Reliquary

= 2 =

LOUIE PADELSKY, Assistant Medical Examiner for the City of New York, glanced at the clock, feeling his gut rumble. He was, quite literally, starving. He’d had nothing but SlimCurve shakes for three days, and today was his day for a real lunch. Popeye’s fried chicken. He ran his hand over his ample gut, probing and pinching, thinking that there might be less there. Yup, definitely less there.

He took a gulp from his fifth cup of black coffee and glanced at the ref sheet. Ah—at last, something interesting. Not just another shooting, stabbing, or OD.

The stainless steel doors at the end of the autopsy suite banged open, and the ME nurse, Sheila Rocco, rolled in a brown corpse and laid it out on a gurney. Padelsky glanced at it, looked away, glanced back again. Corpse was the wrong word, he decided. The thing on the gurney was little more than a skeleton, covered with shreds of flesh. Padelsky wrinkled his nose.

Rocco positioned the gurney under the lights and began hooking up the drainage tube.

“Don’t bother,” Padelsky said. The only thing that needed draining around here was his coffee cup. He took a large swallow, tossed it into the wastebasket, checked the corpse’s tag against the ref sheet and initialed it, then pulled on a pair of green latex gloves.

“What have you brought for me now, Sheila?” he asked. “Piltdown Man?”

Rocco frowned and adjusted the lights above the gurney.

“This one must’ve been buried for a couple of centuries, at least. Buried in shit, too, from the smell of it. Perhaps it’s King Shitankhamen himself.”

Rocco pursed her lips and waited while Padelsky roared with laughter. When he was finished, she silently handed him a clipboard.

Padelsky scanned the sheet, lips moving as he read the typed sentences. Suddenly, he straightened up. “Dredged out of Humboldt Kill,” he muttered. “Christ almighty.” He eyed the nearby glove dispenser, considered putting on an extra pair of gloves, decided against it. “Hmm. Decapitated, head still missing… no clothing, but found with a metal belt around its waist.” He glanced over at the cadaver and spied the ID bag hanging from the gurney.

“Let’s have a look,” he said, taking up the bag. Inside was a thin gold belt with an Uffizi buckle, set with a topaz. It had already been run through the lab, he knew, but he still wasn’t allowed to touch it. He noticed the belt had a number on its back plate.

“Expensive,” Padelsky said, nodding toward the belt. “Maybe it’s Piltdown Woman. Or a transvestite.” And he roared again.

Rocco frowned. “May we show the dead a little more respect, Dr. Padelsky?”

“Of course, of course.” He hung the clipboard on a hook and adjusted the microphone that hung above the gurney. “Switch on the tape recorder, will you, Sheila darling?”

As the machine snapped on, his voice suddenly became clipped and professional. “This is Dr. Louis Padelsky. It’s August 2, 12:05 P.M. I am assisted by Sheila Rocco, and we’re commencing examination of”—he glanced at the tag—“Number A-1430. We have here a headless corpse, virtually skeletonized—Sheila, will you straighten it out?—perhaps four feet eight inches in length. Add the missing skull and you probably got someone five foot six, seven. Let’s sex the skeleton. Pelvic rim’s a little wide. Yup, it’s gynecoid; we’ve got a woman here. No lipping of the lumbar vertebrae, so she’s under forty. Hard to say how long she’s been submerged. There is a distinct smell of, er, sewage. The bones are a brownish orange color and look like they’ve been in mud for a long time. On the other hand, there is sufficient connective tissue to hold the corpse together, and there are ragged ends of muscle tissue around the medial and lateral condyles of the femur and more clinging to the sacrum and ischium. Plenty of material for blood typing and DNA analysis. Scissors, please.”

He snipped off a piece of tissue and slipped it into a bag. “Sheila, could you turn the pelvis over on its side? Now, let’s see… the skeleton is still mostly articulated, except of course for the missing skull. Looks like the axis is also missing… six cervical vertebrae remaining… missing the two floating ribs and the entire left foot.”

He continued describing the skeleton. Finally he moved away from the microphone. “Sheila, the rongeur, please.”

Rocco handed him a small instrument, which Padelsky used to separate the humeras from the ulna.

“Periosteum elevator.” He dug into the vertebrae, removing a few samples of connective tissue, cutting away at the bone. Then he pulled a pair of disposable plastic goggles over his head.

“Saw, please.”

She handed him a small nitrogen-driven saw and he switched it on, waiting a moment while the tachometer reached the correct rpm. When the diamond blade touched the bone, a high-pitched whine, like an enraged mosquito, filled the small room. Along with it came the sudden smell of bone dust, sewage, rotten marrow, and death.

Padelsky took sections at various points, which Rocco sealed in bags.

“I want SEM and stereozoom pictures of each microsection,” Padelsky said, stepping away from the gurney and turning off the recorder. Rocco wrote the requests on the Ziploc bags with a large black marker.

A knock sounded at the door. Sheila went to answer, stepped outside for a moment, then poked her head back in.

“They have a tentative ID from the belt, Doctor,” she said. “It’s Pamela Wisher.”

“Pamela Wisher, the society girl?” asked Padelsky, taking off the goggles and backing off a little. “Jeez.”

“And there’s a second skeleton,” she continued. “From the same place.”

Padelsky had moved to a deep metal sink, preparing to remove his gloves and wash up. “A second one?” he asked irritably. “Why the hell didn’t they bring it in with the first? I should have been looking at them side by side.” He glanced at the clock: one-fifteen already. Goddammit, that meant no lunch until at least three. He felt faint with hunger.

The doors banged open and the second skeleton was wheeled under the bright light. Padelsky turned the tape recorder back on and went to pour himself yet another cup of coffee while the nurse did the prep work.

“This one’s headless, too,” Rocco said.

“You’re kidding, right?” Padelsky replied. He walked forward, glanced at the skeleton, then froze, coffee cup to his lips.

“What the—?” He lowered the cup and stared, open-mouthed. Laying the cup aside, he stepped up quickly to the gurney and bent over the skeleton, running the tips of his gloved fingers lightly over one of the ribs.

“Dr. Padelsky?” Rocco asked.

He straightened, went back to the tape recorder, and brusquely switched it off. “Cover it up and get Dr. Brambell. And don’t breathe a word about this”—he nodded at the skeleton—“to anyone.”

She hesitated, looking at the skeleton with a puzzled expression, her eyes gradually widening.

“I mean now, Sheila darling.”