Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (54 page)

“I think we both have our assignments this morning,” Lassiter said. “The sooner you leave to do yours, the sooner I can get started on mine—unless you have any
more
objections?”

Now Riley made the circular incision around his skull, applied the bone saw, removed the skull cap, and found … nothing at all.

“Then get moving,” Lassiter said. “The day isn’t getting any younger.”

Riley ran her tongue across her lower lip and tasted blood.

She wheeled around and charged down the hallway and up the stairs, ignoring a morning greeting from the chief deputy coroner. She headed for her tiny second-floor office, intending to stop just long enough to drop her lab coat and grab her purse—but on the way she passed the open doorway of Lassiter’s office.

She looked back at the stairway. In a few minutes the autopsy would begin, and then Lassiter would be occupied for at least two hours—three or four if there were abnormalities. She glanced across the hall at the cubicles that filled the center office. She saw the tops of heads just visible above the fabric-covered panels. No one looked up; no one met her eyes; no one was watching.

She stepped back into Lassiter’s office and quietly shut the door behind her.

She turned and rested against the door, surveying the office. Her anger had somehow left her, replaced by a strange sense of exhilaration. She felt lightheaded, almost giddy, the way she felt as a teenager playing a midnight game of Capture the Flag—but this was no game. She had acted impulsively; she had acted out of anger; she had entered Lassiter’s private office without even knowing what she was looking for.
You’d better figure it out fast,
she said to herself. Her exhilaration was quickly giving way to gnawing fear.

And then she remembered—
autopsy dictations.

During every autopsy, the senior pathologist wore a headset microphone and kept a running verbal commentary on a voice-activated digital recorder. These were his notes, the observations and details he would use to refresh his memory as he composed the final autopsy report. The recording sounded nothing like an organized presentation; it was always broken, choppy, filled with the pathologist’s off-the-cuff remarks and unconscious reactions. Riley had heard comments made about a victim’s attractiveness, or ethnicity, or even about his obvious guilt or innocence—comments that would never appear in written form. In the course of a two-hour autopsy, who knows what Lassiter might have said? His dictations might reveal evidence that never made it to his final reports.

Riley stepped around the desk and sat down at Lassiter’s computer. She knew that the digital recordings were downloaded onto the pathologist’s computer, where the session could be audibly reviewed or the file could be e-mailed to an outside vendor for transcription. On the monitor, a screen saver of a cherry red Dodge Viper was displayed. Riley jiggled the mouse and the image instantly vanished, replaced by the Windows Desktop. She quickly hunted through the dozens of icons, searching for the medical dictation program.

And then she heard the doorknob turn.

A pure panic-reflex caused her to jump to her feet just before the door opened wide. Nathan Lassiter stood looking at her without expression.

“Can I help you?”

Riley’s brain flooded with adrenaline, and a thousand lame excuses and ridiculous explanations competed for her approval. But none of them was adequate—none was even close—and Riley stood there looking guilty and ashamed, like a little girl caught with a quarter pressed tightly in her hand and her mama’s purse at her feet.

From the corner of her eye Riley saw the computer monitor, and she almost audibly gasped. The screen saver was gone; the Windows Desktop was still in view.

Lassiter charged forward. Riley quickly stepped out to block him from circling the desk.

“I came in to … leave you a note,” she stumbled.

“You couldn’t leave it with my secretary?” He moved forward again. Riley stepped as far forward as she could and still keep the screen in her peripheral vision.

“It was … personal in nature,” she said.

Lassiter softened a bit. “Oh?”

“It was … an apology.” She stood uncomfortably close to him now, but it was the only way to keep him from the computer screen.

“Well, here I am. Let’s hear it.”

Riley winced. “I just wanted to say … I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“For … for my attitude.” Riley felt her stomach turn. She felt as though she were vomiting up each detestable word. “You’re my supervisor, and I was … disrespectful.” She eyed the monitor; how long
does it take for a screen saver to reappear? Thirty seconds? A minute? She didn’t know how much more of this sniveling she could endure. She was sure of one thing: Lassiter could listen to it all day.

“Well, I appreciate that,” he said beneficently. “It takes a little perspective to see these things clearly, and I suppose that comes from experience.” He reached out and placed one hand on her shoulder. It had all the warmth of a cadaver. From the corner of her eye, Riley saw a flicker of light and a change in hue from Windows blue to cherry red. She felt an overwhelming rush of relief, but she had no idea how to break off this touching encounter.

“OK,” she said abruptly. “Gotta go.” She stepped under his arm and headed directly for the door, exiting without looking back. She stopped briefly at her office, hung up her lab coat, and collected her purse. Then she hurried out of the building, looking for a suitable place to scream.

There was a steady, insistent rapping on the metal fire door that opened onto the parking lot at the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office. Riley hurried to the corner of the autopsy room and pushed it open. There stood an expressionless Nick Polchak, a canvas backpack slung over one shoulder.

“Nick, what took you so long? I called you thirty minutes ago!”

“I live thirty minutes away,” Nick said.

“You said you were going to be ‘on call.’ ”

“You mean just sitting around day after day, waiting for you to call? And they say men are demanding.”

She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him inside.

“Where is everybody?” Nick said. “The place is dead—no pun intended.”

“It was a quiet night—there were no calls coming in—so I gave them some money and sent them all out for pizza and beer.”

“You seem to personally fund a lot of interesting ventures. Remind me to tell you about a certain grant proposal.”

“Nick, they left twenty minutes ago. They could be back any moment now.”

“Then we’d better get busy. What have you got?”

“We had a body come in this morning. It was a gunshot wound to the rear of the head. He was apparently changing his tire, and they found him slumped over against his car—he picked a bad place to get a flat. Nothing was taken from the victim or his car; it looks like a drive-by shooting, possibly gang related.”

“And the autopsy? I assume it was Lassiter’s rotation.”

She nodded. “I offered to assist, as always—this time he sent me to Pitt to teach medical students how to hold a pen. I reviewed the police report just before I called you. Estimated time of death was yesterday, around dusk. They talked to the victim’s wife—he left home at exactly seven p.m. He was due at a poker game by seven thirty, but he never showed up. Lassiter did the autopsy late this morning.”

“And?”

“The procedure is to issue a death certificate immediately after the autopsy, but all it indicates is the primary cause of death. The details of Lassiter’s autopsy report won’t come out for a week or two—but I talked to one of his autopsy techs. He said the cause of death was a single bullet through the occipital bone. There was an entry wound, but no exit—it was a small-caliber weapon. The size and shape of the wound suggest a short-to-intermediate firing distance, and it was straight-on—just what you’d expect from a drive-by.”

“Nothing out of the ordinary?”

“Nothing the tech could see—nothing he was
allowed
to see. The only way we’ll know for sure is to check for ourselves—that is, if you’re still willing to help.”

“What can I do?”

“I need a second pair of eyes. We can’t reopen the body—we can’t even use the autopsy room. We can’t send any tissue samples to the histology lab, and we can’t draw any fluids for a toxicology screen. All we can do is work from the outside. I can check
for contusions, abrasions, additional wounds of any kind—I need you to look for evidence of insect activity. I’m looking for anything, Nick—anything that doesn’t look consistent with a drive-by shooting. But whatever we do, we’ve got to do it
fast.
”

The cooler door opened with a soft click, and a wall of icy air greeted them. The cooler was a single large room, long and deep, with a series of utility shelves and wire-rimmed, circular fans lining the far end. The walls looked like panels of Reynolds Wrap imprinted with poultry wire, a dull silver gray, and three stark incandescent bulbs dotted the midline of the ceiling. Packed in the center of the room were a half-dozen aging gurneys with white Formica tops and large, narrow wheels. Each one supported a human cadaver, sealed in a glossy blue body bag with a long black zipper directly down the center.

Riley pulled the door shut behind them and wheeled a single gurney into a small, open area.

“We have to do our looking in here,” Riley said. “Sorry it’s a bit chilly.”

“My mom has no air conditioning,” Nick said. “This is heaven.” He pulled the zipper all the way to the feet and began to tuck the vinyl back away from the torso.

Riley started with the soles of the feet and worked her way up, searching for any telltale mark or scratch that might reveal a struggle, an antemortem wound, or a posthumous relocation of the body. Nick began at the opposite end, checking the eyes, ears, and nasal passages for infestation. He pried open the lower jaw and peered into the mouth with a penlight.

“This is interesting,” Nick said.

“What?”

“There are eggs in the back of the mouth; blowflies go for the natural orifices first, and they often oviposit well back in the passageway. You said the time of death was after seven o’clock, around dusk? Blowflies usually knock off after dark, when the temperatures begin to fall. That would put the time of death as close to seven as possible. Looks like these ladies just got in under the wire.”

“Hurry, Nick,” Riley said. “We can debrief later.”

Riley worked her way up toward the neck and cranial area, while Nick headed for the lower orifices; they stumbled into one
another at the center of the body. When they bumped against the gurney, a tiny, paste-white object dropped into the crease at the bottom of the body bag.

“Now that is interesting,” Nick said, smoothing the crease and lifting the edge of the body bag closer to his face.

“Do you need a magnifier?”

Nick tapped his glasses. “Got one—it’s one of the perks.” Under the powerful lenses, a single, barely moving larva came into focus.

“It’s a first-instar maggot,” he said, “the earliest stage of larval development. There are two possibilities: Either the temperatures remained warm enough last night to allow a blowfly egg to hatch, or it’s a sarcophagid—a flesh fly. Blowflies lay eggs; flesh flies give live birth. They sort of squirt the maggots out, sometimes without even landing on the body. The big question for us is: where did it come from?”

“You already found eggs in the oral cavity.”

“Yes—
deep
in the oral cavity. Flesh-eating flies are attracted to openings in the body—usually the natural orifices first, because that’s where the gases are released that are the by-product of decomposition. But there are no orifices in the middle of the body, and yet we seem to have dislodged this little guy from somewhere.”

Nick stooped down and grasped the thorax with both hands, hooking his thumbs under the lower back, rolling the body slightly onto its left side. On the back, just below the rib cage, was a long, curving wound that was roughly sutured shut. In the center of the wound, wedged tightly between the lips of flesh, were two more tiny maggots.

“Bingo,” Nick said.

Just then they heard the click of the cooler door. Nick released the body, which settled thickly onto its back again. Riley lunged for the zipper, tugging it shut. She gave the gurney a shove with her hip, sending it rolling into the others. The cooler door began to swing open.

Nick turned to Riley, took her roughly in his arms, and kissed her.

Riley was so astonished that for the first instant she stood with her eyes bulging, her arms thrust down and back like a gymnast
finishing a dismount, as rigid as one of the cadavers around her. Then, just as suddenly, she realized what was taking place and understood her part in it. She swung her left arm up around Nick’s neck, closed her eyes, and kissed him back hard.

She heard a kind of snort from the doorway behind her, and then a giggling sound from out in the hall. “Sorry,” a voice said. “Bad timing.”

She turned to face them. Two deputy coroners and the dispatcher stood in the doorway holding a white cardboard box.

“We brought you back some pizza,” one of them said. “Guess we should have brought extra.” There was a smothered laugh and a trading of elbows.