Trace

11

"Excuse me," says a young man who is suited up in purple scrubs, face J_-/shield and mask, and hair and shoe covers, and double pairs of latex gloves. He looks like a parody of an astronaut as he moves closer to Scarpetta. "What do you want us to do with her dentures?" he asks.

Scarpetta starts to explain that she doesn't work here, but words vanish before they leave her brain and she finds herself staring at the obese dead woman as two people, also suited up as if expecting a plague, tuck her inside a body pouch on a gurney sturdy enough to bear her enormous weight.

"She has dentures," the young man in purple scrubs says, this time to Fielding. "We put them in a carton and then forgot to put them inside the bag before we sewed her up."

"You don't want them inside the bag." Scarpetta decides to handle this amazing problem herself. "They need to go back inside her mouth. The funeral home, the family, will want them inside her mouth. She would probably appreciate being buried with her teeth."

"So we don't need to open her up and get the bag," says the man in purple. "Whew, that's good."

"Forget the bag," Scarpetta tells him. "You never want to put dentures in the bag," she says of the sturdy transparent plastic bag that is sewed up inside the obese dead woman's empty chest cavity, the bag that contains her sectioned organs, which were not returned to their original anatomical positions, because it isn't the forensic pathologist's job to put people back together again, nor is it possible, but it would be rather much like returning a stew to the condition of a cow. "Where are her dentures?" Scarpetta asks.

"Right over there." The young man in purple scrubs points to a countertop on the nthcr side of the autopsy suite. "With her paperwork."

Fielding wants nothing to do with this lobotomized problem and completely ignores the man in purple, who looks too young to be a rotating medical student and likely is another soldier from Fort Lee. He might have a high school education and is spending time at the OCME because his military duty requires that he learn to handle the war dead. Scarpetta is inclined to say, but doesn't, that even soldiers blown up by grenades would like their dentures to go home with them, preferably inside their mouths, if they still have mouths.

"Come on," she says to the Fort Lee soldier in purple. "Let's go take a look."

She accompanies him across the tile floor, passing another gurney that was rolled out moments earlier, this one bearing a gunshot victim, a young black man with strong arms that are covered with tattoos and folded stiffly across his chest. He has goose bumps, a postmortem reaction of his erector pili muscles to rigor mortis that makes him look cold or frightened or both. The Fort Lee soldier picks up the plastic carton from the countertop and starts to hand it to Scarpetta, then notices that she isn't wearing gloves.

"I guess I'd better get dressed again," she says, passing on green Nitrile gloves, opting instead for a pair of old-fashioned latex ones that she whips out of a box on a nearby surgical cart. She works her hands into the gloves and takes the dentures out of the container.

She and the soldier walk back across the tile floor, toward the toothless dead woman.

"You know, next time you have a problem," Scarpetta says to the young soldier in purple, "you can just place the dentures with the personal effects and let the funeral home deal with them. Don't ever put them in the bag. This lady's awfully young for dentures."

"I think she was on drugs."

"Based on what?"

"Someone said so," the soldier in purple replies.

"I see." Scarpetta considers, leaning over the enormous sutured-up body on the gurney. "Vasoconstrictor drugs. Like cocaine. And out fall the teeth."

"I always wondered why drugs do that," says the soldier in purple. "You new here?" He looks at her.

"No, just the opposite," Scarpetta replies, working her fingers into the dead woman's mouth. "Very old around here. Just visiting."

He nods, confused. "Well, you look like you know what you're doing," he says awkwardly. "I sure am sorry about not putting her dentures back in. I feel real stupid. I hope nobody tells the chief." He shakes his head and blows out a loud breath. "That's all I need. He don't like me anyway."

Rigor mortis has come and gone, and the obese dead woman's jaw muscles do not resist Scarpetta's prying fingers, but the gums don't want the dentures for the simple reason that they don't fit.

"They aren't hers," Scarpetta says, placing the dentures back into the carton and returning it to the soldier in purple. "They're too big, much too big. Maybe a man's? Was there someone else just in here with dentures and maybe there's been a mixup?"

The soldier is baffled yet happy with the news. This isn't his fault. "I don't know," he says. "Sure have been a lot of people in and out of here. So these aren't hers? Just a good thing I didn't try to cram them in her mouth."

Fielding has noticed what is going on and suddenly is there, staring down at the bright pink synthetic gums and white porcelain teeth inside the plastic carton that the soldier in purple is holding. "What the hell?" Fielding blurts out. "Who mixed this up? You put the wrong case number on this carton?"

He glares at the soldier in purple, who can't be more than twenty years old, his short light-blond hair peeking out from under the blue surgical cap, his wide brown eyes unnerved behind scratched safety glasses.

"I didn't label it, sir," he addresses Fielding, his superior officer. "I just know it was here when we started working on her. And she didn't have no teeth in her mouth, not when \vc started on her."

"Here? Where is here?"

"On her cart." The soldier indicates the cart bearing the surgical instruments for table four, also known as the Green Table. Dr. Marcus's morgue still uses the Scarpetta system of keeping track of instruments with strips of colored tape, ensuring that a pair of forceps or rib cutters, for example, don't end up elsewhere in the morgue. "This carton was on her cart, then somehow it got moved over there with her paperwork." He looks across the room to the countertop where the dead woman's paperwork is still neatly spread out.

"There was a view on this table earlier," Fielding says.

"That's right, sir. An old man who died in bed. So maybe the teeth are his?" says the soldier in purple. "So it was his teeth on the cart?"

Fielding looks like an angry blue jay flapping across the autopsy suite and yanking open the enormous stainless-steel door of the cooler. He vanishes inside a rush of cold dead-smelling air and reemerges almost instantly with a pair of dentures that he apparently removed from the old man's mouth. Fielding holds them in the palm of a gloved hand stained with the blood of the tractor driver who ran over himself.

"Anybody can see these are too damn small for that guy's mouth," Fielding complains. "Who stuck these in that guy's mouth without checking that they fit?" he asks the noisy, crowded, epoxy-sealed room with its four bloody wet steel tables, and x-rays of projectiles and bones on bright light boxes, and steel sinks and cabinets, and long countertops covered with paperwork, personal effects, and streamers of computer-generated labels for cartons and test tubes.

The other doctors, the students, soldiers, and today's dead have nothing at all to say to Dr. Jack Fielding, second in command to the chief. Scarpetta is shocked in a sick, disbelieving way. Her former flagship office is out of control and so is everybody in it. She glances at the dead tractor driver, half undressed on his red-clay-stained sheet, on top of a gurney, and she stares at the dentures in Fielding's blood-stained gloved hands.

"Scrub those things before you put them in her mouth,' she cant help but say as Fielding hands the misplaced dentures to the soldier in purple. "You don't need another person's DNA, or other people's DNA, in her mouth," she tells the soldier. "Even if this isn't a suspicious death. So scrub her dentures, his dentures, everybody's dentures."

She snaps off her gloves and drops them in a bright orange biohazard trash bag. As she walks off, she wonders what has become of Marino, and she overhears the soldier in purple saying something, asking something, apparently wanting to know exactly who Scarpetta is and why she is visiting and what just happened.

"She used to be the chief here," Fielding says, failing to explain that the OCME wasn't run anything like this back then.

"Holy shit!" the soldier exclaims.

Scarpetta hits a large wall button with her elbow, and stainless-steel doors swing open wide. She walks into the dressing room, past cabinets of scrubs and gowns, then through the women's locker with its toilets and sinks and fluorescent lights that make mirrors unkind. She pauses to wash her hands, noticing the neatly written sign, one she posted herself when she was here, that reminds people not to leave the morgue with the same shoes on that they wore in it. Don't track biological menaces onto the corridor carpet, she used to remind her staff, and she feels sure nobody cares about that or anything else anymore. She takes off her shoes and washes the bottoms of them with antibacterial soap and hot water and dries them off with paper towels before walking through another swinging door to the not-so-sterile grayish-blue-carpeted corridor.

Directly across from the women's locker room is the glass-enclosed chief medical examiner's suite. At least Dr. Marcus exerted the energy to redecorate. His secretary's office is an attractive collection of cherry stained furniture and colonial prints, and her computer's Screensaver shows several tropical fish swimming endlessly on a vivid blue screen. The secretary is out, and Scarpetta knocks on the chief's door.

"Yes," his voice faintly sounds from the other side.

She opens the door and walks into her former corner office, and avoids looking around but can't help taking in the tidiness of the bookcases and the top of Dr. Marcus's desk. His work space looks sterile. It is only the rest of the medical examiner's wing that is in chaos.

"Your timing is perfect," he says from his leather swivel chair behind the desk. "Please sit and I'll brief you on Gilly Paulsson before you take a look at her."

"Dr. Marcus, this isn't my office anymore," Scarpetta says. "I realize that. It's not my intention to intrude, but I'm concerned."

"Don't be." He looks at her with small, hard eyes. "You weren't brought here as some sort of accreditation team." He folds his hands on top of the ink blotter. "Your opinion is sought in one case and one case only, the Gilly Paulsson case. So I strongly encourage you not to overtax yourself with how different you might find things here. You have been gone a long time. What? Five years. And during most of that period of time, there was no chief, just an acting chief. Dr. Fielding, as a matter of fact, was the acting chief when I got here just a few months ago. So yes, of course, things are very different. You and I have very different management styles, which is one of the reasons the Commonwealth hired me."

"It's been my experience that if a chief never spends time in the morgue, there will be problems," she says, whether he wants to hear it or not. "If nothing else, the doctors sense a lack of interest in their work, and even doctors can get careless, lazy, or dangerously burned out and undone by the stress of what they see every day."

His eyes are flat and hard like tarnished copper, his mouth fixed in a thin line. Behind his balding head, the windows are as clean as air and she notices that he has replaced the bulletproof glass. The Coliseum is a brown mushroom in the distance, and a dreary drizzle has begun to fall.

"I can't turn a blind eye to what I see, not if you want my help," she says. "I don't care if it is one case and one case only, as you put it. Certainly you must know all things are used against us in court and elsewhere. Right now, it's the elsewhere that worries me."

"I'm afraid you're talking in riddles," Dr. Marcus replies, his thin face staring coldly at her. "Elsewhere? What is elsewhere?"

"Usually scandal. Usually a lawsuit. Or worst of all, a criminal case that is destroyed by technicalities, by evidence that is ruled inadmissible because of impropriety, because of flawed procedures, so there is no court. There is no trial."

"I was afraid this was going to happen," he says. "I told the commissioner what a bad idea this was."

"I don't blame you for telling him that. No one wants a former chief reappearing to straighten up…"

"I warned the commissioner that the last thing we needed was a disgruntled former employee of the Commonwealth dropping by to fix things," he says, picking up a pen and setting it down again, his hands nervous and angry.

"I don't blame you for feeling…"

Especially crusaders," he says coldly. "They're the worst. Nothing worse than a crusader unless it is a wounded one."

"Now you're getting…"

But here we are. So let's make the best of it, shall we?" I would appreciate your not interrupting me," Scarpetta says. "And if you're calling me a wounded crusader, then I'll choose to accept that as a compliment and we'll move along to the subject of dentures."

He stares at her as if she has gone mad.

"I just witnessed a mix-up in the morgue," she says. "The wrong dentures with the wrong decedent. Carelessness. And too much autonomy for young Fort Lee soldiers who have no medical training and in fact are here to learn from you. Suppose some family gets their loved one returned to the funeral home, and there's an open casket and the dentures are missing or don't fit, you have the beginning of a disintegration that is hard to stop. The press loves stories like that, Dr. Marcus. You mix up those dentures in a homicide case, and you've just given the defense attorneys quite a gift, even if the dentures have absolutely nothing to do with anything."

"Whose dentures?" he asks, scowling. "Fielding is supposed to be supervising."

"Dr. Fielding has too much to do," she replies.

"So now we get to that. Your former assistant." Dr. Marcus rises from his chair. He does not tower over the desk, not that Scarpetta ever did because she isn't tall either, but he seems small as he erupts from behind the desk and moves past the table with a microscope shrouded in plastic. "It's already ten o'clock," he says, opening his office door. "Let's get you started on Gilly Paulsson. She's in the decomp fridge and it's best you work on her in that room. No one will bother you there. I suppose you've decided to re-autopsy."

"I'm not doing this without a witness," Scarpetta says.