I Am Death

Nine

Los Angeles County’s Chief Medical Examiner, Doctor Carolyn Hove, had once again woken up too early, this time two hours before her alarm was due to go off.

It hadn’t always been like this. Doctor Hove had never had problems sleeping until her husband of twenty years passed away a year and a half ago, and now the nights seemed longer and lonelier than ever.

She opened her eyes, but didn’t move. Lying on her back, she simply stared at the white ceiling, pondering if she should try and get back to sleep or not.

What is the point? she thought. Her brain was now wide-awake. Sleep had most certainly left the building, and any attempt to get it back would be futile. She knew that well enough. She’d tried it plenty of times before.

Decision made, she wasted no more time, getting up and making her way into the kitchen where she prepared herself a strong cup of black coffee. After a quick shower, another cup of coffee and a small but very healthy breakfast, she was ready to leave.

At that time in the morning, and with less traffic than usual, it took her just twenty-two minutes to cover the almost ten miles between her home in West Hollywood and the coroner’s office on North Mission Road.

As the doctor swiped her security card at the door of the main building and stepped into the lobby, the young, tall and wiry attendant sitting behind the reception counter looked at her without much surprise.

‘Couldn’t sleep again, Doctor Hove?’

‘Something like that,’ she replied with a feeble smile.

‘I really don’t know how you do it, Doc. I just can’t function if I don’t get a good night’s sleep. Have you tried cherry juice, or chamomile and lavender tea? They work wonders for me.’

‘I don’t really have a problem falling asleep,’ she explained, approaching the counter. ‘What’s tricky is staying in that state for long enough.’

The attendant nodded once. ‘Oh, I see. Yep, I hate it when that happens too.’

‘So what did we get overnight?’ the doctor asked while she checked something on her cellphone.

‘Let me have a look.’ The attendant turned his attention to the computer on the counter in front of him and quickly typed something in. ‘Not that busy a night, Doc, you’ll be glad to know,’ he said after a few seconds. ‘Only ten new bodies. Five male, four female, and a kid. Five of them seem to be drug related, one from sexual play, and four, including the kid, are homicides.’

Doctor Hove nodded, unsurprised. She had been the Los Angeles County Chief Medical Examiner for three years, and a senior medical examiner for the city of Los Angeles for twenty years prior to that. When it came to violent deaths, very little ever shocked her.

‘Oh, wait,’ the attendant said, as the doctor began to turn away. ‘One of the bodies is flagged as urgent.’

Doctor Hove chuckled. ‘Yeah, well, they usually are. Everyone always needs their results ASAP.’

‘I know,’ the attendant replied, raising his eyebrows. ‘But this one says LAPD’s UV Unit.’

That made Doctor Hove pause, turn around and return to the counter. ‘Who is it?’

The assistant brought up the file on his screen.

‘Female, twenty years of age, already identified as Nicole Wilson. No apparent cause of death. She was brought in just a couple of hours ago, Doc.’

The doctor chewed on those facts for a moment. She knew that UV Unit detectives would be calling or dropping by first thing in the morning, and then every hour after that until they had their results. She quickly made her decision.

‘OK. Can you please get someone to take her body to theater one?’

The attendant checked the clock on the wall to his left. ‘You’re going to autopsy her now?’

Usually when Doctor Hove came in early she dealt mainly with paperwork.

‘That’s the idea.’

‘But as I’ve said, she just came in about two hours ago, Doc,’ the attendant retorted, looking slightly surprised. ‘She hasn’t been prepped or anything.’

Before any autopsy examination, the body needs to be prepared for the post mortem — undressed, then sprayed with fungicide and thoroughly washed with disinfectant soap. That job usually fell to the morgue orderlies, but their shift wouldn’t start for at least another hour and a half.

‘It’s OK,’ Doctor Hove replied. ‘I’ll prep the body myself, it’s not a problem.’

‘You’re the boss,’ the attendant said, noting something down on a notepad. ‘Would you like me to find you an assistant for the autopsy? I can probably find you one while you’re prepping the body.’

‘No need. I’ll be fine on my own.’

After scrubbing up and disinfecting her hands, Doctor Hove made her way to Autopsy Theater One. The body of Nicole Wilson had already been wheeled in and transferred to one of the two stainless-steel tables that occupied the middle of the spotlessly clean, white linoleum floor.

Nicole Wilson was lying on her back, arms loosely resting by her side. Livor mortis, the discoloration of the body by the settling of blood, showed that the body had most probably been moved after death. She had not been killed in the location where she was found. Rigor mortis had also come and gone, which told the doctor that she’d been dead for over twenty-four hours. Her facial features were now essentially unrecognizable.

Doctor Hove first freed the body from its shoes. There were no cuts to Nicole Wilson’s feet or toes, but the doctor immediately noticed the tiny abrasions and color change to her ankles — ligature marks. Next, she removed the CSULA sweatshirt, which had bits of grass and dirt stuck to it. As each item of clothing was taken from the body, it was carefully placed into a clear-plastic evidence bag, which would later be handed over to forensics for further examination. Blood, urine and hair samples would also be collected, and oral and anal swabs taken.

As the doctor removed the victim’s sweatshirt, the first thing she noticed were the ligature marks on the woman’s wrists. Not surprising, since she had already found restraint marks on her ankles.

Using a pair of safety scissors, Doctor Hove proceeded to slice open Nicole Wilson’s T-shirt. As it came undone, she paused, her eyes slowly running up and down the woman’s torso.

‘Jesus Christ!’

After reaching for her digital camera and documenting everything, Doctor Hove finished undressing the body, sprayed it with fungicide and used a hose with a powerful water jet to methodically wash and disinfect every inch of it. With that over, she turned on her digital voice recorder and started the official examination.

She began by stating the date and time, followed by the case number. After that, she described the general state of the body. Now it was time to move into all the grisly details.

Using a magnifying headset with a directional light, Doctor Hove began by checking the skin around the neck. There were no suspicious bruises. A quick touch-examination also revealed that neither Nicole Wilson’s larynx nor her trachea had collapsed. The hyoid bone in her neck also didn’t seem to be fractured. There was absolutely nothing to suggest that she had been strangled by hand, or any other method.

Using her thumb and index finger, Doctor Hove pulled open Nicole’s eyelids and, with the help of the magnifying headset, carefully studied her eyes. As expected, her corneas were cloudy and opaque, but what the doctor was looking for were minute red specks that could be dotting her eyes or their lids, called petechiae. These tiny hemorrhages in blood vessels can occur anywhere in the body, and for a number of reasons, but when they occur in the eyes and on the eyelids it’s usually due to blockage of the respiratory system — suffocation or asphyxiation.

Doctor Hove saw none. It also didn’t seem like Nicole Wilson had died from lack of oxygen.

Her next step was to check all of Nicole’s cavities for any signs of aggression, sexual or otherwise. She began with her mouth, pulling it open and first checking for any trauma or skin and teeth color alteration. Certain poisons will leave a clear indication of having being used by either burning the fragile skin inside the victim’s mouth, or leaving a residue that will discolor the teeth and tongue, or both. Doctor Hove found no primary indications of poisoning, but she’d have to wait for the results from the toxicology tests to be completely sure.

She was about to move on when something caught her attention.

‘Wait a second,’ she whispered to herself, turning the light on her magnifying headset back on and squinting at the inside of Nicole Wilson’s mouth. ‘What do we have here?’

She examined the victim’s throat for a moment.

‘I’ll be damned.’

Carefully, the doctor moved the head left, then right, then down a fraction. She had no doubt about it, there was definitely something lodged in the victim’s throat.

From the instrument table to her right she grabbed a digital camera and proceeded to photograph the object undisturbed, snapping three shots from different angles. Once that was done, she retrieved a pair of surgical fishing forceps and inserted them into Nicole’s mouth. It took her just a couple of seconds to pinch the edge of the object she could see. It looked like a thick piece of paper. Cautiously, she began extracting it from the throat.

‘What the hell?’

What at first looked like a paper fragment just kept on coming — three, four, five inches long before it finally came loose. The piece of paper had been tightly rolled up into a tube, then inserted into Nicole Wilson’s throat.

Doctor Hove deposited the rolled-up piece of paper on to an aluminum tray on the table, grabbed her camera once again, and snapped a couple more shots.

She put the camera down and very slowly started to unroll the paper tube.

Despite everything she’d seen in all her years as a pathologist and medical examiner, and she’d seen things that defied belief, as she held the unrolled tube of paper in her hands, Doctor Hove had to pause for breath.

‘Oh fuck!’