Play Dead

Chapter 4

Elise pulled into the morgue parking lot, spotting David Gould's black Honda. He must have been watching for her in his rearview mirror. As soon as she cut the engine of her old yellow SAAB wagon, he stepped out.

A bit under six feet, he was dressed in a loose-fitting suit that made her think of old movies. His hair wasn't short or long, the color somewhere between light and medium brown, a few sun-bleached streaks here and there from hours spent outdoors.

Fellow workers had commented on seeing him running ten miles beyond the city limits. In the dark. In the rain.

Running.

He seemed so perpetually disinterested in everything that it was hard to imagine he could have the ambition to go a mile, let alone ten.

Outwardly, he appeared fairly average, but Elise had occasionally caught something disconcerting in his blue eyes, something that made her uncomfortable and told her David Gould was in no way average.

He had that FBI ability to blend, and if you didn't look at him closely, he seemed like a lot of other men. The kind who wore a suit and worked in an office and exercised four times a week. Had a wife and a couple of kids and cooked out in the backyard on weekends. Went to church on Sundays and could even hide Easter eggs and play Santa Claus upon occasion. Gould could be that man, but he wasn't. Elise knew better.

He wasn't making any effort to become a part of the community. A part of anything. He wasn't winning any friends or influencing people within the Homicide Unit. He didn't seem to care whether anyone liked him or not. She got the idea he just wanted to be left alone.

There was a greenness, an immaturity, about him that Elise suspected was something else. She couldn't classify him in her mind. Who he was. What he wanted. Why he was there.

He had a story; she just didn't know what it was. Yet.

Had he been sent there as some kind of reprimand? Was he just biding his time until he could return to wherever he'd been before Cleveland?

Dr. John Casper was waiting for them. Elise had met him a few times and liked him. He was friendly, natural, unpretentious.

The young doctor's curly hair was messier than usual, his white lab coat wrinkled, looking as if he may have slept in it. His face was pale; his eyes had dark circles under them.

Elise introduced him to her partner, and they shook hands.

"Where's the body?" Gould asked, glancing around the dim hallway.

"Paramedics took him to the hospital."

"Then he's still alive," Elise said.

"If you want to call it that."

Dr. Casper told them about the rush of bodies they'd had, about how everyone was working overtime. "But I don't think it would have mattered if it had been slow. I still don't think anyone would have noticed." He motioned to some plastic chairs lined up against a light green wall.

While Elise and her partner settled themselves, Casper pulled a chair around so he sat facing them. The young doctor wiped a shaking hand across his face. "You have bodies do that sometimes."

"Do what?" Elise asked.

"Move. Expel air. It's unsettling as hell, but it happens."

He crossed an ankle over his knee and began fiddling with his tennis shoe, jabbing the plastic end of the lace into an eyelet. "In med school, we used to deliberately pump bodies full of air so that when a student cut into them-" He stopped short, as if suddenly remembering he wasn't speaking to fellow med students. "Sorry." He was sweating profusely. "I'm just so fucking-oh, shit."

"That's okay," Elise assured him. "Something like this has to be extremely upsetting."

Dr. Casper wiped his face with the sleeve of his lab coat. "I haven't slept in almost two days. I always get a little twitchy when I don't sleep."

"Were you performing the autopsy by yourself?" Elise asked.

"It was getting ready to storm, and I told Willy- he's a morgue assistant-I told him to go home." Dr. Casper laughed, as if something had just come to him. "If Willy had been here when it happened, we'd have a cutout in the wall the shape of a running man." He laughed a little more.

"Did you notice anything unusual about the body?" Gould asked, leaning forward. Forearms on his knees, hands clasped, he appeared almost interested.

"Well, it didn't smell, but I had the downdraft turned on. And contrary to popular belief, not all bodies smell."

Elise wasn't falling for that. Coroners spent so much time around stinking bodies that the mild ones no longer registered.

"And there weren't any signs of lividity. That's rare, but not impossible. I've seen it before. If a body's put in storage right away, it can look pretty fresh." Dr. Casper got an odd expression on his face. "Unless those weren't dead either."

Elise didn't have an answer; she was no good at false reassurance, and she could proudly boast that she'd never in her life uttered the phrase Everything's going to be fine.

She glanced at Gould. He lifted his eyebrows as if to say, This is your show. I'm only your sidekick.

Elise brushed away her impatience to focus on the situation at hand. "We'll need the name of the physician who pronounced him dead and signed the death certificate," she said.

"Already looked it up." Dr. Casper pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. "Dr. James Fritz."

"Know him?"

The young doctor shook his head. "Name's familiar. Never heard anything bad about him, anyway. And we always hear the bad stuff. Apparently the patient had a history of heart disease. Died, or appeared to have died, at home. Wife called 911. No vital signs. At the hospital, he was pronounced dead."

"What about the case three weeks ago?" Gould asked.

Elise was a little surprised he remembered the case of three weeks ago. They hadn't been involved in it. All Elise could recall was that the victim had died shortly after his "awakening."

"Different hospital, different doctor," Casper said. He tugged at his shoestring again. "I became a coroner because I like working with the dead, not the living," he said. "I've never wanted to have anybody's life in my hands."

"Any chance this guy will wake up and tell us what happened to him?" Elise asked.

"My guess is that he's in a vegetative state. He was only taking one shallow breath a minute. The brain needs more oxygen than that."

Gould linked his fingers together. "What about people who've been pulled from frigid water and been clinically dead for hours only to be revived?"

"Ask five doctors their definition of death and you'll get five different answers," Casper told them. "Without the use of expensive equipment, it's sometimes impossible to tell if someone is really dead. The standard for determining death is the irreversible cessation of spontaneous cardiopulmonary functions." He seemed to be regaining some of his confidence now that he was able to reference his medical school education. "We now know that the boundaries between life and death aren't so clear. Hundreds of papers have been written on the subject, with no definitive definition of death."

"Let me get this straight," Gould said. "Are you saying there isn't an established criterion for determining death?"

"The Uniform Determination of Death Act, UDDA, has outlined two specific criteria for determining death, dealing with circulatory and respiratory functions and brain death, but there are no cost-effective tests to measure those things," Casper told them. "The standard procedure is to observe the patient for two minutes for signs of breathing or heartbeat. Even with expensive testing using ECGs and contrast dye X rays, there have been cases of cold-water drownings that have proved even the most sophisticated equipment fallible."

Dr. Casper shook his head, amazed by what he was relating, even though he'd obviously studied the subject. "Here's an interesting tidbit for you: There's actually a group pushing for a standard for determining death that would allow for the burial of brain-dead bodies with spontaneous respiration and heartbeat."

"That's disturbing as hell," Gould muttered while Elise stared at the doctor in horror.

"What was that line from The Wizard of OzT Gould asked, looking up at the ceiling. "Something about not being merely dead?"

Casper thought a moment. " 'She's not only merely dead-she's really most sincerely dead.' "

Both men laughed, instant comrades.

Elise frowned. She didn't know who irritated her more, Casper, for so easily breaking through Gould's shell, or Gould, for instigating the inappropriate behavior. Or was she just jealous because they were having fun and she wasn't?

That possibility also irritated her.

As Gould caught her glare of disapproval, his laugh quickly fizzled to an aw-shucks crooked smile.

Why, the man was quite charming when he pulled himself out of his malaise.

"Actually," Casper said, managing to get control of himself, "the simplest and best way to know if someone is dead is to wait for him to rot."

Gould glanced at Elise, one eyebrow raised. "The medical field has come so far," he said dryly. "What will it be next? Holding three-day wakes so we can be sure our loved ones are actually dead?"

"Might not be a bad idea," Dr. Casper said, only half joking.

Elise thanked him for his time; then she and Gould headed for the hospital where Truman Harrison had been taken. As far as she knew, she'd never talked to a dead man before.