we bend around a floor that eventually will run into itself. Every corridor in my building is a circle.

Life stops where it starts and what is straight becomes round and I define my facility as a port not a terminal. I illustrate the work in this place as part of a journey that redefines and re-creates and not the endpoint or final destination. The dead help the living and the living help the dead and I find the seven round corridors inside my round building to be a metaphor for hope or at least a springboard for a less morbid conversation.

Long past are days when I didn’t think twice about referring to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner as the morgue or a hospital for the dead. It’s part of my employee handbook and a priority in our training that we are appropriate and professional in all we do and say. One never knows who’s listening, and those we serve aren’t stiffs, corpses, crispy critters, roadkill, or floaters. They’re patients or cases. They’re someone’s family, lovers, friends, and I encourage the perception that the CFC isn’t a dead house but a lab where medical examinations are conducted and evidence is scientifically analyzed and those left behind are welcome to learn as much as they can tolerate.

I’ve instituted a spirit of transparency that allows visitors to watch us work through observation windows and the one Lucy and I walk past now is the evidence room where bloody clothing is air-drying from hanging bars inside HEPA-filtered cabinets. Spread out on a white paper — covered table are a pair of broken eyeglasses, a hearing aid, shoes, a wallet, cash, credit cards, and a wristwatch with a shattered crystal. The personal effects of the man whose wrecked car we just saw, I suspect, and next is ID. I nod a good morning at forensic technicians processing fingerprints on a pistol inside a downdraft powder station and at other stations are other weapons. A barbell, a knife, a mop handle, a brass art sculpture, all bloody and being fumed with superglue.

“The Medflight chopper just radioed Logan requesting clearance to the southwest at one thousand feet.” Lucy is monitoring an app on her phone. “Their BK117 took off from a location in Concord, headed back to Plymouth.”

“If it’s not headed to a hospital then it’s either nothing or someone’s dead.” I open the door to large-scale x-ray.

Lucy scrolls down on her phone, checking air traffic control live streams. “It landed in Concord exactly fifty-five minutes ago. Obviously it responded to something there. It could be unrelated. I’ll keep listening.”

I take a seat at Anne’s console. On the other side of a leaded window is the large-bore CT scanner and she’s sliding the table in.

From my perspective I can see a deformed head and gray hair matted with brain tissue and blood. I see a bloody lacerated ear. The sixty-three-year-old psychiatrist who crashed into a guardrail, a possible homicide by kids who thought it was entertaining to puncture a stranger’s tire and possibly rob him. Or alcohol really could be to blame. You don’t have to be legally drunk to fall asleep at the wheel or lose control of your car.

I push the intercom button to talk to Anne on the other side of the glass.

“Who’s posting him?” I ask.

“When Luke finishes the fire death,” her voice sounds from a speaker on her desk. “He already did a blood draw for a STAT alcohol.”

“I heard.”

“Point-oh-four. Barely a decent buzz and not worth dying for.” Anne continues talking as she opens the door connecting her work area to the scanner room. “Anyway, his super-lawyer’s already called.”

“I heard that, too,” I reply.

“And how’s Lucy today?” she asks me as if Lucy isn’t here.

Shy-Anne, as Lucy calls my gifted radiology tech, who couldn’t be more pleasant but talks about people disconnectedly and often won’t look them in the eye. She’s the sort I imagine as the class brain in high school who got the attention of cheerleaders and football players only if they needed help with their homework.

“Life sucks,” Lucy says to Anne. “And you?”

“By the way,” I add, “we don’t talk to lawyers who call about our cases unless they’re prosecutors or defense attorneys, preferably with subpoenas in hand.”

“Bryce didn’t tell her anything that matters but was on the phone long enough to get an earful and then he gave me one,” Anne says as I spot Benton through the observation glass, walking briskly along the corridor, headed toward us in a pair of borrowed black leather sneakers.

“Carin Hegel,” I assume, and Lucy is next to me, looking at what’s on the flat screen, postmortem images of the man whose car we just saw.

Dr. Franz Schoenberg, with a home and office address in Cambridge near Longfellow Park, and I keep seeing him in the photographs I looked at hours ago. Gray-haired with a kindly, pleasant face that couldn’t have looked more stunned or distraught as he stared at his dead patient who had texted him she planned to fly to Paris from her roof. Maybe she was out of her mind on drugs. But it seems what she did was for his benefit, what I call taking someone out with you, and so many suicides are more angry and vindictive than just plain sad.

“We had his patient through here a few days ago,” I comment. “The young fashion designer who committed suicide. She jumped off the roof of her building right in front of him.”

“Maybe that’s why he was fighting with his wife and went out drinking.” Anne sits down beside me and I notice she’s wearing purple scrubs with lace trim, pockets, and pleats, what I call her Grey’s Anatomy attire.

“It didn’t help matters, that’s for sure.” I study Dr. Franz Schoenberg’s scans.

Open comminuted fractures of the left temporal and parietal bones, axons and blood vessels sheared due to extreme rotational forces. His head accelerated and decelerated violently on impact and probably struck the side window, not the windshield. I wonder how fast he was going. The skid marks should tell us. I note very little cerebral edema. His survival time was minimal.

“Carin Hegel was trying to reach me earlier,” I tell Anne. “At around five-thirty this morning as I was headed to the scene at MIT. She told Marino she wanted to talk to me. I assumed it was about Gail Shipton.”

“Business is booming for ambulance chasers,” Anne says.

“She isn’t exactly an ambulance chaser.” I’m amused but puzzled.

Hegel and I usually don’t have cases in common for the simple reason that most of my patients and their families can’t afford an attorney like her. Most of what I deal with is on the criminal side and the super-lawyers of the super-rich very rarely appear on my radar and yet she has twice today.

Anne slides out a call sheet and other paperwork from a file holder on her desk as Benton walks in. Not far behind him is Bryce, with big sunglasses parked on top of his head, in extra-slim jeans, a chunky cable-knit sweater, and red suede loafers. He’s carrying a pizza box, napkins, and paper plates, and Lucy steps into the doorway to intercept him, making sure he doesn’t escape until we’re fed.

“Are you aware of anything going on in Concord?” I ask Benton and the way he looks at me conveys that something is.

“Approximately an hour ago.” He positions himself behind my chair. “A call for an active shooter that turned out to be false.”

“Explaining why Medflight was deployed and then turned back,” I suggest.

“I assume so.”

But the way he says it makes me think there’s more.

“What else do we know about this case?” I then ask Anne for more details about the patient in her scanner, Dr. Schoenberg.

“DOA at Cambridge Hospital at around four a.m.” She shuffles through paperwork. “Apparently he left the pub around two but it took a while to get him out of his car. If you look at it in the evidence bay, you can see why. One of these classic old Jags, a real beaut before hydraulic tools opened it up like a can of soup.”

“A Jag E, early 1960s.” Lucy is standing back from us, in the doorway. “It was probably what he envied when he was old enough to drive and didn’t have the money. The problem is these antiques don’t have air bags.”

“Which pub?” I ask Anne.

“The Irish one Marino likes so much. He’s taken me there a few times pretending it’s not a date. I admit their lager mac and cheese is to die for — and I didn’t just say that, sorry, Fado’s. They’ve got a killer slow-roasted pork belly in a cider-reduction sauce…I’m going to stop talking now because my Tourette’s is acting up.”

“Fado’s isn’t in the best part of town,” Benton says. “Not far from the projects in West Cambridge.”

“He left the pub and do we know where he was headed?” I inquire as I remember the police call earlier, suspicious youths in a red SUV who may have just broken into a number of vehicles in the parking lots of the subsidized housing development on Windsor Street.

“According to his paperwork, he was on Memorial Drive near the Mass Ave Bridge. It may be he was headed home,” Anne says.

I imagine gang members in a red SUV following the Jaguar, waiting for the tire to go flat, maybe planning to rob the driver, but things turned out a lot worse than that. Possibly they nudged the car, sending it out of control into a guardrail.

“If they get the kids seen fleeing the projects on Windsor, we need to compare the paint of their red SUV to the paint transferred to the Jaguar,” I decide. “Let’s make sure the Cambridge police know.”

“Well, if Carin Hegel was trying to find you as early as five-thirty, she sure as hell didn’t waste any time.” Anne stops talking about food and quits the bad puns. “She called here about an hour ago, at almost eleven. You know it’s got to be the pub’s fault. The pub shouldn’t have kept serving him. And of course we couldn’t offer what his blood alcohol is, that he wasn’t intoxicated, because we can’t release his information before the investigation is completed, et cetera, et cetera. The usual, from what I gathered from Bryce, who told me the same story in fifty different ways of course.”

“I heard my name and it better not have been in vain,” he says.

“Apparently Hegel doesn’t know a tire was slashed and that he may be a homicide,” I say to Anne as Lucy holds out her hands to make Bryce surrender what promises to be a large pie with beef, sausage, pepperoni, peppers, fresh tomato, onions, garlic, extra mozzarella, and Asiago. The usual I order.

My mouth waters and hunger stabs my empty stomach. It feels constricted, practically tubular, and if aromas were audible, the volume would be as high up as it could go. It would be deafening.

“Not so fast.” Bryce pulls the box away from Lucy. “Not even if you tell me to put my hands up or you’ll shoot.”

“Don’t dare me.”

“Oh I’m scared. You’re not even armed.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re such a monster even when you’re sweet.”

“Looking for someone to sue,” Anne is saying to me. “Let me guess. The wife wants money from her husband’s death and we’ve not even autopsied the poor guy yet.”

“I guess Carin Hegel doesn’t discuss her other clients.” I look at Lucy.

“She has a lot of rich ones but how do we know he was a client?” She directs this at Bryce.

“Well, I assumed,” he says. “She was asking questions about how drunk he was and if that’s why he crashed his car. She sounded upset and sensitive for a lawyer and kept saying what a bad day it’s been. Maybe she knew him.”

He’s typing something on his phone.

“He had a fight with his wife?” I repeat this to Bryce. “Do we know where that detail came from?”

“It’s on the call sheet,” he says. “When he didn’t come home his wife called nine-one-one all teary and described his car. She said they’d had a disagreement and he left the house angry. And, well, look at this. Dr. Schoenberg was an expert witness in several lawsuits with big verdicts over the past few years and guess who the trial lawyer was? So maybe Carin Hegel was calling because it’s personal. She just lost a friend and a consultant who helps her make a lot of money.”

“We don’t take personal calls from lawyers,” I reply. “No information goes to her or anyone else about this case or any of our cases. We don’t do those types of favors.”

“Granby wants to meet at three.” Benton places his hands on my shoulders from where he stands behind my chair.

“I’m sure he does.”

“What should I tell him?”

“With the way my day is looking, it will have to be here.” I turn around to answer him. “I’ll reserve the war room or the PIT, depending on what we’ll be looking at.”

The PIT is our Progressive Immersion Theater, where we review cases in three-dimension or virtual reality. One of Lucy’s latest innovations as she continues her efforts to rid the world of paper, it features a HAPTIC and a Lidar data tunnel among other far-flung things.

“I need to replace a projector in the multi-touch table,” she lets me know as DNA scientist Gloria walks in.

I hand over evidence to her.

“After you it goes to Ernie,” I say as she initials the package. “As fast as you can.”

In her thirties, with spiky black hair and a pierced left nostril, she specializes in low copy number DNA and is used to my wanting everything yesterday.

“I’ll move it to the head of the line,” she says to me.

“You may be getting lab reports from Dr. Venter’s office in Baltimore,” I say next.

“I’ve already forwarded them,” Lucy informs me.

Gloria gives me a lingering, curious look as she heads to the door. A DNA profile from one of the Capital Murderer cases and my top molecular biologist isn’t ignorant or out of touch. Something big and bad is going on and she knows it.

“Needless to say…” I meet her eyes.

“Of course, and I’ll have something by tomorrow morning but will shoot for sooner.” And then she’s gone, out the door, on the other side of the window, walking fast down the corridor toward the elevator, like everybody else glued to her phone.

“When did Benton get back from Washington?” Anne asks me. “Is he doing okay because he looks like he could use a little meat on his bones. Did you get a load of that tank Lucy drove up in? When she pulled into the bay it sounded like she flew her helicopter in.”

“I’m standing right here.” Lucy sets the pizza box on a desk. “There’d better be vegan or I really will kill you, Bryce.”

“Wish Anne a good morning for Benton, who’s standing right behind you,” Bryce says to me. “I mean, really?” He directs this at Anne. “Sauce, mushrooms, broccoli, spinach, eggplant.” He counts on his fingers for Lucy’s benefit. “And let’s see. Presto!” He opens the lid. “Two boring slices just for you.” He hands her a paper plate, making sure he flaunts his leather bracelets. “Do you like?” He holds up his wrist. “Totally made by hand with a dragon clasp. In brown and royal blue because, what can I say? Ethan is way generous. And Anne? Lucy says good morning to you through me and I’m wishing you a good morning through her. Point taken?”

Anne is unable to refrain from talking about people as if they’re not in the room but it’s hard to take offense. She’s one of the least provocative people I’ve ever met, with her gentle face and demeanor and her plain-speaking and practical manner. No amount of ragging by Marino has ever gotten a rise out of her and even Bryce’s silly compulsive blather doesn’t pluck at her nerves.

She opens Gail Shipton’s scan for me, 3-D images of the head and thorax appearing on a flat screen.

“J.Crew,” Bryce shows off more bling. “And this one is almost over the top, but far be it from me to look a gift horse in the mouth.” He plucks at a black leather cuff with a stainless-steel chain. “To go with…” He pulls a necklace out of his sweater, black leather with some sort of tribal metalwork, and then he places a slice of pizza on a plate and presents it to me.

The first bite is an explosion of pleasure. My God, I’m starved. I’ve eaten half the slice before I can talk.

“This is what’s significant.” I wipe my fingers on a napkin. “Starting with a fairly dense material that fluoresces in UV. Some kind of dust that was all over her.”

I point out intense white areas on Gail Shipton’s scan, the residue in her nostrils and mouth. The vague, dark, air-filled space in the pleural cavity is the small pneumothorax in the upper lobe of the right lung, I go on to explain. Clicking on a different image, a cross section of the thorax and a coronal section, I can see the problem more clearly.

“The buildup of air in the closed space would have put pressure on the lung, making it impossible to expand,” I explain to Benton and Lucy.

“Making it harder to breathe,” she says.

“Even I know that,” Bryce exclaims.

“She already had some problems breathing,” Lucy informs me. “She would get winded. She sighed a lot as if it were hard to catch her breath.”

“I’m not sure I see what you’re talking about.” Benton puts on his reading glasses. “And would a pneumothorax kill someone?”

“If left untreated, it would have caused her severe respiratory distress,” I reply. “It would have put pressure on her heart and other major vessels.”

“I’m still trying to see it.” Benton leans over me, peering at the flat screen, and I feel his breath in my hair.

“This black area here,” Anne helps him out. “That’s air density. See? It’s the same inside and outside the chest. And it’s not supposed to be like that.”

“There should be no black area at all in the pleural space,” I add. “This lighter area here in the soft tissue of the chest is hemorrhage. She suffered some type of trauma that collapsed her lung. The first order of business is to find out how she got that.”