The son of a bitch is having fun. Hes enjoying himself. I hate him!
Her stomach acted up. The tiramisu that had tasted so delicious going down was on the verge of coming up.
He changed into scrubs and she followed him back into the autopsy room, girding for the moment when he exposed the corpse. Apparently, though, he had some setting up to do. He pulled over a small metal table holding a square of brown corkboard and arranged an assortment of instruments: clamps, knives, forceps, oddly shaped scissors, scalpels, extra blades, rulers, and a soup ladle.
That looks like a steak knife, she said, pointing to an instrument with a wooden handle and a six-inch blade.
Jake grinned. I had a colleague who gave two of them he took from an autopsy room to his wife as an anniversary present.
How romantic. Didnt he ever hear of Tiffanys little blue box, pretty white ribbon?
He handed her a pair of latex gloves. Put these on. And this. It was a paper face mask.
Goodbye, makeup.
His gloves and mask were already in place.
Isnt this primitive for you? she asked. You must be used to all sorts of fancy equipment in the city.
Its not much different in the city. MEs have been using the same instruments for a hundred and fifty years, ever since autopsies were made legal. And Id rather work in a place like this than in a modern building, where you cant see a darn thing. Somehow the ceiling lights are never over the autopsy tables.
He strode to the table and unzipped the body bag. Manny took a step back. The corpse wore floral pajamas. Jake gently removed the clothing intact. Manny felt gooseflesh on her arms. Theresa Alessis lay completely naked now. Her mouth was ajar, her skin drying. Not a body that had been prettied with makeup and posed in a facsimile of sleep, as in a funeral home.
Manny felt a wave of sadness. Mrs. Alessis seemed pathetic, a hunk of sagging skin. No one in her right mind would ever want to be so diminished, so exposed. Id best die in my sleep, she thought. No autopsy, please. She made a mental note to go back to the gym. My God, she said. The smell!
It gets to everybody at first, Jake said. Youll be fine.
Its like rotten eggs, only worse.
Decomposition; the human body breaking down. Corpses emit intestinal gases such as hydrogen sulfide. Its a natural process from ashes to ashes. Gods way of recycling.
Very comforting. Im a lawyer, Dr. Rosen. Im supposed to be lawyering. I do not belong in this morgue. I want to go home!
He was smiling.
Enjoy yourself. Have a good time. Torture Manny. What fun.
She expected a lecture on why she should have changed into scrubs, but all he said, very politely, was, If you want, Ill put some VapoRub inside your mask. Itll cover the smell. Ever since
The Silence of the Lambs,
when Jodie Foster used it, half the cops and DAs slather it under their noses at postmortems. I think the effects more psychological than physical.
No. Thanks. If you dont mind, Ill just sit for a minute.
Sure. He indicated a chair. Meanwhile, he pulled a metal stool next to the autopsy table and used it as a step to haul himself up so he stood straddling the corpse. Then he took a camera and began shooting photos of the body. When I attended my first autopsy, the ME had a cup of coffee in one hand and was poking through the decedents organs with the other. Disgusting! I couldnt understand how someone could be so callous and insensitive. A half-dozen autopsies later, I was doing the same thing.
Thats a charming story, she said. Thank you for sharing.
I was trying to make you feel better. He got down, turned the body over, and climbed back for another round of pictures. Ill need your help now.
She rose wobbily to her feet. At your service.
You monster.
He retrieved a long wooden stick from the corner of the room and handed it to her. Align the bottom to the heel, then measure the height at the top of the head. He picked up a notebook and pen. Whats the measurement?
She stood with the ruler and tried not to look at the body. Um . . . sixty-four inches.
Weight?
God knows. Am I supposed to guess?
Thats how its done. If theres no body scale, we estimate.
Thats crazy. Okay . . . Id say one hundred sixty-five and a half pounds.
Very good. My thought exactly, though its hard to tell about that half pound. Maybe its the Krispy Kreme she had for breakfast. When we open the stomach
Please!
Sadist.
Do you get the weight wrong a lot of the time?
We do, for various reasons. But the most disputed statistic is height. Family members read an autopsy report and swear it isnt their relative. Know why?
Because people lie about how tall they are?
Right. Studies of drivers licenses show people especially short people often add inches to their height. He handed her the pad and pen. Now, a sample of the vitreous humor of the eye. He picked up a syringe.
Wait! Manny screamed. Youre going to stick that thing into her eye?
You bet. The fluid in the white part of the eye can tell us time of death as well as toxicology. Well take some from both eyes and put it in two separate test tubes. Notice that the eyes are jaundiced.
She turned her back. Tell me when youre done.
Finished, he said, half a minute later. Next, the external examination. To a forensic pathologist, the skin is the bodys most important organ. He ran his fingers over the body. We look for signs of injury gunshot wounds, stab wounds, blunt trauma. In the case of Mrs. Alessis, none. Theres no apparent bruising, no injury to the neck that could indicate strangulation. Write that down, please.
She realized Jake was easing her discomfort by teaching her as he worked, but her feeling of gratitude disappeared with his next words.
Help me turn her onto her side and hold her steady.
Me?
He looked around the room. I dont see another diener.
Ill diener you.
Manny put down her notebook. The womans skin felt icy, even through the latex gloves. Although she knew logically that dead flesh would be cold, she had unconsciously expected it to feel like living tissue.
But it feels like death itself.
She was only able to hold on by fixing her gaze on the big institutional clock on the morgue wall.
One-thirty. Mycroft and I should be in bed.
Lividity along the back and the backs of the legs and neck shows that the red blood cells settled while she was lying on her back after she collapsed, he said, demonstrating by pressing on the skin as he spoke. Lividity is nonblanching. Its not really an issue here, but it indicates she died more than eight to ten hours ago.
Nonblanching?
If you press on it, the maroon color doesnt fade. He reached for her hand. Ill show you.
She looked away. I believe you.
Theres an old autopsy adage: You watch one, you do one, then you teach one.
Theres another old saying, one you should be familiar with: Not over my dead body.
He didnt laugh.
No sense of humor.
Let her down now, very gently. Thank you.
She eased the body onto its back again, thankful for the gloves not much, but better than nothing.
Keep writing, he told her. Shame I couldnt find a tape recorder. She has a lot of dark hair on her arms and legs. I want to check for puncture wounds from a needle, make sure a new suitor didnt kill her by injection. He put a new blade on the scalpel handle and shaved the hair from the underside of her forearms, particularly near the bend of the elbows. Then he moved to her legs, her varicose veins revealed as the hair fell away.
He handles the scalpel masterfully. Not a nick. What would it feel like if he shaved
my
legs?
She hoped he didnt see her blush.
Temporary insanity due to chemical intoxication. Lets not take this any further.
Not a pinprick, Jake said. We move to the internal examination.
Goody.
He put a new blade on the handle. We must evaluate the internal organs. That means taking them out. He reached for the body, hesitated. You can step out for a moment if you need some air. Sometimes first-timers faint, but its always the men, never the women.
She thought of the sandbox.
Damned if Ill be the first.
Im fine. She knew how unconvincing she sounded.
Even the corpse doesnt believe me.
Go ahead.
With the slightest pressure, he cut across the upper left chest and shoulders, curved the scalpel under the breasts to the right shoulder, and continued down to the lower abdomen just to the left of the belly button.
Its called a Y-incision.
Id never have guessed.
The thin cut widened almost instantly as the skin pulled apart, revealing a ravine of flesh and fat. Manny forced herself to watch, trying not to hyperventilate as Jakes scalpel sliced through layers of pale skin, glistening yellow fat, and pink muscle.
Hes peeling poor Mrs. Alessis open like an orange.
A few small rivulets of blood ran down the sides of the corpse into the holes in the autopsy table.
Some people believe that dead bodies dont bleed, Jake explained. But when we die our vessels are filled with blood and will leak if theyre cut, just like a garden hose leaks water.
He pulled out a handheld electric saw and turned it on.
Yikes! The sound was like a dentist drill magnified a thousand times.
Jake, though, seemed unperturbed as he cut through the breastplate to get at the internal cavities. He looked up as he cracked the breastplate away from the skin incisions. Are you all right?
She knew she had gone pale. Her uncovered shoes were dotted with blood. I think Ill take that VapoRub now.
He motioned to the jar, and she took off her gloves to wipe a glob under her nose. Put on new gloves, he said. She obeyed.
Jake was holding Mrs. Alessiss heart in his hands, raising it for her to see. The heart is just a muscle, he said. Its a pump. The lungs are the bellows. The kidneys are the plumbing. The skeleton is the scaffolding. The stomach and small intestines are the furnace, turning fuel food and water into energy. The liver, gallbladder, urinary bladder, kidneys, and large intestines are the sanitation department; they get rid of waste. And the brain ah, the wonder of it! is a high-powered computer so sophisticated that other brains dont begin to understand it.
Fascinating, she croaked.
Dont faint. Dont vomit. Pretend youre paying attention.
Ive never been a religious man, he went on, especially considering the horrors I see, day in, day out: the dead children, the victims of violence, the awful waste of life. But when I look inside the human body, I can understand why people believe in a grand design. Its an awesome machine, dont you think?
You are so right.
Hearts of normal size. He took a blood sample to be sent to toxicology. Lungs pink and healthy. She wasnt a smoker. Jake removed the organs from the body and weighed them, the quickest way, he said, to tell if they were normal. The image of the bloody organs hanging from the scale prompted another round of nausea.
Im never going inside a butcher shop again.
Next, the head, he said cheerfully.
Uh-oh.
He sliced the scalp from ear to ear and peeled the skin forward over the face. Then he fired up the electric saw, cut open the skull plate, and loudly cracked it back to reveal the brain, which he pulled out and sliced into cutlet-sized pieces.
They say lawyers dont have brains, Manny managed.
And without question, medical examiners have no hearts.
* * *
Two hours later, the autopsy was over. Washed and doused with perfume but still feeling sick, Manny ventured outside. This is what paradise feels like, she thought, and filled her lungs with the nectar of the night. In her mind she retained the vision of Jake opening Mrs. Alessiss stomach and ladling yes, ladling! its soupy contents into a plastic container. She reminded herself that he was simply trying to determine the cause of the womans death, to give her family some peace of mind. But how could a man spend his life routinely cutting up corpses? Shed never witnessed anything so barbaric.
If he ever touched me, Id remember the ladle and the heart. Ill bet hes still a virgin.
Jake joined her, still wearing his scrubs. There you are! he said. I have to go to the pathology lab. Want to come with me or stay out here? He brandished a glass jar.
She pointed to it. Whats in that thing?
Part of Mrs. Alessiss liver. His tone was serious, his expression troubled. Its wrinkled and underweight. Important, given the yellowish color of her eyes.
For the record, Manny said, Im sorry I asked.
So you coming with me or not?