Gallery of the Dead

Fifty-Four

Dr. Morgan took his time getting ready. By the time he finished scrubbing up and made his way to Autopsy Theater One, on the ground floor of the Pima County’s Office of Medical Examiner, the body of Timothy Davis had already been washed, disinfected and transferred to the stainless-steel examination table at the center of the spotlessly clean, white linoleum floor.

The body was lying on its back, with its arms loosely by its side. As Dr. Morgan approached it, he paused for a moment.

Just minutes after death, due to the ceasing of heart function and consequently the lack of blood flow, human skin will begin to tighten and discolor, acquiring a grayish pale tone. Within thirty minutes of death, post-mortem lividity, which is the pooling of blood in the parts of the body that are closest to the ground, will start to settle, turning the skin purple and giving it a waxy feel, but Timothy Davis’s body looked a lot paler than anyone would’ve expected for an African American subject. But that wasn’t all — in his case, post-mortem lividity was practically unnoticeable.

‘Interesting,’ the doctor whispered to himself, adjusting his glasses on his nose to have a better look at the discoloration of the skin. He wondered if Mr. Davis had suffered from any dermatological conditions while alive.

Dr. Morgan checked the module directly behind him just to make sure he had all the instruments he needed. With everything in place, he finally turned on his digital Dictaphone, ready to start the official post-mortem examination.

He began by stating the date and time, followed by the morgue’s internal case number. After that he described the general state of the body, detailing any wounds, marks, scratches, abrasions... anything that could be seen externally. Once Dr. Morgan flipped the body over to examine its back, something somersaulted inside his stomach.

‘What the hell?’

Immediately he reached for his digital camera.

The marks to Timothy Davis’s back practically sucked the air out of Dr. Morgan’s lungs.

Arizona was not the most racist state, but unfortunately racial hatred was still going strong in pretty much every corner of America, regardless of which state you found yourself in. It was with that knowledge in mind that Dr. Morgan first considered the possibility of this being a racially motivated attack. The marks to the victim’s back looked at first like some sort of castigation, applied to Mr. Davis by a whip, or similar instrument. But a closer examination made Dr. Morgan realize that was impossible. Not all, but several of the marks actually looked like letters. He could clearly identify a ‘T’, an ‘R’, an ‘F’, an ‘M’, and possibly an ‘E’. That certainly was no coincidence and no matter how proficient one could be with a whip, Dr. Morgan just couldn’t imagine anyone being so good as to be able to write letters with lashes. The rest of the marks looked random — just a mishmash of straight cuts.

‘What in the world is all this?’ Dr. Morgan asked himself, as adrenaline pumped his veins with excitement.

Then it finally dawned on him.

‘I’ll be damned. So this is why they needed this autopsy ASAP. This is a message.’

Dr. Morgan had been a pathologist for thirty-one years, twenty-one of them as the Chief Medical Examiner for Pima County. He had autopsied more than his fair share of bodies brought in from homicide crime scenes, some of them in an awful state, but he had never been the examining pathologist in a serial-murder case. In fact, as far as he knew, there had only been one serial killer active in Tucson, back in the sixties — Charles Schmid, also known as The Pied Piper of Tucson, who had murdered three people and buried them in the desert.

Dr. Morgan was now sure that this wasn’t just any serial-killer case. This was a serial killer who had apparently left a cryptogram carved into his victim’s flesh. That was something that happened plenty in Hollywood movies and crime-fiction books, but rarely in real life.

After photographing Timothy Davis’s back and the markings on it from a variety of angles, Dr. Morgan turned the body back around, ready for the Y incision and the internal organs examination. From the module behind him, he retrieved a long-handed scalpel and brought it to the body’s right upper chest, starting the cut about an inch below its shoulder. As the laser-sharp scalpel ruptured through skin and muscle with tremendous ease, Dr. Morgan frowned.

Something didn’t seem right.

‘What is going on here?’

He proceeded with the incision and opened up the body’s breastplate.

The doctor’s jaw dropped open.

‘This is... impossible.’