I believe cities have personalities; they take on the energy of the people who occupy and rule them. During its worst era, Richmond was stubborn and small-minded, and bore itself with the wounded arrogance of a has-been now ordered about by the very people it once dominated, or in some instances owned. There was a maddening exclusivity that caused people like me to feel looked down on and alone. Through it all, I detected the traces of old injuries and indignities as surely as I find them on bodies. I found a spiritual sadness in the mournful haze that during summer months clings like battle smoke over swamps and endless stands of scrawny pines and drifts along the river, swathing the wounds of brick pilings and foundries and prison camps left from that awful war. I felt compassion. I did not give up on Richmond. This morning, I struggle with my growing belief that it has given up on me.
The tops of buildings in the downtown skyline have vanished in clouds, the air thick with snow. I stare out my office window, distracted by big flakes drifting past as phones ring and people move along the corridor. I worry that state and city government will shut down. This can’t happen on my first day back.
“Rose?” I call out to my secretary in the adjoining office. “Are you keeping up with the weather?”
“Snow,” her voice sails back.
“I can see that. They aren’t closing anything yet, are they?” I reach for my coffee and silently marvel over the unrelenting white storm that has seized our city. Winter wonderlands typically grace the commonwealth west of Charlottesville and north of Fredericksburg, and Richmond is left out. The explanation I have always heard is that the James River in our immediate area warms up the air just enough to replace snow with freezing rains that sweep in like Grant’s troops to paralyze the earth.
“Accumulation of possibly eight inches. Tapering off by later afternoon with lows in the twenties.” Rose must have logged on to an Internet weather update. “Highs not to get above freezing for the next three days. It looks like we’ll have a white Christmas. Isn’t that something?”
“Rose, what are you doing for Christmas?”
“Nothing much,” her response comes back.
I scan stacks of case files and death certificates and push around phone message slips, mail and inter-office memos. I can’t see the top of my desk and don’t know where to start. “Eight inches? They’ll declare a national emergency,” I comment. “We need to find out if anything’s closing besides schools. What’s on my schedule that hasn’t already been canceled?”
Rose is tired of yelling through the wall at me. She walks into my office, looking sharp in a gray pants suit and white turtleneck sweater, her gray hair pinned up in a French twist. She is rarely without my big calendar and opens it. She runs her finger over what is written in it for today, peering through half-moon reading glasses. “The obvious is we now have six cases and it’s not even eight o’clock yet,” she lets me know. “You’re on call for court, but I have a feeling that’s not going to happen.”
“Which case?”
“Let’s see. Mayo Brown. Don’t believe I remember him.”
“An exhumation,” I remember. “A homicidal poisoning, a rather shaky one.” The case is on my desk, somewhere. I start looking for it as muscles tense in my neck and shoulders. The last time I saw Buford Righter in my office it was over this very case, which was destined to create nothing but confusion in court even after I spent four hours explaining to him the dilution effect on drug levels when the body has been embalmed, that there is no satisfactory method to quantitate the rate of degradation in embalmed tissue. I went over the toxicology reports and prepared Righter for the defense of dilution. Embalming fluid displaces blood and dilutes drug levels, I drilled into him. So if the decedent’s codeine level is at the low end of the acutely lethal dose range, then prior to embalming, the level could only have been higher. I meticulously explained that this is what he needs to focus on because the defense is going to muddy the waters with heroin versus codeine.
We were seated at the oval table in my private conference room, paperwork spread before us. Righter tends to blow out a lot when he is confused, frustrated or just pissed off. He continued to pluck up reports and frown at them, and then put them back down, all the while blowing like a whale breaking surface. “Greek,” he kept saying. “How the hell do you make the jury understand things like 6-mono-acetylmorphine is a marker for heroin, and since it wasn’t detected, then it doesn’t necessarily mean heroin wasn’t present, but if it was present, then that would mean heroin was too? Versus telling if codeine is medicinal?” I told him that was my point, the very thing he didn’t want to focus on. Stick to the dilution offense—that the level had to have been higher before the person was embalmed, I coached him. Morphine is a metabolite of heroin. Morphine is also a metabolite of codeine, and when codeine is metabolized in the blood we get very low levels of morphine. We can’t tell anything definitively here, except we have no marker for heroin, and we do have levels of codeine and morphine, indicating the man took something—willingly or unwillingly—before he died, I painted the scenario for him. And it was a much higher dose than is indicated now because of the embalming, I stressed again. But do these results prove the man’s wife poisoned him with Tylenol Three, for example? No. Don’t get gummed up in the tar baby of 6-mono-acetylmorphine, I told Righter repeatedly.
I realize I am obsessing. I am sitting at my desk, angrily going through stacks of backed-up work as I anguish over how much trouble I went to preparing Righter for yet another case, promising I would be there for him, just as I always have been. It is a shame he does not seem inclined to return the favor. I am a free lunch. All of Chandonne’s Virginia victims are free lunches. I just can’t accept it and am beginning to resent the hell out of Jaime Berger, too. “Well, check with the courts,” I say to Rose. “And by the way, he’s being released from MCV this morning.” I resist saying Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s name. “Expect the usual phone calls from the media.”
“I heard on the news this New York prosecutor’s in town.” Rose flips through my date book. She doesn’t look up at me. “Wouldn’t that be something if she gets snowed in?”
I get up from my desk, take off my lab coat and hang it on the back of my chair. “I don’t guess we’ve heard from her.”
“She hasn’t called here, not for you.” My secretary hints she knows that Berger did track down Jack or at least someone besides me.
I am very skilled at becoming prepossessed with business and deflecting any effort on another person’s part to probe an area I choose to avoid. “To expedite things,” I say before Rose can give me one of her pregnant looks, “we’ll skip staff meeting. We need to get these bodies out of here before the weather gets any worse.”
Rose has been my secretary for ten years. She is my office mother. She knows me better than anyone but doesn’t abuse her position by pushing me in directions I don’t want to go in. Curiosity about Jaime Berger fizzes on the surface of Rose’s thoughts. I can see questions rising in her eyes. But she won’t ask. She knows damn well how I feel about trying the case in New York instead of here, and that I don’t want to talk about it. “I think Dr. Chong and Dr. Fielding are already in the morgue,” she is saying. “I haven’t seen Dr. Forbes yet.”
It occurs to me that even if the Mayo Brown case goes forward today—even if the courts don’t close because of snow—Righter isn’t going to call me. He will stipulate my report and resort to putting the toxicologist on the stand, at best. There is no way in hell Righter is going to face me after I called him a coward, especially since the accusation is true and a part of him must know it. He will probably figure out a way to avoid me the rest of his life, and that unpleasant thought leads to another one as I cross the hallway. What does all this bode for me?
I push through the ladies’ room door and make the transition from civilized paneling and carpeting, through a series of changing rooms, into a world of biological hazards, starkness and violent attacks on the senses. Along the way, one she
ds shoes and outer clothing, stowing them safely in teal-green lockers. I keep a special pair of Nikes parked near the door that leads inside the autopsy suite. The shoes are not destined to walk through the land of the living ever again, and when it is time to get rid of them, I will burn them. I clumsily arrange my suit jacket, slacks and white silk blouse on hangers, my left elbow throbbing. I struggle into a full-length Mega Shield gown that has viral-resistant front panels and sleeves, sealed seams and a gripper neck, which is a snug stand-up collar. I pull on shoe covers, then an O.R. cap and surgical mask. The final touch of my fluid-proofing is a face shield to protect my eyes from splashes that might carry such frights as hepatitis or HIV.
Stainless steel doors automatically open, and my feet make paper sounds over the tan vinyl floor of the biohazard epoxy-finished autopsy suite. Doctors in blue hover over five shiny stainless steel tables fastened to steel sinks, water running, hoses sucking, X rays on light boxes a black-and-white gallery of organ-shaped shadows and opaque bones and tiny, bright bullet fragments that, like loose metal chips in flying machines, break things and cause leaks and vital gears to seize. Hanging from clips inside safety cabinets are DNA specimen cards that have been stained with blood. They look oddly like a bunting of tiny Japanese flags as they air-dry beneath a hood. From closed-circuit television monitors mounted in corners a car engine rumbles loudly in the bay, a funeral home here to deliver or take away. This is my theater. It is where I perform. As unwelcome as the average person might find the morbid odors, sights and sounds that rush to greet me, I am suddenly and immensely relieved. My heart lifts as doctors glance up at me and nod good morning. I am in my element. I am home.
A sour, smoky stench taints the long, high-ceilinged room, and I spot the slender, naked, sooty body on a sheet-covered gurney that has been rolled out of the way of traffic. Alone, cold and silent, the dead man waits his turn. He waits for me. I am the last person he will ever talk to in a language that matters. The name on the toe tag scrawled in permanent Magic Marker, pitifully, is John Do. Someone couldn’t spell Doe right. I tear open a packet of latex gloves and am gratified I can stretch one over my cast, which is further protected by the fluidproof sleeve. I am not wearing the sling and will have to resort to doing autopsies with my right hand for a while. Although being left-handed in a right-handed world has its difficulties, it is not without advantages. Many of us are ambidextrous or at least reasonably functional on both sides. My aching fractured bones radiate reminders that all isn’t right in my world, no matter how tenaciously I go about my business, no matter how intensely I focus on my work.
I slowly circle my patient, leaning close, looking. A syringe is still embedded in the crook of his right arm, and second-degree burns blister his upper body. They have bright red margins, and his skin is streaked black with soot that is thick inside his nose and mouth. He is telling me he was alive when the fire started. He had to be breathing to inhale smoke. He had to have a blood pressure for fluid to be pumped into his burns, causing them to blister and have a bright red margin. The circumstances of a set fire and the needle in his arm certainly could suggest suicide. But on his right upper thigh, he has a contusion that is swollen to the size of a tangerine and crimson. I palpate it. Indurated, hard as a rock. It appears recent. How did it happen? The needle is in his right arm, suggesting that if he injected himself, he most likely is left-handed, yet his right arm is more muscular than his left one, hinting he is right-handed. Why is he nude?
“We still don’t have an ID on him?” I raise my voice to Jack Fielding.
“No further info.” He snaps a new blade into a scalpel. “The detective’s supposed to be here.”
“Found unclothed?”
“Yup.”
I run my gloved fingers through the dead man’s thick, carbon-dusted hair to see what color it is. I won’t be certain until I wash him, but his body and pubic hair are dark. He is clean-shaven with high cheekbones, a sharp nose and square jaw. Burns on his forehead and chin will need to be covered up with funeral home makeup before we can circulate a photograph of him for identification purposes, if it comes to that. He is fully rigorous, arms straight by his sides, fingers slightly curled. Livor mortis, or the blood settling to dependent regions of the body due to gravity, is also fixed, causing the sides of his legs and buttocks to be a deep red, the backs of them blanched wherever they rested against the wall or the floor after death. I hold him tilted on his side to check for injuries to his back and find parallel linear abrasions over the scapula. Drag marks. There is a burn between his shoulder blades and another one at the base of the back of his neck. Clinging to one of the burns is a fragment of a plastic-like material, narrow, about two inches long, white with small blue type on it, such as you might see on the back of a food product’s packaging. I remove the fragment with forceps and hold it up to the surgical lamp. The paper is more like thin, pliable plastic, a material I associate with candy or snack wrappers. I make out the words this product, and 9–4 EST and a toll-free number and part of a website address. The fragment goes inside an evidence bag.
“Jack?” I summon him and begin collecting blank forms and body diagrams, attaching them to a clipboard.
“I can’t believe you’re going to work with that damn cast on.” He walks across the autopsy suite, his bulging biceps straining against the short sleeves of his scrubs. My deputy chief may be famous for his body, but no amount of weightlifting or chocolate cream Myoplex high-protein meals in a glass can stop him from losing his hair. It is eerie, but in recent weeks his light brown hair has started falling out before our very eyes, clinging to his clothing, drifting through the air like down, as if he is molting.
He frowns at the misspelling on the toe tag. “The guy from the removal service must be Asian. John Dooo.”
“Who’s the detective?” I ask.
“Stanfield. Don’t know him. Just don’t get a puncture in your glove or you’ll be wearing a biological hazard for the next few weeks.” He indicates my latex-coated cast. “Actually, what would you do, now that I think of it?”
“Cut it off and put on a new one.”
“So maybe we should have disposable casts down here.”
“I feel like cutting it off anyway. This guy’s burn pattern isn’t making sense to me,” I tell him. “Do we know how far the body was from the fire?”
“About ten feet from the bed. I was told the bed’s the only thing that burned and only partially. He was nude, sitting on the floor, back against the wall.”
“I wonder why only his upper body got burned.” I point out discrete burns the size and shape of silver dollars. “Arms, chest. One here on his left shoulder. And these on his face. And he has several on his back, which should have been spared if he was leaning against the wall. What about the drag marks?”
“As I understand it, when the fire department got there, they dragged his body out into the parking lot. One thing’s for sure, he must’ve been unconscious or incapacitated when the fire started,” Jack says. “Sure as hell don’t know why else someone would just sit there getting burned and breathing in smoke. Obviously that happy-holiday time of year.” My second-in-command is cloaked in a hung-over weariness that causes me to suspect he had a very bad night. I wonder if he and his ex-wife had another one of their explosions. “Everybody killing themselves. That woman over there.” He points to the body on table 1, where Dr. Chong is busy taking photographs from a stepladder. “Dead on the kitchen floor, a pillow, a blanket. The neighbor heard one shot. Mother found her. There’s a note. And behind door number two”—Jack stares at table 2—“a motor vehicle death the state police are suspicious is a suicide. She has extensive injuries. Plowed right into a tree.”
“Did her clothes come in?”
“Yup.”
“Let’s x-ray her feet and get the labs to check the bottom of her shoes to see if she was braking or accelerating when she hit the tree.” I shade areas of a body diagram, indicating soot.
“And we got
a known diabetic with a history of overdose,” Jack recites our guest list of the morning. “Was found outside in the yard. Question is drugs, alcohol or exposure.”
“Or a combination of the above.”
“Right. I see what you mean about the burns, though.” He leans closer to look, blinking often, reminding me he wears contact lenses. “And it’s weird they’re all about the same size and shape. You want me to help with this?”
“Thanks. I’ll manage. How are you?” I glance up from my clipboard.
His eyes are tired, his boyish good looks strained. “Maybe we can grab some coffee sometime,” he says. “One of these days. And I should be asking about you.”
I pat his shoulder to let him know I am okay. “As well as can be expected, Jack,” I add.
I begin the external examination of John Doe with a PERK. This is a physical evidence recovery kit, a decided unpleasantness that includes swabbing orifices, clipping fingernails and plucking head, body and pubic hair. We PERK all bodies when there is any reason to suspect something other than a natural death, and I will always PERK a body that is nude, unless there is an acceptable reason for the person’s not being clothed when he died—in the bathtub or on the operating table, for example. For the most part, I don’t spare my patients indignities. I can’t. Sometimes the most important evidence lurks in the darkest, most delicate hollows, and clings underneath nails and in hair. During my violation of this man’s most private places I discover healing tears of his anal ring. He has abrasions at the angles of his mouth. Fibers adhere to his tongue and the inside of his cheeks.
I go over every inch of him with a lens and the story he tells grows more suspicious. His elbows and knees are slightly abraded and covered with dirt and fibers, which I mundanely collect by pressing them with the adhesive backs of Post-its, which I seal inside plastic bags. Over the bony prominences of both wrists are incomplete circumferential dry, reddish-brown abrasions and minute skin tags. I draw blood from the iliac veins and vitreous fluid from the eyes, and test tubes ride up on the dumbwaiter to the third-floor toxicology lab for STAT alcohol and carbon monoxide tests. At half past ten, I am reflecting back tissue from the Y incision when I notice a tall, older man heading toward my station. He has a wide, tired face and maintains a safe distance from my table, gripping a grocery-size brown paper bag, the top folded over and sealed with red evidence tape. I have a flash of my bagged clothing on my red Jarrah Wood dining room table.