Trace

13

The Decomposed Room is a small mortuary with a walk-in cooler and double sinks and cabinets, all in stainless steel, and a special ventilation system that sucks noxious odors and microorganisms out through an exhaust fan. Every inch of walls and floor is painted with non slip gray acrylic that is nonabsorbent and can withstand scrubbing and bleach.

The centerpiece of this special room is a single transportable autopsy table, which is nothing more than a cart frame with casters equipped with swivel wheels that have brakes, and a body tray that rolls on bearings, all of which is supposed to eliminate the need for human beings to lift bodies in the modern world, but in reality doesn't. People in the morgue still struggle with dead weight and always will. The table is sloped so it can drain when it is attached to the sink, but that won't be necessary this morning. There is nothing left to drain. Gilly Paulsson's body fluids were collected or washed down the drain two weeks ago when Fielding autopsied her the first time.

This morning, the autopsy table is parked in the middle of the acrylic painted floor, and Gilly Paulsson's body is inside a black pouch that looks like a cocoon on top of the shiny steel table. There are no windows in this room, none that open onto the outside, only a row of observation windows that were installed too high for anyone to see through them, a design flaw that Scarpetta didn't complain about when she moved into the building eight years ago because no one needs to observe what goes on in this room, where the dead are bloated and green and covered with maggots or burned so badly they look like charred wood.

She has just walked in, having spent a few minutes in the women's locker room to suit up in the appropriate bioha/ard gear. "I'm sorrv to interrupt your other case," she says to Fielding, and in her mind she sees Mr. Whitby in olive-green pants and his black jacket. "But I believe your boss really thought I was going to do this without you."

"How much did he brief you?" he asks from behind his face mask.

"Actually, he didn't," she says, working her hands into a pair of gloves. "I know nothing more than what he told me yesterday when he called me in Florida."

Fielding frowns and he has started to sweat. "I thought you were just in his office."

It occurs to her that this room might be bugged. Then she remembers when she was chief and tried out a variety of dictating equipment in the autopsy suite, all to no avail because there is too much background noise in the morgue and it tends to foil even the best transmitters and recorders. With that in mind, she moves to the sink and turns on the water, and it drums loudly and hollowly against steel.

"What's that for?" Fielding asks, unzipping the pouch.

"I thought you might like a little water music while we work."

He looks up at her. "It's safe to talk in here, I'm pretty sure. He's not that smart. Besides, I don't think he's ever been in the decomp room. He probably doesn't know where it is."

"It's easy to underestimate people you don't like," she says, helping him open the flaps of the pouch.

Two weeks of refrigeration have retarded decomposition, but the body is desiccating, or drying out, and on its way to being mummified. The stench is strong but Scarpetta doesn't take it personally. A bad smell is just another way the body speaks, no offense intended, and Gilly Paulsson can't help herself, not the way she looks or stinks or the fact that she is dead. She is pale and vaguely green and bloodless, her face emaciated from dehydration, her eyes open to slits, the sclera beneath the lids dried almost black. Her lips are dried brown and barely parted, her long blond hair tangled around her ears and under her chin. Scarpetta notes no external injuries to the neck, including any thar midit have been introduced at autopsy, such as the deadly sin of a buttonhole, which should never happen but does when someone inexperienced or careless is reflecting back tissue inside the neck to remove the tongue and larynx and accidentally pokes through the surface of the skin. An autopsy-induced cut to the neck is not easily explained to distraught families.

The Y incision begins at the ends of the clavicle and meets at the sternum, and travels down, taking a small detour around the navel and terminating at the pubis. It is sutured with twine that Fielding begins to cut with a scalpel, as if he is opening the seams of a hand-stitched rag doll, while Scarpetta picks up a file folder from a countertop and begins to glance through Gilly's autopsy protocol and the initial report of investigation. She was five foot three and weighed a hundred and four pounds and would have turned fifteen in February had she lived. Her eyes were blue. Repeatedly on Fielding's autopsy report are the words "within normal limits." Her brain, her heart, her liver, and her lungs, all of her organs were just what they should have been for a healthy young girl.

But Fielding did find marks that should now be even more apparent because the blood is drained from her body and any blood trapped in tissue due to bruising is vivid against her very pale skin. On a body diagram, he has drawn contusions on the tops of her hands. Scarpetta places the file back on the counter while Fielding lifts out the heavy plastic bag of sectioned organs from the chest cavity. She gets close to look at her and lifts one of her small hands. It is shriveled and pale, cold and damp, and Scarpetta holds it in her gloved hands and turns it over, looking at the bruise. The hand and arm are limp. Rigor mortis has come and gone, the body no longer stubborn, as if life is too far gone to resist death anymore. The bruise is deep red against the pallor of her ghostly white skin and is precisely on the top of her slender, shrunken hand, the redness spreading from the knuckle of her thumb to the knuckle of her little finger. A similar bruise is also on her other hand, her left hand.

"Oh yeah," Fielding says. "Weird, right? Like someone held her, maybe. But to do what?" He untwists a tie around the top of the bag, opening it, and the stench from the tan mush inside is horrific. "Shewww. Don't know what you're going to accomplish by going through this. But be my guest."

"Just leave it on the table and I'll pick through it in the bag. Somebody may have restrained her. How was she found? Describe the position of her body when she was found," Scarpetta says, walking over to the sink and finding a pair of thick rubber gloves that will reach almost to her elbows.

"Not sure. When Mom got home she tried to revive her. She says she can't remember whether Gilly was facedown, on her back, on her side, whatever, and she hasn't a clue about her hands."

"What about livor?"

"Not a chance. She wasn't dead long enough."

When the blood is no longer circulating, it settles according to gravity and creates a pattern of deep pinkness and blanching where the surfaces of the body touch whatever is pressing against them. As much as one always hopes to get to the dead in a hurry, there are advantages with delays. A few hours will do, and livor mortis and rigor mortis set in and reveal the position the body was in when it died, even if the living come along later and move things around or change their stories.

Scarpetta gently pulls open Gilly's bottom lip, checking for any injuries that might have been caused by someone pressing a hand over her mouth to silence her or by pushing her face into the bed to smother her.

"Help yourself, but I looked," Fielding says. "No other injuries that I could find."

"And her tongue?"

"She didn't bite herself. Nothing like that. I hate to tell you where her tongue is."

''I think 1 can guess,' she says, dipping her hands inside the bag of frigid, soupy organ sections and feeling her way through them.

Fielding is rinsing his gloved hands in the vigorous stream of water thundering into the metal sink. He dries them with a towel. "I notice Marino didn't come along for the ride."

"I don't know where he is," she says, not particularly happy about it.

"He never was much for decomposed bodies."

"I would worry about anybody who likes them."

"And kids. Anybody who likes dead kids," Fielding adds, leaning against the edge of the counter, watching her. "I hope you find something, because I can't. Frustrates the hell out of me."

"What about petechial hemorrhages? Her eyes are in grim shape, too grim for me to tell anything at this point."

"She was pretty congested when she came in," Fielding replies. "Hard to tell if she had petechial hemorrhages, but I didn't notice any."

Scarpetta envisions Gilly's body when it first arrived at the morgue, when she had been dead only hours, her face congested red, her eyes red. "Pulmonary edema?" she asks.

Scarpetta has found the tongue. She walks over to the sinks and rinses it, patting it dry with a small white terry-cloth towel from an especially cheap batch purchased by the state. Rolling a surgical lamp close, she turns it on and bends it near the tongue. "You got a lens?" she asks, patting the tongue again with the towel and adjusting the light.

Coming up." He opens a drawer, finds a magnifying glass, and gives it to her. "See anything? I didn't."

"Does she have any history of seizures?"

"Not according to what I've been told."

"Well, I don't see any injury." She is looking for evidence that Gilly might have bitten her tongue. "And you swabbed her tongue, the inside of her mouth?"

"Oh yeah. I swabbed her everything," Fielding says, returning to the counter and leaning against it again. "I didn't find anything obvious. Preliminarily, the labs haven't found anything to indicate sexual assault. I don't know about whatever else they've found, if anything yet."

"It says in your CME-1 that her body was clothed in pajamas when it came in. The top was inside out."

"That sounds right." He picks up the file and starts flipping through it.

"You photographed the hell out of everything." She doesn't ask, simply verifies what should be accepted as routine.

"Hey," he says, laughing. "Who taught my sorry ass?"

She gives him a quick look. She taught him better than this, but she doesn't say it. "I'm happy to report you didn't miss anything on the tongue." She drops it back into the bag, where it rests on top of the other tan pieces and parts of Gilly Paulsson's rotting organs. "Let's turn her over. We're going to have to take her out of the pouch."

They do this in stages. Fielding grips the body under the arms and lifts while Scarpetta pulls the pouch out from under it, and then he rolls the body over on its face as she works the pouch out of the way, its heavy vinyl complaining in heavy rumbles as she folds it up and sets it back on the gurney. She and Fielding see the bruise on Gilly's back at the same time.

"I'll be damned," he says, unnerved.

It is a faint blush, somewhat round, and about the size of a silver dollar on the left side of the back, just below the scapula.

"I swear that wasn't here when I posted her," he says, leaning close, adjusting the surgical light to get a better look. "Shit. I can't believe I missed it."

"You know how it is," Scarpetta replies, and she doesn't tell him what she thinks. There is no point in criticizing him. It's too late for that. "Contusions always show up better after the body's been autopsied," she says.

She plucks a scalpel off the surgical cart and makes deep linear incisions in the reddish area, checking to see if the discoloration might be a postmortem artifact, and therefore superficial, but it's not. Blood in the underlying soft tissue is diffuse, usually meaning some trauma broke blood vessels while the body still had a blood pressure, and that's all a bruise or contusion is, just lots of little blood vessels that get smashed and leak. Fielding places a six-inch plastic rule next to rhe incised area of reddish flesh and starts taking photographs.

"What about her bed linens?" Scarpetta asks. "You checked them?"

"Never seen them. The cops took them, handed them over to the labs. Like I said, no seminal fluid. Damn, I can't believe I missed this bruise."

"Let's ask if they see any pulmonary edema fluid on the sheets, the pillow, and if so, have the stain scraped for ciliated respiratory epithelium. You find that, it supports a death by asphyxia."

"Shit," he says. "I don't know how I missed that bruise. Then you're thinking this is a homicide, for sure."

"I'm thinking someone got on top of her," Scarpetta says. "She's facedown and the person has a knee in her upper back, leaning on her with all his weight and holding her hands up and out above her head, palms down on the bed. That would explain the bruises on the tops of her hands and on her back. I'm thinking she's a mechanical asphyxia, a homicide, absolutely. Someone sits on your chest or back, and you can't breathe. It's a horrible way to die."