Marker (45 page)

Laurie pushed her way toward the ID room while ignoring a welter of further questions. To her relief, Robert was visible through the central glass pane. With his help, she got inside and closed the door behind her with the journalists stranded out in the lobby.

"Thanks, Robert," Laurie said, peeling off her coat.

"They're like a bunch of wolves," Robert responded.

"What's this is all about?" Laurie asked.

"A couple of thirteen-year-old boys were run over by a subway train."

Laurie winced. Such a scenario was going to be emotionally taxing for her, and she was surprised she'd not been called during the night. Luckily, the current batch of tour doctors was particularly competent, and they had significant experience under their belts to handle all but the most critical cases. The tour doctors were mostly senior pathology residents earning a bit of money by moonlighting.

"Have the IDs been done?"

"Yup! That was all taken care of during the night."

Laurie was glad that was out of the way. For her, the ID process was especially trying with children, as it invariably meant dealing with the bereaved parents.

Laurie continued into the ID office, delighted to see Marvin's weekend call coincided with hers. He'd already made the coffee and had laid out the folders of the cases that had come in, with one of them in front of him.

Laurie and Marvin exchanged greetings as she helped herself to a mug of coffee.

"Looks like we're going to be busy," she said, eyeing the folders.

"I'm afraid so," Marvin agreed. He tapped the folder in front of him with his knuckle.

"We got another of these confusing postoperative cases from the General."

"No kidding!"

"There's a note from Janice on the front."

Laurie read the note quickly. It outlined the details on Patricia Pruit, answering all the usual pertinent questions. Laurie sucked in a deep breath. Providing she found no significant cardiac pathology, her series was now up to fourteen, with eight at the Manhattan General alone. It couldn't go on.

"Let's do Pruit first," Laurie said.

"Before the two boys?" Marvin questioned. "Did you see all the newspeople waiting out in the lobby?"

"I did, and they can wait some more," Laurie said. She wanted to confirm as soon as possible that Pruit was part of her series and let Roger know. Something had to be done.

They couldn't stand on the sidelines any longer.

"Okay, I'll go down and get set up."

"Anything else of note?"

"Most seem routine to me. I think you'll want to pass on the majority of them. My guess is that we are looking at doing four cases, but you may have other ideas."

While Marvin went down to the autopsy room, Laurie went through all the folders.

As she had anticipated, Marvin was right. They'd do the four cases and call it a day, unless anything of note came in while they were working. With that decided, Laurie went up to her office to stash her coat. She was glad she had, because sitting on her desk was a stack of hospital charts. To her amazement, the PAs had somehow managed the impressive feat of getting Lewis and Sobczyk's charts from the Manhattan General and the six charts from St. Francis, all in record time.

The chart on the top of the pile was Rowena Sobczyk's. Laurie flipped it open and shuffled through some of the pages, glancing at the OR notes and the anesthesia record.

As with McGillin and Morgan, there was nothing out of the ordinary. She was about to put the chart down when a short strip of abnormal EKG flopped out. It was about two feet long, having been folded, accordion-style, into the chart with just the first six inches glued to the page.

Laurie opened the chart to the location. It was a note written by the resident in charge of the resuscitation attempt. Laurie quickly read it and found it unenlightening. She then extended the EKG tracing and studied it. The complexes were stretched out, suggesting that they represented ineffectual heartbeats, if they had been heartbeats at all. They could have been merely poorly coordinated cardiac electrical activity that didn't cause any muscular contraction. As the sequence continued, the complexes became progressively more distorted, then rapidly flattened out to a straight line. On the border, scribbled in pencil, was the message: "Short EKG segment from the outset of the resuscitation attempt, after which no further electrical activity was obtained."

She'd never had a strong background in reading EKGs, and this short segment didn't suggest anything to her. Yet she couldn't help but think it might be significant, since there had been no similar tracings on either McGillin or Morgan, who'd had no electrical activity on EKG whatsoever, and she thought she might show it to someone more knowledgeable than she. She marked the spot in the chart with her ruler, and even scribbled on a Post-it note to remind herself to show the tracing to a cardiologist.

Her phone rang, and the sound made her jump. She eyed it, hoping and wondering if it could be Jack. She put her hand on it and allowed it to ring again, feeling the vibration through her skin in a vain attempt to influence the identity of the caller. Her efforts notwithstanding it was Marvin, and the message was simple: All was ready downstairs in the autopsy room.

Laurie returned Sobczyk's chart to the top of the pile, with the ruler sticking out of the side. She was looking forward to going over them later that afternoon, particularly those from Queens, to make sure the cases mirrored those from the General. She then looked back at the phone, and for a brief moment contemplated calling Jack. In the process, she noticed the small light on the side of the phone indicating she had voicemail. Confused by who would have left her a voicemail during the night, she picked up the receiver again and checked her messages.

Laurie was surprised first by the time of the message and then by the sound of Roger's voice. She was impressed that he had taken her suggestion so seriously that he'd been working nonstop until two o'clock in the morning. She was even more impressed that he had managed to come up with what he considered a list of suspects, including an anesthesiologist by the name of Najah who'd recently transferred from St. Francis to the Manhattan General. As she continued to listen to the message, she felt a definite sense of satisfaction and an eagerness to hear the details, although when was another matter. As she headed back toward the elevators to the basement, she wondered if and when Jack might call. You never knew with Jack.

As Laurie had anticipated, the post on Patricia Pruit was strikingly similar to the others in the series, with absolutely no pathology to account for her sudden demise.

True to form, the operative site was without any excessive bleeding, without signs of infection, and there were no clots in the major vessels of the legs, abdomen, or chest. The heart, lungs, and brain were all entirely normal.

At the end of the procedure, Laurie helped Marvin move the corpse back onto a gurney.

"Which one of the kids do you want to do first?" Marvin asked as he unlocked the gurney's wheels.

"It doesn't matter," Laurie said. She had opened the two folders on a neighboring autopsy table and was searching for the forensic investigator's reports. Then, getting a second thoughts, she said, "In fact, why not put them both up at the same time."

"Fine with me," Marvin said agreeably. He pushed the gurney with Pruit's corpse out through the main door.

A few years ago, Laurie would have taken the folders up to the lunchroom between cases, but now that she had on her moon suit, it was too much trouble, so she read the investigative reports standing up, with her ventilation fan as a backdrop. She could immediately see why some journalists would be interested. The tragic episode had the kind of lurid appeal that the tabloids loved. The accident had happened at three o'clock in the morning at the 59th Street station. The uptown train had thundered in and run over the two kids.

Conflicting stories were the problem. The engineer claimed that the kids had waited until the last minute to jump, so there was nothing he could do. Such a scenario suggested a double suicide, but the engineer failed a Breathalyzer test, casting severe doubt on his reliability. The other story came from the conductor, who claimed he was between car one and car two, looking out at the station, as the train came in. He said he didn't see any kids on the platform, and he passed the Breathalyzer test. The third story was from the agent in the token booth, who claimed that a suspicious man had gone through the turnstile right after the kids but disappeared.

The door to the hall burst open and Marvin pushed in another gurney. "This is not pretty," he said.

"I can imagine," Laurie said. She continued reading the investigative reports. No suicide notes were found, either on the platform or on the victims. Conversations with both sets of parents did not confirm any episodes of depression. In the words of one of the parents, the kids were "wild and full of the devil but would never kill themselves."

"I'm going to get the other one," Marvin called out.

Laurie waved over her shoulder as she continued to read. Once again, she was impressed with Janice's work. How Janice could pack as much as she did into a single night, Laurie had no idea.

When Laurie was finished with her reading, she took out the sheets for the autopsy notes from the two folders and turned around to face the first of the two corpses. As she did so, Marvin came back in with the second one.

"Good Lord," Laurie murmured as she looked down at the first boy's remains.

Teenagers weren't as difficult emotionally for Laurie as younger children, but they were still tough.

Being run over by a train was at the upper end of traumatic experiences. The boy's arm had been severed at the shoulder and it lay alongside the torso. The head and the face had been reduced to a pulp. There was no way things could have been cleaned up for the parents' benefit.

Laurie began the external examination by detailing the all-too-visual trauma. It was obvious that the body had tumbled along beneath the train until it had been brought to a stop.

"There's the second one," Marvin said as he wheeled the empty gurney over to the side of the room.

Laurie waved over her shoulder without turning around. She found something unexpected on the boy's penis, which made her move down and look at the soles of his feet. Marvin joined her on the opposite side of the table.

"I noticed that," Marvin said, following Laurie's line of sight. "What do you make of it?" In addition to the abrasions, there was a bit of charring.

"Where are the shoes?" Laurie asked.

"In a plastic bag in the walk-in."

"Bring them in," Laurie said. She was preoccupied and immediately stepped over to the second child.

By the time Marvin was back with the clothing from both cases, Laurie felt she had solved the mystery by the external exam alone. Marvin brought over the sneakers that the kids had been wearing. Like the bodies themselves, they were a sorry sight. Laurie picked them up and looked at the soles. "Seems pretty clear to me what happened."

"Oh?" Marvin questioned. "Fill me in."

At that moment, the door to the hall banged open, surprising both Laurie and Marvin.

It was Sal D'Ambrosio, one of the other mortuary techs. He was more animated than his usual indifferent self. "We got a headless, handless male corpse that just arrived, along with some cops. What should I do?"

"Did you x-ray it, weigh it, and photograph it like you're supposed to do?" Laurie questioned. In sharp contrast with Marvin, who needed little direction, Sal's apathy often grated on Laurie's nerves. There was a protocol to be followed with every body arriving at the OCME.

"All right already," Sal said, sensing Laurie's impatience. "I thought with the cops here, it might be a different story." He ducked back out and the door closed.

Laurie paused for a minute. Hearing that a headless, handless body had arrived created a sense of déjà vu that took her back seven years, when a similar corpse had been brought in after floating around in the East River. With some effort, identification had been made. The man's name turned out to have been Franconi, and Mr. Franconi posthumously had taken her and Jack on a wild adventure to Equatorial Guinea in West Africa.

"Hey!" Marvin interrupted Laurie's brief reverie. "Come on! You got me curious here.

What's with these two kids?"

Laurie again started to explain, but the door to the hall reopened. A gowned, hooded, and masked figure walked in, much to Laurie and Marvin's surprise.

"I'm sorry, but no one is allowed in here," Laurie called out, holding up her hand like a traffic cop. For a moment, she thought the intruder might have been a particularly adventuresome journalist who'd somehow managed to infiltrate OCME security. "It's dangerous, and full protective gear is mandatory."

"Oh, come on, Laur!" the man said while stopping in his tracks. "Jack told me on the weekends things weren't so hard-nosed around here and that this is the way he dresses unless it's an infectious case."

"Lou?" Laurie questioned.

"Yeah, it's me. You're not going to make me get into one of those suits, are you? They drive me crazy."

"If Calvin comes in, you'll be banned for life."

"Realistically, what are the chances of him coming in?"

"Nil, I suppose."

"Well, there you go," Lou said. He walked over to Laurie and glanced down at the two boys, then quickly looked back up at Laurie. "Yuck! What a sight! How you do this for a living?"

"It does have its downside," Laurie agreed. "What brings you in here so early on a Saturday?"

"The headless horseman I came in with. It's caused another stir over at the Manhattan General. I tell you, that place is going to be the bane of me."

"I think you'd better fill me in."

"I got called at the crack of dawn this morning. Seems that the guy who takes care of the bodies over at the General came in to work as usual and then found a body that wasn't supposed to be there." Lou laughed. "I mean, there's some humor here, finding an extra body in a morgue. I've heard about bodies being misplaced or missing, but finding an extra one is a bit out of the ordinary."