Night Shift

Chapter 3

Tuesday, December 7, 7:32 a.m.

“Okay, what’s the story?” Laurie answered after the first ring. As Jack fully anticipated, it was plainly obvious from the tone of her voice she was irritated. “Why in heaven’s name did you get up and leave without so much as a note on the fridge? Do I have to deal with three children when two is more than enough with everything else going on?”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you already at the OCME?”

“No, I stopped in at the St. Regis for their lovely French toast,” Jack said, and immediately regretted it.

“This is no time for sarcasm, my friend. You are in the proverbial doghouse, so don’t make it worse.”

“You’re right,” Jack said, controlling himself. “Yes, I’m at work. As an explanation, not an excuse, I’m feeling a little like the odd man out when you and your mother gang up on me about JJ’s Adderall issue and Emma’s schooling.”

“Neither of those issues has been decided,” Laurie said.

“I beg to disagree, according to your mother,” he said, “but listen, there is another issue here that you need to know about for multiple reasons. Are you prepared for a shock?”

There was a distinct pause that Jack allowed to continue and took a sip of his coffee as he waited. He felt it was important for her to have a moment to put aside her pique about his leaving that morning without a note, which Jack was willing to admit had been a bit adolescent.

“Is this a shock in relation to the OCME?” Laurie questioned finally. Her voice had changed, sounding more like the chief medical examiner.

“No, it is personal,” he said. “I hate to be the messenger, but your dear friend Sue Passero is downstairs in the cooler needing to be autopsied.”

“Good lord!” Laurie responded. “That’s awful news. What on earth happened?”

“Apparently, she suffered a terminal event in her car while still in the MMH garage.”

“Most likely a cardiac issue, with her history of diabetes,” she suggested.

“I didn’t know you knew, but that would be my guess, too. I didn’t know she was diabetic until I read the MLI’s report.”

“Sue kept it a secret,” Laurie said. “She didn’t want to be treated any differently because of it, and she swore me to secrecy. I didn’t know until we were in medical school.”

“I suppose I understand. I’d probably do the same.”

“Poor Abby, Nadia, and Jamal,” Laurie said sympathetically. Nadia and Jamal were Sue’s children, both of whom had followed Sue’s lead into medicine and were currently residents, one in surgery and the other in internal medicine like his mother. “This is going to be a terrible shock for them, but more so for Abby as the stay-at-home dad. He’d put his career on hold so Sue could pursue hers.”

“Well, maybe this can be an opportunity for him to go back to selling insurance, if he is inclined.”

“I sincerely doubt it,” she said. “Not after thirty years of being a house-husband.”

“Abby came in to make the ID,” Jack said. “Surprisingly, he apparently made a stink about not wanting an autopsy done, and Jennifer Hernandez had to be involved to explain why it was necessary.”

“Did Abby give a reason?”

“Yes, he said he was Muslim.”

“That’s surprising.”

“That’s what I said.”

“He did grow up in Egypt, so he probably was raised Muslim, but I had no idea he was practicing. Sue never mentioned it, nor did he. How did Jennifer handle the issue? Did she have to come in to speak with him?”

“No, she spoke with him by phone while he was here making the ID. She managed to get things ironed out, but Abby wasn’t a happy camper.”

“Well, let’s get the post done quickly,” Laurie said. “Speed and a timely burial are really the issues for Muslims. But an autopsy needs to be done. And I’m sure Nadia and Jamal will want some answers even if Abby doesn’t. You do the post as your first case and be quick about it.”

“Why me?” Jack complained. A cardiac event with a type 1 diabetic wasn’t going to suffice for what he had in mind to appease his anxieties. It was too forensically routine. Besides, he was reluctant to autopsy someone he knew socially. Such a circumstance had happened to him two years earlier, when Laurie had him autopsy one of the New York University pathology residents who had been rotating at the time through the OCME for a month of forensic training, and it had been a bit unsettling, which had surprised him. After all he’d been through personally, including feeling responsible for losing his first family in a plane crash, he thought he was immune to other peoples’ problems.

“Do it because you are there, because I can count on you to be discreet, and because you are probably the fastest and the most thorough prosector on staff. If Abby is truly religiously concerned, the faster it is done the better.”

“I was here early trying to find a challenging forensic case,” he said. “Doing a routine post is not going to cut it, so to speak.”

“Why on earth do you particularly need a forensically challenging case today?” she asked petulantly. She was now one hundred percent the harried CEO and not the marital partner.

“Why is the sky blue?” Jack questioned superciliously. “Don’t ask me unless you are willing to drop the Adderall issue, at least be open to discuss school for Emma, and, perhaps most important, propose some sort of a timetable for your mother to move back to Park Avenue. On top of everything else, we really shouldn’t tolerate her continued anti-vaccine stance and her refusal to get the Covid vaccine.”

“Let’s not bring up my mother while we’re on the phone!” Laurie stated, in a tone that precluded further discussion. “Not now! Besides, it’s only been three months since my father passed away. She’s doing the best she can, and she has been invaluable for the progress Emma has made. I’m sure you recognize that. I’m heading out the door as we speak and will be there shortly. Get Sue’s autopsy done, so I’ll be able to speak to Abby, Nadia, and Jamal.”

It took him a moment to recognize that she had disconnected as he had begun speaking to bring up Jennifer’s point about his not being the correct gender to do Sue Passero’s autopsy. When he realized he was talking into a dead phone, he pulled it away from his face and glanced at it to check if she had really hung up on him. Shaking his head in frustration, he was beginning to seriously rue his encouragement of Laurie to take on the job of chief medical examiner when it had been offered to her. At the time he had thought that she would change the chief’s role to give the MEs more investigative freedom, but it seemed as if the role was changing her.

“I heard part of that,” Jennifer said. “What was her take?”

“She wants me to do the post on Passero and get it done quickly. I tried to bring up the gender issue you mentioned, but she hung up on me. Do you mind if I do it?”

“Of course not,” she said. “Laurie’s the boss.”

“Yeah, right,” Jack added. He stood up. “But can you do me a favor? Can you try to find me a case to follow this one that might provide a bit of forensic challenge?”

“Funny you should ask,” Jennifer said, holding up a folder in her hand. “This one might fit the bill. It’s a supposed suicide with a contact gunshot wound in the left temple.”

“That hardly sounds exciting,” he said.

“True, but Janice Jaeger thinks otherwise.”

Janice Jaeger was one of the more senior and hence experienced night-shift MLI investigators, someone whose work Jack particularly highly respected. On numerous cases that she had investigated, she had anticipated his need for additional information so that it was available before he even knew to request it. Over the years she’d developed a sixth sense for what information was ultimately required to button up a difficult case.

“That sounds intriguing,” Jack said. He walked over to take the folder. “What was it that sparked Janice’s interest? Do you know?”

“I’m not sure, but she underlined that it involves a thirty-three-year-old female who was found naked.”

“Hmmm. Interesting! Was there a suicide note?”

“Apparently not.”

“I’ll take it,” Jack said without even looking at the folder’s contents.

“It’s yours,” Jennifer said. She picked up the next folder in front of her and slid out the contents.

He turned to Vinnie, who was hidden behind his beloved New York Post. After finishing with the coffee making, Vinnie had repaired to the second easy chair to commit to memory the day’s sporting minutiae. “Let’s go, big guy!” Jack said, trying to marshal his own enthusiasm. “We have to bang out this case in record time to satisfy the big boss.”

As Jack retrieved his mug of coffee, he noticed Vinnie hadn’t budged. As he’d done a hundred times over the years, he snatched away the mortuary tech’s paper and quickly exited the room, which elicited a string of curse words from Vinnie as he leaped up and followed. It was a ritual that they had repeated over and over, week in and week out. Even on more normal days, Jack was an early bird, eager to start work, and he always had to build a fire under Vinnie. Part of the routine involved Vinnie bellyaching that they were the only ones in the pit for at least an hour until other, more civilized people arrived well after 8:30 a.m.

“Okay,” Vinnie said as they waited for the rather slow back elevator to arrive. “Tell me, why did you jump on the suicide case? A contact temporal suicide wound sounds pretty routine to me.”

“Simply because the woman was found naked,” Jack said as he stepped into the car, holding the door open for Vinnie. “Women who kill themselves are never naked. The fact that this one was, means something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and we need to listen to the dead woman to find out what it is.”

“No shit,” Vinnie remarked, wrinkling his forehead in apparent disbelief. “Although I can’t imagine the issue is going to come up very often in normal conversation, it is an interesting tidbit to know. I have to say: You can learn something every day in forensics. It never stops.”

“That’s exactly why I love being an ME,” Jack said. “Back in my previous life as an ophthalmologist, before I saw the light, so to speak, every day was like every other day. In many ways, I didn’t know what I was missing. It’s also nice that you don’t have to worry about screwing up because the patients are already dead.”

Vinnie laughed uproariously despite having heard the joke more times than he could count. He was a great fan of dark humor.

Jack and Vinnie went into the locker room together and changed out of their street clothes, putting on scrubs, face masks, face shields, and other protective paraphernalia for working in the autopsy room. While Vinnie went into the pit to get everything ready for the case, including instruments and sample bottles and the like, Jack took a quick moment to scan Janice Jaeger’s investigative report on the suicide case. There was no doubt it was going to be forensically interesting, hopefully just what the doctor ordered as far as he was concerned. The deceased was the wife of an NYPD officer, and the gun was the husband’s service weapon, not an infrequent circumstance. The woman was found in bed, and it was the husband who called 911, supposedly after hearing the fatal shot.

While Vinnie was busy in the autopsy room, to speed things up Jack went into the walk-in cooler to get Sue’s body. Although the other MEs insisted on a sharp separation of their duties and those of the mortuary techs, Jack was more egalitarian, especially early in the morning when he was eager to get underway. The big walk-in cooler was a relatively new addition to the morgue and had been installed in the same area where the old bank of body drawers had been. The body drawers were the ones seen in movies and TV shows from which bodies would be pulled out on rollers. Although such storage was visually interesting, as a whole they take up too much space and were ultimately inconvenient, especially in mass-casualty situations. Instead, a large cooler that could accommodate more than twice the number of bodies with easier access had been designed.

Conveniently, all the shrouded new arrivals from the previous night were already on individual gurneys near the entrance. He needed to locate the correct body, which he knew wasn’t going to be difficult. All he had to do was raise the covering sheets enough to check out the respective faces. He certainly didn’t have to check the ID tags on the corpses’ toes. When he did find Sue on the fourth try, seeing her face gave Jack pause, more than he expected. Even in death, she was a physically impressive person.

For a moment Jack just stared at her. Her usually carefully coifed hair was plastered against her forehead and her face was paler than it had been in life. Her mouth was also distorted by an endotracheal tube and her red silk dress had been cut open to expose her chest where a few ECG connectors were still in place, all remnants of her having been through a major resuscitation attempt in the Emergency Department. “Sorry, my friend,” he whispered, his breath visible in the chilled air. Seeing her there in the cooler reminded him how fragile life was.

After replacing the sheet, Jack maneuvered the gurney out of the cooler, across the hallway, and into the autopsy room, which had been upgraded to an extent since his arrival at the OCME but still held remnants of its outdated self. There was no doubt that the largest, oldest medical examiner institution in the United States was in dire need of a new autopsy suite.

Vinnie had made great strides in getting ready with his usual efficiency, and Jack’s favorite autopsy table was ready with everything laid out. It was table number eight at the far end of the room, and Jack headed in its direction. He much preferred this table because its location far from the entrance meant he was less casually interrupted by fellow MEs coming in to do their cases. Jack wasn’t asocial in any way. Far from it. It was just that he liked to maintain his concentration with the fewest interruptions as possible. As Laurie had suggested, he was the fastest prosector on staff.

After the gurney came alongside the table, Vinnie pulled off the sheet. He then helped Jack lift the body onto the table.

“Wow!” Vinnie said with a grunt. “She is one solid lady.”

“She was quite an athlete in her day,” Jack said. He walked over to the X-ray view box and glanced at Sue’s film, which Vinnie had already put up.

“X-ray is all clear,” Vinnie called out. Over the years he’d become expert at reading X-rays to the point of occasionally catching small details that Jack might miss.

Jack nodded, then returned to table eight. Vinnie had a camera ready, and Jack took a few initial photos, and while he was doing so, he noticed what looked like a small bloodstain on the dress near Sue’s right hip. Pointing to it he asked, “Does this look like blood to you?”

“Could be,” Vinnie agreed after bending over to take a closer look. “It wouldn’t be surprising, either.”

“Get me some scissors anyway,” Jack said. He knew that body fluid stains, including blood, were certainly an occupational hazard for a doctor during a normal day in the clinic, but Sue was meticulous. Once he had a pair of dissecting scissors, he cut out a square of fabric containing the stain. He put it in a sample bottle that Vinnie held out. With that accomplished, they removed both the black Burberry winter coat whose arms had been cut open lengthwise during the resuscitation attempt, and then the red dress. Next to go were the underclothes. For thoroughness, all of it would be saved for a period of time as standard practice.

Once the body was completely naked, Jack and Vinnie together did a thorough external examination that included the entire body, talking as they did so to point out everything and anything abnormal. The only things of note were multiple injection sites on her abdomen and both thighs, some obviously older than others, as would be expected with an insulin-dependent diabetic. One on the right thigh appeared to be the most recent, with even a small amount of surrounding bruising. Jack took several close-up photos in his usual obsessive-compulsive, detail-oriented fashion. Later, when they removed the endotracheal tube after ascertaining it indeed was in the proper position in the trachea, Vinnie noted a laceration of the upper frenulum between the gum and the lip.

“It probably occurred during the intubation in the ED,” Jack said. “But good pickup!”

While Vinnie held the upper lip away from the teeth, Jack took a photo of the defect. Then, after removing the intravenous catheters, they were ready to go.

“Let’s not dillydally,” Jack said as he reached out toward Vinnie while glancing up at the wall clock. The tray with the instruments and all the sample bottles was on Vinnie’s side of the table. On Jack’s side was the camera and a pad for notes and diagrams. Picking up the scalpel, Vinnie jokingly slapped it into Jack’s hand the way he’d seen it done in movies during operations on live patients. They both laughed at the routine nature of what they were about to do, a procedure that normal people would find ghoulishly cringeworthy.