Authors: Lisa Black
‘This is terrible,’ Dr Banachek clucked, shaking strands of gray loose from his comb-over.
The other pathologist, Dr Harris, said: ‘It sure is. I have more seniority than Reese. How come I’m not home in bed and he’s here instead?’
Theresa tried not to roll her eyes. The first words Harris spoke to her on her first day at the ME’s office had been to complain about the fit of his lab coat, and every word since had kept to a similar vein. A dozen years later he still had no other form of conversation. Tall, skinny, with a grayish pallor to his skin, his cheeks had begun to sink as if the eternal negativity was eating him up from the inside out. He went on: ‘You know why? I’ll tell you why. Because I had the courtesy to answer my phone! Why couldn’t they get an actual diener to work as diener? Why not Causer?’
‘The county’s trying to show a little compassion,’ Theresa explained, unnecessarily. Harris knew perfectly well why he had been pressed into service. He just didn’t care.
‘Because they were friends? As if. The last friend Causer had came with a screw cap. And he was the wrong color to make Johnson feel warm and fuzzy. Causer could have made the incision while eating a muffin.’
As fed up as she felt toward the general boorishness of Harris, Causer
and
the dead Johnson, Theresa couldn’t help a quick, slightly hysterical giggle at the image of Mitchell Causer plunging a scalpel into Darryl’s chest while holding a breakfast pastry in his other hand, a plastic apron over his flannel shirt with a beer gut barely held in check by a scratched WWF belt buckle. She choked it off as the other doctor spoke.
‘Looks like some bruising starting over the abdomen. Someone slugged him in more than just the head.’ Banachek hesitated, holding the scalpel over the dead man’s chest, still trying to comprehend the depth of their collective violation. ‘How could anyone be killed
here
? And who’d want to kill Darryl?’
‘Besides his wife?’ Theresa couldn’t help saying. ‘His comments about her always sounded so – violent.’
Harris said, ‘Nah. She crashed the Christmas party here once, and I’m pretty sure that if he had ever hit her, she’d have flattened him. And she wouldn’t have waited until he was at work to do it. Face it, it was Justin.’
‘No,’ Banachek said, dragging the scalpel from Darryl’s shoulder to groin.
‘No,’ Theresa said. ‘Justin hardly seemed like some hair-trigger maniac to me.’
‘How would you know?’ Harris fixed her with a suspicious gaze, ready to verbally pounce if she had been secretly dating one of the deskmen, and not because it would have been interracial or cougar-like or against county policy. He would care only that a piece of gossip existed without his knowledge.
Despite that, it was a valid question. Theresa saw Justin in passing, long enough to get a quick patient history that usually consisted of abbreviations or phrases: MVA (motor vehicle accident), GSW (gunshot wound), suicide – hanging, suicide GSW, decomp, stabbing, or industrial (meaning an accident at work). Occasionally, there might be an addendum, such as: ‘This guy owned the car dealership at Euclid and Fifty-fifth, you know, next to the restaurant that used to be the BirdHouse?’ They had not had in-depth conversations about politics or their personal lives or even their preferred sports teams. Theresa couldn’t claim to know the man just because he had beautiful eyes and a certain gravity to his aura.
But she protested anyway. ‘This is a morgue. We attract very strange people. We’ve had estranged family members who thought we hid a victim’s body because they weren’t invited to the funeral and thus it didn’t happen. We’ve had abusive spouses or parents who thought we framed them by pointing out that the victim died of blunt impact trauma instead of falling down the basement steps. We’ve had self-styled psychics who thought this building bulged with trapped souls trying to cross over to the light. Remember? They stood outside with picket signs.’
‘Then where’s Justin?’ Harris asked, picking up the long-handled clippers. Most people used them to trim trees; pathologists use them to snap ribs, two of which, Dr Banachek pointed out, had been cracked during the struggle. Theresa kept her kidnapping/ransom theory to herself as he freed up the thoracic cavity a little more with each sickening crunch and the smell of offal and clotting blood filled the room.
Instead, she took a closer look at Darryl’s mashed face, now that the blood had been hosed away. The nose looked broken, left cheek flattened where it had been pressed to the floor as he died. He had nearly matching cuts over both eyebrows and another on the right temple. These had coated his face in blood, but from the sheer volume of it on the office floor she felt sure he had more gashes on the back of his skull, under the hair. Theresa thought she’d been getting used to the idea, but it still felt strange to realize this had been a person she’d interacted with regularly for more than a dozen years. She expected his clouding eyes to pop fully open as he shouted, ‘Gotcha!’ with that rumbling, Barry White laugh.
Dr Banachek had peeled back the skin from the Y-incision, clearing the way to examine the organs. Lemon-yellow, bubbling fat bulged outward.
‘He should have left off some of those cheeseburgers,’ Harris said.
‘Definitely a lot of bruising here,’ Banachek said, peering at the spider-like red tendrils of blood vessels broken by a blow to the area.
Harris excavated the skin on his side, finding more of the same kind of damage, prodding at the subcutaneous fat with an expression of distaste. ‘And here I am, reduced to a friggin’ diener. How could Reese not be home at four in the morning?’
‘His wife’s out of town,’ Banachek said absently.
‘So what, he’s at his mistress’s? Hah. No, he had the sense to look at his caller ID before picking up. Not like me.’
‘It’s not like this happens often,’ Theresa said in an attempt to shut him up, though she’d never been able to get him to see the bright side of anything.
Banachek removed the lungs, slapping them on to the polypropylene cutting board next to the sink. As usual, they just looked like raw meat to Theresa. ‘Not since Diana, and that was, what – ten years ago?’
‘At least,’ Theresa said, feeling a residual pang much more deeply than she would ever be able to for Darryl Johnson. She and Diana had been friends of sorts, sharing plenty of lunch hours together. Until her husband had strangled her with a jump rope and left her body on their kitchen floor.
‘I remember that,’ Harris said. ‘The pretty one from Records. They emptied the building for the whole day for her, no talk of a half-day. And they called in Reese – why? Because I have more seniority!’
He and Dr Reese had had a friendly rivalry for as long as Theresa could remember. Friendly on Reese’s part, anyway – Harris, she couldn’t be sure about.
Banachek sectioned the lungs with a large bread knife, slicing off tiny bits he found interesting and dropping them into the plastic quart container filled with formalin, murmuring the occasional comment, such as: ‘Too many cigarettes. They would have begun to haunt him in another decade.’
The stomach was largely empty, unsurprising if death occurred five or six hours after dinner time. From Darryl’s gut she would have pegged him for a snacker, though, and indeed, some tough yellowish flecks bobbed here and there in the red-brown purée that emptied out of his digestive sac. Banachek helpfully retained most of it in a fifty ml plastic tube and labeled it to be sent to Theresa’s department, where she would have to rinse off the acids and bile and put the remaining solids under the stereomicroscope. Oh joy. Theresa would rather run her hands through a bucket of blood than deal with two tablespoons of gastric contents.
Harris photographed the hands, after taking four minutes to figure out how to turn the camera on. Another advantage of the digital era, making photography fairly simple even for laymen. Simply point and click. Now that the hands were clean, Theresa could easily see the damage – both sets of knuckles were scraped and bruising. ‘He put up a fight.’
‘I’m sure losing came as a shock to him,’ Harris said. ‘He’s bigger than Justin. Probably wasn’t worried at first.’
Dr Banachek examined the heart, exposing the coronary arteries with dozens of shallow slices. ‘Don’t understand that. They never even had an argument, that I heard of. Hasn’t been a feud in this building since old Doc Brewster was the head of histology and took over that supply closet in the hallway. Arteriosclerosis, getting pretty bad.’
‘Cheeseburgers,’ Harris said darkly.
‘Wonder what mine looks like,’ Banachek muttered, and cut open the heart to measure the walls. When the heart had to work harder to pump the blood out it tended to bulk up, like any other muscle. Thickened walls could indicate high blood pressure, arrhythmia, or heart valve problems. Circulation fascinated Theresa, and she watched over his shoulder.
Harris withstood their abandonment for about four seconds before peeling back the skin on the top of Darryl’s head to comment on the skull. ‘Shattered,’ he pronounced.
Theresa wandered back to him. Her career as a cardiologist would have to wait.
Fracture lines criss-crossed Darryl’s parietal bone, and as Harris pulled the brain out of the way with a soft, sucking sound, a piece actually fell out. Theresa felt bad for looking at it, the broken bone, the severed brain stem, the now-empty torso. The victim had been laid as bare as he could be. This was someone she knew. Someone she worked with on a daily basis for over a decade.
And we just ripped out his brain.
‘Looks like Justin bounced his head off the floor a couple of times,’ Harris said, with a bit too much glee to his voice. It set Theresa’s teeth on edge.
‘How many times?’ a voice behind them said. Shephard stood in the doorway, more out than in, and Theresa wondered how long he’d been there.
‘You can come in, Sergeant,’ she told him, honestly trying to be nice instead of screwing with him, but his eyes narrowed and he moved another half-inch back instead of forward. Obviously, the sergeant did not care for autopsies – but then, that was the normal response. Hanging over the doctor’s shoulder while he carved a heart into little pieces was, perhaps, not.
Harris and Banachek traced the tracks in the skull with their gloved fingers as if reading a road map. ‘At least five,’ Banachek said at last.
‘Is that what killed him?’ Shephard asked.
‘Oh, yes. The edges of the fracture cut open the hematomas that formed from the concussions. Those swellings put pressure on the brain that would have killed him eventually, but this one—’ he held up the loose piece – ‘actually broke through the skin from the inside, letting the hematomas vent.’
‘In other words,’ Harris said, ‘his brain started oozing out of his head.’
‘Thank you, doctor,’ Theresa said severely. He managed to look hurt.
Banachek continued, talking either to them or to himself: ‘In a best-case scenario, bleeding to the outside might have relieved the pressure and saved him. But this was worst-case, and he bled to death.’
Shephard looked at Theresa. ‘So our killer should have this man’s blood on him?’
Had he
looked
at the deskmen’s office? ‘Covered in it.’
He nodded to himself.
‘Who’s doing the scene?’ Harris demanded of the cop.
‘We are.’ He meant CPD.
‘And how long are you going to tie up the building for?’
What, now he couldn’t wait to get back to work?
‘No longer than absolutely necessary, Doctor,’ Shephard said with exaggerated courtesy. ‘Your ME made that stipulation clear.’
Harris snorted. ‘As if he minds. Lock out the county auditor along with the rest of the employees and Stone will let you have the run of the place for weeks.’
‘Auditor?’ Theresa asked.
‘Didn’t you know that?’ the man reported with unabashed glee. ‘Our new manager hasn’t quite finished cleaning house.’
Cuyahoga County managers and employees had conducted shady deals for decades, mostly involving jobs and contracts but also utilizing bribes from gift cards to televisions, free labor, lowered property appraisals and some really good steaks. The populace had finally decided they couldn’t afford that kind of nonsense any more and had thrown out the county commissioners and their entire system of government, opting to replace them with a county manager and a brand-new, never before done Department of Inspector General, to make sure that the forty-odd crooks sent to jail weren’t simply replaced with a new set.
‘No wonder he seems stressed,’ Theresa said.
Shephard, to whom, surely, county corruption hardly came as breaking news, thanked them and moved away.
Theresa wanted to leave herself, go up to her locked lab with its inanimate specimens and microscopes and computer monitors; she could make another cup of coffee and finally take a moment to, as the guru said on her yoga tape, ‘assimilate all that has occurred’. But she would feel like a coward if she bailed. She hadn’t liked Darryl, but now she would stay with him until the end, until they zipped that white plastic body bag over his face. She would wheel his gurney into the cooler herself, save Harris that one last chore. That ought to make the old whiner happy.
Fifteen minutes later she pulled the cord that closed the sliding door to the cooler, abandoning Darryl Johnson to the company of the other corpses. It was a final goodbye, and Theresa felt guilty for saying it; it felt as if, having received the last bit of physical attention he would in this world, Darryl had now crossed the line from an actual person to just a memory, his body now simply an inconvenient chunk of decomposing meat. Theresa could only console herself by realizing that he and the rest of his new colleagues didn’t care. They had moved on to another plane where the disposition of their used flesh weighed no more on their mind than a lost button off an old sweater.
Theresa went back up the rear staircase and into the lab. As soon as she entered she knew she was not alone behind those locked doors. Someone else had penetrated her stronghold.
And more than that, he’d made coffee.
SIX
D
NA analyst Don sat on the edge of Leo’s abandoned desk. Half African-American and half Spanish, he had enviably smooth amber skin, an enviably slender frame, and enviably huge brown eyes. He also appeared enviably well-rested.