Chapter Two
I didn’t start the autopsy right away. How could I? I was squirming on the inside, trying not to scream and have a tantrum. I was sitting on the opposite table, staring at the dead guy covered in a sheet, and chewing on my thumb. I was nervous and Chief Fredricks’ whole ‘let me know if there’s anything weird about this’ speech was weighing heavily on my mind. Even my guts were rioting against this. I felt like I wanted to simultaneously throw up and wet myself. It was nerves and I was letting it get to me.
This wasn’t like me at all. Normally, the chance to cut open a body was something that, while I didn’t exactly look forward to it, I didn’t get this nervous about it on a regular basis. Usually I was right in there, hoping to find some sort of evidence that would put whomever was responsible for the death of my patient behind bars. Sometimes, I did the opposite and proved self defence. It wasn’t always about justice for the dead person. Sometimes, it was about justice for the living.
There was no information about the dead guy. No one knew who he was, no one told me anything about him. It was like there was a big secret being kept and I was the one they were keeping it from. I groaned and pushed myself off of the table. I slipped out of my jacket and draped it carefully over the table I had just been sitting on. I walked across the room to where I kept my splatter proof gear and puled down a simple apron. I didn’t need my mad scientist leather and rubber gear just yet. I was just planning to have a little poke around, nothing extensive and nothing invasive. Yet. I couldn’t help it. The curiosity was starting to get to me.
I pushed the rolling metal tray that held all my tools across the room and over to the occupied table. I pulled two of the powder blue latex rubber gloves out of the box and snapped them on my hands. I always liked the snapping sound as I pulled gloves on. It always freaked people out, especially when I coupled the aggression of the action with a Cheshire cat grin.
“All right, let’s see what we have here,” I mumbled, pulling aside the sheet covering my new best friend.
I swore as soon as my eyes landed on the mess underneath the sheet. In fact, I swore uncharacteristically out loud and vehemently. I was used to seeing the brutality that one human could do to another, but this was unexpected.
“Looks like you had it rough, hey buddy?” I asked the corpse with a shake of my head. I huffed another sigh through my nose.
The guy on my slab wasn’t white. He wasn’t arabic either. I stared at him, through the mess of injury on his face. I had no idea where this guy was from, ethnically. He looked like maybe some kind of Asian, like he’d come from Mongolia or Malaysia, maybe? Definitely not Chinese or Japanese. Tibetan was a likely candidate for his ethnicity, too.
“No, too pale to be from Tibet,” I told myself, frowning.
He had a round face and a wide, sort of flat nose. His eyes were closed so it was hard to tell exactly what they looked like and I wasn’t about to touch him, just in case. His eyes looked almost too big for his face and they were wide set. His black hair was scraggly and matted back against his head. He had no eyebrows and no facial hair. His lips were thick and puffy and they also looked like they weren’t meant for his face. He was an absolute mess.
I was still hesitant to touch him or perform an autopsy. There was no I.D. on the guy, no one to claim him. I didn’t want to accidentally ruin his chances of getting into whatever form of Heaven he believed in by not observing proper death and burial rituals. Wouldn’t that just be a pain in the ass? An irreversible karmic black spot on my record. I didn’t need that kind of pressure on my mind for the rest of my life!
I decided that he needed at least a closer look, I wasn’t sure what sort of harm there was in touching a dead body on a karmic or religious level, but I figured that there was someone in every culture who took care of the dead, right? Having a look to determine which of the multiple woulds I could see immediately had killed him and maybe hosing off the body once I collected trace evidence couldn’t possibly hurt.
I pulled the sheet down a little further. He’d been dressed in a simple black T-shirt and I saw at east two bullet holes and multiple stab wounds across his torso. I winced. Any one of the wounds I was looking at could have killed the guy, but something told me that none of these were the actual cause of death. I moved back up to his face. Gingerly, I placed my hands against his head, turning it side to side. My suspicions were confirmed when I found a crushed spot on the back, right side of his head. He’d been bludgeoned, too. Adding that to the mess of bruises on his face, I’d say that he put up one hell of a fight.
“So why’d they shoot you in the forehead and slit your throat, too?” I asked the corpse.
I pulled out the box of swabs and started swabbing around the bullet holes in his chest and forehead, then the wound on his throat, looking for DNA. I opened his mouth and did the same, hoping that I’d get a hit on his genetics. I checked his whole body for any loose fibres that I could find, there was nothing. Not even any dirt or gravel on his shoes. I swabbed them anyway, hoping that something might ping in the directory. I slowly cut away the fabric of his clothing, dropping them into evidence bags for processing later. I was really afraid of cross-contamination, especially since I had nothing to go on with this guy. Pulling his clothes off was a challenge. Usually, I had no problem removing clothing from my cadavers, but this time it seemed nearly impossible to lift him myself. He wasn’t even that big, there was no reason why I shouldn’t have been able to move him.
He was freaky, I’ll admit. His naked body seemed out of place on the slab. Something about him was wrong, and I wasn’t sure what it was. I pulled the sheet back up over his lower body. I didn’t see any wounds on his legs, so there was really no reason for him to not be decent. I was about to wash the dried blood off his body so that I could start pulling bullets out of him when a glint of metal in his throat caught my eye.
I set the hose back down and picked up a pair of tweezers. I wanted that metal bit. I leaned over him and plucked at the shiny piece in his wound, but I couldn’t get a hold of it. My tweezers clicked together as I tried to grip the metal but I couldn’t get it.
I shook my head. “All right, Rasputin, I’ll bite.”
I set the tweezers aside for a minute and I stuck my gloved fingers very carefully into the wound. I spread the bloody, ruined flesh back and had to muffle the shout of surprise that was about to leave my mouth.
“What the actual…”
I stared at the body on my table. From what I was seeing, it couldn’t be possible. I bit my lip, nervous about what I was about to do. I knew I had to do a full autopsy on the guy. The metal I’d found? It was his esophagus.