Judging Time

37

At 3:31 P.M., Rosa Washington was alone in the women's room on the second floor. About twenty minutes earlier she'd finished doing the autopsy of a homeless woman who'd died of exposure in a doorway of a vacant building and gone unnoticed for some four days. Rosa had finished up, showered, and changed her clothes, but now she was on another floor, washing her hands again.

For her, the hardest thing about her job was the smell of the dead. She washed and washed, particularly her hands, but never felt cleansed of the stink. Nothing else about the dead traveled home with her. Not the colors—the greens and purples and blacks of skin stretched to the bursting point, the body fluids that streamed out like an endless polluted river, or the texture of tissue and fat so long dead it had turned into tallow. Neither was she much distressed by half-rotted corpses dressed in the rankest rags, or mummified babies. She attacked each former being with the same zeal, proud of what she could reveal about them from their remains.

She met the larva that was laid by flies in the eyes and mouths of corpses within minutes of death with particularly avid interest. She actually thought of the puffy maggots that emerged from the larval stage to begin feasting only a few hours later as her friends. The maggots reproduced rapidly. By calculating the number of generations thronging into the soft, wet, open places on a corpse, Rosa could count the hours and days since death occurred. The maggots were only one of many clues and signposts that helped pinpoint time of death. The hours since life stopped and the decomposition of body tissues began could also be estimated by the body's temperature falling to that of the surrounding environment, by the patterns of reds and purples on the skin that showed how the blood settled in the body, and many other ways.

There was always a great hurry to establish the time of death. Among the myriad revelations provided by an autopsy, the law cared the most about how and when the person had died and who he was if they didn't already know. An autopsy took from two to six hours, depending on who was doing it and how careful a job the medical examiner did. If the medical examiner's office was overwhelmed with bodies, Rosa could do an autopsy in two hours flat. She was especially proud of the six she'd done in a particularly active summer weekend back in '92.

The only hard part for her was living with the intensity of the smell. It was impossible to describe the stench of the dead, the way it invaded a space, penetrated every porous surface, and persisted despite all efforts to eradicate it.

Rosa dried her hands afld glanced at herself in the mirror. She didn't look like a regal African beauty now. Her hair was wispy and wild. Her eyes were red in a face that wore no makeup and offered no other relief from gloom. Oddly, she felt bereft, almost as if she'd just lost her best friend. But she knew that no friend of hers had died. She looked tired, sad, almost beaten. And this enraged her, for she was a success, not a failure. She was one of the world's winners. Her face, beautiful by anyone's standards, told her so. Her education and status in life told her so. But her face also told her she suddenly felt insecure, even frightened for the first time in her career, and she didn't like the feeling.

More than 111 hours had passed since she'd responded to the 911 call and seen Merrill Liberty and Tor Petersen lying blood-soaked in a puddle outside

Liberty's restaurant. For male corpses she had no pity. For Petersen she had felt no pity. But the death of the Liberty woman unnerved her. Merrill Liberty had died only minutes before Rosa's arrival. Her blood was still steaming in the cold when Rosa squatted beside her. That's how close to life she'd been. Rosa almost felt contaminated by the evil of the woman's death.

Rosa had not expected to be lucky enough to do either of the autopsies. Like many medical examin-ers—those earthly revealers of the sins and secrets of the formerly living—Abraham was a showman. He had to do all the big cases himself. He might not have given in to her pleas if the mayor and the police commissioner—best buddies now that the homicide numbers were way down in New York—had not insisted on getting the autopsies of the two VIPs done immediately, if not sooner. And because no other medical examiner was available, Rosa had done them. Both of them.

But now she felt besieged by enemies. Potential trouble was everywhere. People wanted her to lose her job, and her job was everything to her. It wouldn't be so hard to destroy her, for there was no doubt that things happened when everybody was so damned pressed for time. Procedures went wrong. Tests went wrong. Nobody understood how understaffed they were now that the city had forced so many people to take early retirement. No one knew how hard it was to replace even one or two competent people, much less four or five. Their staff was cut . to the bone. Rosa sniffed her fingers. They smelled of soap, but she lingered in the bathroom to wash them again anyway. It was winter, the worst time for her hands. Already her skin was brittle and dry, not moist and soft as it should be.

After she opened the corpses up, Rosa did not know everything about how their former owners had lived, but she knew far more than they ever had. She could tell by a person's bones and muscles how they'd

walked, held their tools, even what tools they'd used. She knew their filthy habits by the condition of their organs, the discoloration on their skin. She could see the damage done. She knew about their sexual preferences and what illnesses they'd had, and maybe didn't even know they'd had. Rosa knew whether they'd gone to the doctor and the dentist, whether they'd played tennis or golf, or nothing at al. She knew how well they'd eaten, when they'd eaten last, and often what it had been.

The doctor with the most intimate physical knowledge of a person's life was the doctor who examined him when that life was over. Rosa was proud of the specialty no matter who made jokes about how medical examiners were forced into the specialty because they were not good enough to treat the living, and worse in her case, she wouldn't be even a medical examiner but for affirmative action. She knew people said that. It hurt her even now.

From time to time (okay, maybe a hundred times a year) people told her she was too sensitive. As if she shouldn't mind a dumb cop's accusing her of missing a cause of death, as if she shouldn't think the color of her skin was the reason the dumb cop had suggested it. But how could she not make the leap to race being at the bottom of every problem when she couldn't even walk into a department store without a security guard's eyeing her nervously. Sometimes they even followed her around right up to the moment she produced her credit card, thinking every second she was in the store that she was there not to buy, but to steal. Just because her skin wasn't white. Sure, she was too sensitive.

Sometimes Rosa liked to bug those security guards just a little by carrying an item around before she finally paid for it or putting it down and walking away. She liked to tease them with their own doubts about her honesty. But she did not really want anyone to challenge and hurt her, and always had her credit card in her hand just in case.

The truth was she'd done a damn good job on Petersen. The best. But she couldn't help feeling threatened by April Woo anyway. She thought of Petersen's nose so badly damaged from cocaine. It made her furious. He'd been white, rich, and just as stupid and sick as the poorest street kid. The man deserved to die.

Rosa ran her fingers through her hair but didn't stop to comb it back in place. She was going to put a surgical cap over her head and didn't give a damn, anyway. Absently, she washed her hands one last time, soaping well past her wrists. She rinsed, then cursed quietly because she'd already used the last of the towels. She was shaking her hands dry when the bathroom door opened and April Woo came in. The cop put her purse down on the next sink and, smelling like a mandarin orange, she took out a lipstick and refreshed her lips.

Rattled by the person she suspected of trying to destroy her, Rosa frowned into the mirror.

Woo put the lipstick away in her purse and smiled at Rosa's image in the mirror. "Hi, Rosa, I'm glad I caught up with you."

"You came here looking for me?" Rosa's tired eyes ignited.

"Yes, I wanted to apologize for last night."

"You followed me into the ladies' room to apologize?" she said sharply. "Is that your normal procedure, Sergeant, to trap your suspects on the can?"

"Uh, I'll apologize in your office if you'd prefer."

"I have an autopsy to perform," Rosa said coldly. She turned her back to the mirror and leaned against the sink, her heart beating. I didn't do anything wrong, she told herself. Why panic like this?

"Anywhere you'd like," the cop said.

"I don't think you're here to apologize." Rosa surveyed the dangerous adversary. The cop's lips were red. She wore a short red jacket over a black skirt buttoned from the waist to the knee. At her waist was a automatic. Rosa knew firsthand how much damage those guns could do. At April's knee, her skirt flared open to reveal her legs.

Rosa sniffed. She didn't think much of the looks of Asian women, even though they were highly thought of by both black men and white ones. Very few were genuinely gorgeous. More often, they had broad flat faces with deep-set, snakelike eyes. They were bow-legged and too long-waisted. Their butts were flat and they had no bosom. Asian women were not generously proportioned and open like African women. They were closed and secretive. Rosa knew from the ones who worked in the lab, from the ones with whom she'd gone to medical school, that you couldn't guess what an Asian was thinking. They were tricky and not to be trusted. Rosa didn't think she was prejudiced. She just didn't like them.

Sergeant April Woo looked like some kind of geisha with a gun as she shook her black helmet of shiny straight hair in denial. "You have a great many supporters, Doctor. I got your message. It's clear I was out of line last night. I'm sorry about that."

"Really? Why don't I believe you then?"

"I'm sure you know how much pressure we're under right now to clear this case. It's been almost a week. I guess the urgency to make an arrest was getting to me yesterday."

"What about today?"

"It's still getting to me. We've got three suspects, two of them are missing, and we've got to plug these holes."

Rosa didn't say anything.

"And Petersen's dying first kind of changed the way we had to look at the thing."

"Ducci's an asshole," Rosa muttered.

"We can't change what the bloodstains tell," April replied softly. "Got to work with the evidence."

Rosa made a face. "Okay, you've said you're sorry. What else do you want?"

"Oh, nothing. That was it."

"You have something else on your mind. I can see it sitting there on your brain, like a tumor the size of an apple."

you must be good if you can see that without an X ray." April moved a step toward the door.

"Who are the suspects? What's the theory now?"

The cop paused. "Oh, could be Liberty, could be Petersen's driver. We're still troubled about the murder weapon. We haven't found anything yet. As you indicated for us, measurements of the wound show that the hole in Merrill Liberty'S throat is smaller and neater than what we'd get with an ice pick. We're trying to figure out what kind of knife blade, or needle, might make a round hole that size."

"I suggest a knitting needle. They come in all sizes. Did the Liberty woman knit? He could have used one of her-"

April shook her head. "If she was a knitter there was no evidence in her apartment."

"He could have killed her with a knitting needle," Rosa said again. She liked that idea.

"That's a thought I hadn't had. Thank you, I'll check it out." The cop turned to the bathroom door again.

"No problem."

Rosa peered in the mirror. She sighed, then spoke again. "Who's the third suspect?"

"Daphne Petersen."

"Don't fuck with me, April. Petersen died of natural causes. It's in my report."

April shrugged and headed toward the door. "It was just a thought."

Rosa calmed down fast. "Anything else you want to know?" she asked, eager to make amends.

Again April paused before she got to the door. "Well, a lot of things. But probably nothing you can help us with."

"Maybe I can. What do you need?"

"A miracle."

"Well, I have a feeling you'll get one today, and then we can all get on with our lives." Rosa sighed, knowing it was wishful thinking.

"That would be nice. I wouldn't mind a day off," April murmured.

"No, I'm sure of it, and we women have to support each other, stick together more, know what I mean?' '

An Asian lab technician with heavy black eyeglass frames and permed hair pushed the door open, forcing April to move aside. She had a cup in her hand, nodded curtly at Rosa and April, then filled the cup at the sink.

Rosa frowned at her. "I wouldn't drink that if I were you, Marsha," she said.

"I wasn't planning to," the technician replied.

"Drink from the water fountain, not from the tap, don't forget," she admonished.

"Well, I've got to go now. Good talking to you." The cop opened the door and hurried off.

Rosa followed her out into the hall, thinking it hadn't been good talking to April at all. She was more tired than she'd been before. And now she had to go back downstairs to the stink chamber. She really needed a rest, but the next one was a five-year-old boy who'd possibly had his neck broken by his father. Rosa didn't want to keep him waiting.