Genesis

Chapter 5

May 8th

3:35 P.M.

Through the small, wire-mesh window outside the autopsy room, Laurie could see Marvin busily laying out specimen jars, instruments, and other paraphernalia. On table #1 there was a corpse of a woman that was slightly bloated, with significant livor mortis of the lower limbs, suggesting to Laurie’s analytical brain that the victim had died in a sitting position.

As she gazed in at the familiar scene, Laurie felt her anticipation build at the prospect of finally being able to do again what she loved. Like she had on so many off moments, she found herself questioning whether she’d done the right thing by accepting the offer to become the chief medical examiner. She shrugged, reminding herself there were no easy answers, before pushing open the door. With a full view of the pit, as the room was called by all who worked there, Laurie could see there were no other personnel present. She wasn’t surprised. Not only did most of the activity in the autopsy room happen in the morning, but every afternoon at 3:00 P.M. there was an informal meeting up in the conference room to go over the day’s cases. Chet revived the event to great acclaim, having made it fun, interesting, and worthwhile from a continuing education standpoint. It was one of the reasons Laurie chose this particular time to do the case, as she preferred not to have to explain herself to too many people.

“Hello, Marvin,” Laurie called to get the mortuary technician’s attention. “Are you almost ready?” She could smell a mild amount of decomposition odor, which the powerful evacuation fans were keeping under control.

“Just about,” Marvin replied.

“Have you seen Dr. Nichols?” Laurie asked. She was mildly disappointed not to see the woman. Since she had not heard anything from Chet, she assumed all was in order.

“You are the first,” Marvin said. “By the way, Dr. McGovern already had me do a rapid fentanyl test on the powder found on the victim’s coffee table. It was positive.”

“I’m not surprised,” Laurie said. Obviously, it was going to be a run-of-the-mill case. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” he said.

“Where’s the case file?” Laurie asked. Her autopsy technique was to go over all the material available on a case before she did the autopsy, to limit the chances of missing something. This modus operandi was just the opposite of Jack’s. He liked to do the autopsy as cold as possible, as it was his thought that preconceived ideas of what he would find might cause him to miss the unexpected. It was one of those differences that Laurie and Jack liked to tease each other about with the assumption that they were right and the other wrong, even though both knew they were both right. It was just a matter of choice.

“I put it on the gurney out there in the hallway,” Marvin said. “I assumed you’d want to look at it before you started.”

Before letting the door close, Laurie gave Marvin a thumbs-up to let him know how much she appreciated the benefits of working with an assistant who knew her routine. Laurie located the file and leafed through all the pages until she came to the MLI’s summary, which had been done by David Goldberg, one of the more recently hired MLIs. Reading quickly, she got a good sense of the case. The victim had been found by a friend and coworker, Madison Bryant, in the victim’s apartment and had been identified by the same individual. The MLI estimated that the victim had been dead for two or three days and gave the evidence he used to come to this conclusion. The MLI then described the drug paraphernalia that had been found on the victim’s coffee table as well as the partially empty syringe still embedded in the victim’s left antecubital fossa, or the front side of the elbow. Other important facts were that the victim was not known to have any medical problems, according to the family. It also was written that no one, neither the family nor the identifying friend, had any knowledge that the victim had been using drugs. She was always thought to be a stable, well-adjusted, happy person.

Laurie was still reading the MLI’s report as she pushed into the women’s locker room and found herself confronted by a woman around thirty in rather fancy and expensive-looking lingerie. At that very moment the woman was reaching into an open locker in the process of hanging up a designer blouse. Contemporary, distressed jeans were visible hanging in the locker, as was a resident-style short white coat.

Assuming she was Aria Nichols, Laurie scrutinized this individual who reputedly had a questionable reputation among her resident colleagues, who’d been verbally brazen to Chet, and who, most important from Laurie’s point of view, was not taking her forensic rotation at the OCME seriously. She was about Laurie’s height of five feet five, slim but muscular like a ballet dancer, with cold black hair cut in a longish pixie bob. Her eyes, which she turned on Laurie, were a striking cornflower blue while her complexion was rather dark, as if she’d been in the sun. In Laurie’s immediate estimation she wasn’t traditionally eye-catchingly attractive, yet she exuded a kind of animal sensuality and youthful beauty that Laurie could still admire and guess might appeal to men, at least some men.

“Hello,” Laurie said, trying to sound more chipper than she felt. “I’m Dr. Montgomery. Are you Dr. Nichols?”

To Laurie’s surprise the woman didn’t respond immediately, but rather stared back unblinkingly with a slight, frozen Mona Lisa smile that Laurie found irritatingly provocative. It seemed there was a hint of arrogance, even unprovoked, suppressed hostility. Although Laurie fought against making a rapid value judgment, she recognized that there was something about this woman that she instinctively didn’t like. She wasn’t sure what it was but guessed it had something to do with an implied entitlement, as if this individual had been born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Laurie had met a number of girls who fit that definition in the private high school she’d attended.

“You are the chief medical examiner?” the woman questioned, as if she couldn’t believe Laurie could be the head of the OCME. She also spoke in a contemporary “vocal fry” to emphasize her disbelief.

It was Laurie’s turn to hesitate as she fought the urge to merely turn around and walk out and give up on this woman. Recognizing she wasn’t in the best of moods after Jack’s revelations of his behavior at the Brooks School and her own discombobulation from what she learned from her breast-cancer screening, Laurie figuratively counted to ten, took a breath, broke off from the juvenile staring contest she’d been indulging, and went to one of the open lockers. She took off the long white medical coat she generally wore while in the OCME. After hanging it up, she turned back to the woman, who had continued to stare at her with the same impudent smile. “Yes,” Laurie said finally, struggling to speak as normally as possible and without emotion. “I am the chief medical examiner. And you?”

“I’m Aria Nichols,” the woman said. “I’m surprised. I thought you’d be a hell of a lot older, and frumpy. You don’t look like a forensic pathologist to me. You look too normal.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?” Laurie said as she began to slip out of her dress. She had made a point from the first day she’d worked at the OCME to wear reasonably stylish clothes. Now that she was the first female NYC OCME chief, she felt it was even more appropriate. If nothing else, she wanted to contravene stereotypes like Aria was implying.

“I’m just being honest,” Aria said neutrally. She went to get scrub pants and a top. Laurie watched her go, amazed at how nonchalant the woman was about her near nakedness. Laurie had gone to a high school where the girls had separate cubicles to change for gym. It was also true that she had never quite gotten used to a thong.

“I heard from Dr. Chet McGovern that you are not particularly fond of your rotation here at the OCME,” Laurie said.

“That’s the understatement of the year,” Aria said. “To be honest, I think it’s a waste of my time.”

“You don’t think what we medical examiners do is significantly beneficial to society and our community?” Once again Laurie was taken aback by the striking disrespect this woman was willing to project, and it grated on her.

“Hey, I didn’t say that,” Aria corrected. “I just said it was a waste of my time, not yours. Sure, I know you guys do a lot, especially for law enforcement and such, but it doesn’t interest me.”

“We do a lot more than help law enforcement,” Laurie said. “Medical examiners have also been responsible for a number of safety innovations. As an example, significant electronic equipment design changes to minimize electrocutions have come from medical examiner work. Even low-voltage swimming pool lights are another example. I can’t imagine how many lives such innovations have saved.”

Aria returned to her locker and began pulling on the scrub pants. “Yeah, that might be true, but as I said, it’s not something that interests me. The idea of this rotation is to give me a sense of what forensic pathology is like. I got the message. I like autopsies but only anatomical autopsies that teach us about disease processes. From my perspective, forensic autopsies are disgusting, what with the smell and all.”

“They can be distasteful on occasion,” Laurie admitted. “But from my perspective they are inordinately challenging. It’s an opportunity to listen to the dead tell their stories in order to help the living. It is a medical specialty that offers the chance to learn something every day.”

“Please,” Aria said. “Give me a break. That’s just a bunch of self-justifying bullshit. But fine, you like forensic pathology. Good for you.”

“I find your disrespect disturbing,” Laurie said, trying to maintain her composure. With everything else that had happened over the past few hours, dealing with this unpleasant woman was a severe test of her patience.

“What am I disrespecting?” Aria said, making an exaggerated expression of confusion. “I’m giving credit where credit is due.”

“I heard you were remarkably disrespectful to our director of education, Dr. McGovern.”

“Oh, really?” Aria drawled. “Let me tell you something. Old Doc McGovern got what he deserved.”

“What do you mean by that? Are you implying he’d been disrespectful to you?”

“Obviously,” Aria said.

“What did he say that was disrespectful?”

“It was the way he looked at me and his syntax. The man is a hopeless womanizer. It’s written all over his face. Of course, it didn’t help that after he’d been talking with me for five minutes, he suggested we should have a drink sometime. I’m not all that fond of men, particularly the Dr. McGovern type. I’ve had to deal with them all my life.”

Once again Laurie found herself staring at Aria, who impudently stared back. As the head of an organization with a thousand employees in an era of heightened workplace sensitivity to issues of sexual harassment, Laurie wondered if beneath this woman’s brassiness, she might be communicating something important. The question arose in her mind whether sexual harassment could be nonverbal and merely implied. Thanks to Jack, she’d known for years that Chet McGovern was a philanderer on his own time, but could that reality affect his behavior in-house? Laurie didn’t know but stored the thought to examine later. Currently she had to deal with the woman in front of her, who was enough of a conundrum.

“Dr. McGovern followed me all the way over to the Tisch Hospital,” Aria said. “As far as I was concerned, that raised a red flag. I didn’t want him following me back to my condo some night.”

“He followed you because you had failed to make an appearance at an assigned autopsy,” Laurie said.

“Big deal,” Aria said. “That’s easy for you to say, but who’s to know. Besides, I’d already stood around and watched one forensic autopsy for the day, and as far as I was concerned, that was enough.”

“That’s not for you to decide,” Laurie said, struggling to control herself.

“Yeah, whatever,” Aria said. “I’m learning enough about forensics to satisfy myself, which is the point of this rotation. I’m sure as hell not going to become a forensic pathologist.”

“What attracted you to medicine?” Laurie asked, to change the subject. Aria’s lack of respect and basic empathy was difficult to weather.

“Whoa...” Aria voiced. “This is getting personal.”

“Do you mind?” Laurie said. “As I’m sure you are aware, or would be if you thought about it, it’s our responsibility to certify that you spent your rotation here at the OCME appropriately. So far your behavior of skipping assigned cases makes us question that.”

“Okay, that’s not unreasonable,” Aria said. “I went into medicine to get away from the family business. Also, in college everybody seemed to be premed, so I was, too. I really didn’t think much about what it would be like being a doctor. I was caught up in the competition, which I enjoyed.”

“What was the family business?” Laurie asked.

“My father, the asshole alcoholic, was a very successful NYC venture capital, hedge-fund guy who knocked me around a lot when I was a tween.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Laurie said, meaning it. “Was your father at least pleased you chose to become a doctor?”

Aria laughed derisively. “He never knew, the selfish bastard. He committed suicide when I was just barely in my teens.”

“My goodness,” Laurie managed. She was appalled. “It certainly sounds like you didn’t have the best childhood.”

“You could say that,” Aria added. “Especially considering the stepdad my screwy mother ended up marrying. He was worse than my real dad in just about every category. But I managed to blackmail him into putting a lot of my mother’s money in my name.”

“How did you end up in Pathology?” Laurie asked. She wanted to get away from Aria’s lurid and depressing family history. Laurie had sometimes felt sorry for herself growing up because her father had been emotionally distant. She couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to be physically abused.

“That’s a good question,” Aria said. “It was by elimination. Maybe I should have given more thought to becoming a doctor, because during medical school I was quick to learn that I hated seeing patients. I mean, it’s pretty pathetic when you think about it. But what can I say? It was what it was. Anyway, pathology is the only real choice if you hate patients. It’s also intellectually stimulating.”

“Well, it’s encouraging to hear you were at least challenged,” Laurie said. She tried to gird herself for an unpleasant afternoon. “Let’s talk about the next hour. My intent here is to get a sense of what you have learned about forensic pathology in the little more than a week you’ve been here. We have an overdose case, and I want you to essentially do it. Are you up for that?”

“I can tell you this: It sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than me just standing around emptying the wastebasket.”

“I hope you find it stimulating,” Laurie said. “Maybe we can even excite you a bit about forensic pathology.”

“That would be a stretch,” Aria said, reverting to her disinterested voice. “Let’s not let expectations get out of hand.”