like a mannequin, like one of those corpses we had in medical school, right, Doctor?” He looked to Jessica for affirmation, but Jessica didn’t give him the satisfaction. He took another long, lingering look to admire her form as she removed the green gown, displaying her crisp, white blouse and beige slacks beneath. In the other room, she could hear the click-click-click of Powers’s Polaroid at work.
“ But if they’ve got looks, these sweet features,” continued Coudriet, coming around to face her, “well, it’s just harder for me, personally. I’m a grandfather now, three times over, and I look into those innocent eyes and faces, and I think if God ever put one of those innocent little sweethearts of mine on my slab, I’d run out of here screaming. Be right off to the loony farm. Felt the same way when I saw those little baby children blown to bloody shards in Oklahoma City. What’s so frightening about it all is that in today’s world, I have a one-in-five chance of seeing one of my grandchildren violently killed before I die.”
She mentally questioned his statistics but had to agree that he wasn’t far off. He was a half inch or so taller than she, his eyes a burnt umber, the brown orbs shining orange under the dim light of the dressing area. The little orange flecks glowing in his eyes matched his limitless freckles and augmented what was left of his red hair. In his time he’d been a powerfully built, handsome man, and he still managed to bring together enough stage presence to make others curiously jealous of him. His eyebrows were bushy across a thick ridge of forehead. He was a genius and he knew it, and he wasn’t certain he wanted Jessica’s competition on the case. His little display of first trying to make her feel uncomfortable and threatened, then the mild form of sexual innuendo, followed by ruminations about his grandchildren and their vulnerability, meant that he felt vulnerable. The Night Crawler cases had so escalated as to eclipse any and all others his department was working on- or had ever worked on during his twenty-nine-year reign as chief medical examiner for the city of Miami.
She guessed that he might’ve retired with an outstanding record, but then this had come up, and he felt duty-bound to see it through, like the president of a failing business trying desperately to see black again before retirement. She both respected and disliked his stubborn Irish. And she realized that he was understandably feeling like a man under a microscope, the intense heat of which could burn away a lifetime career.
She did her best to allow for this. “I guess I know what you mean,” she said, humoring him regarding his preference for a corpse without a face to one that possessed fine, comparatively healthy features.
He suddenly took her by the arm and escorted her back into the autopsy room, where he stood and pointed at the bloated, fishy creation of the sea that lay across the slab. Powers was just finishing his snapshots.
The senior medical man began a new diatribe. “She has no hue in her bloated eyelids, no eyebrows, lashes or color; this girl has neither a pointed nor a flat nose, no ears jutting out or lying back in feline majesty; no moles, fissures, pockmarks, overbites, underbites; the lips are neither dark nor light, thick nor thin, nor meaningful, since you can’t say where they begin or end; and as for the eyes… God, were they ever so deep-set in life as now when they are missing altogether, pecked out by crabs and microscopic sea life?”
“ Dr. Coudriet,” said Powers, taking hold of his boss’s arm. But Coudriet shook off the other man’s touch, continuing, “Is that her brow or that of a Cyclops? If she had eyes, brows, a large or small forehead, at least she’d be somebody, even in death.”
“ I think I’ve seen enough for one night,” Jessica firmly told Coudriet, anxious now to step away from Allison Nor ris’s remains for the last time, angry with Coudriet’s having put her so near the girl and so far from her main objective.
But he continued on, waving his hands as he spoke, a professor repeating a favored lecture to a student. “With this kind of bloated corpse, every minuscule pore and cell is saline-swelled, burying the facial characteristics in pulpy flesh, so there is no recognizing Allison for Allison.”
Now Dr. Thorn tried to intervene, using a kind word. “Doctor Coudriet, it’s late, and you must be exhausted…”
Still he continued on as if he were alone with the corpse. “With Allison Norris, even the distinguishing birthmark on her hip-used along with dental and medical records to ID her-was so ballooned up as to be three times its normal size. She-it-had no identity left, not to speak of, no fingernails or prints, eyebrows or lashes…”
Jessica easily and quickly acknowledged all this as true enough. The sea had been merciless, unaffected actually, uncaring and unforgiving-like a storm-leaving Allison’s body a blank, a mold upon which nothing had been stamped. All color was bleached white to an albino finish, a waxy white lather painted on with a huge brush to create the patina of death. Her auburn hair, once quite close to Jessica’s own in appearance, was bleached from the intense Florida sun. And even this hinted at a horrid truth, Jessica realized. The body had floated atop the water for at least two and perhaps three weeks before discovery. But where and how could it have without being seen by someone somewhere? And if dragged through the water, wouldn’t it have had to be by boat? And if by boat, could not the killing ground have been the sea, the entirety of the ocean itself? If so, this explained a great deal.
Coudriet, like some bad actor now, was still working on his monologue. “Without the birthmark and the dental records, Allison’s body could never have been identified. The quivering mass ot” flesh remaining was like an empty slate, and decay had even blemished this when the abdomen, due to a buildup of noxious gases, had erupted and ruptured. A hell of a lot of lish had dined on her after that.”
As if on cue, a globule of flesh, now at room temperature, first separated itself from the body like a piece of living clay and then spattered onto the white-tiled morgue floor, where it promptly seeped like thick syrup through a grate over a drain below the slab, following the water seeping from a hose that ran continuously to keep the area clean. Pieces of Allison were disappearing before Jessica’s eyes, Jessica thought just as Coudriet. being careless, still wearing his “civvy” shoes, slipped on a second globule off the dripping dead woman, going to one knee. Powers quickly helped the older man back up. Coudriet’s face was flushed red now, and Jessica realized for the first time that he’d been drinking.
There wasn’t much hope of learning anything further from Allison tonight, but at this rate, Jessica wondered how much more Allison’s corpse could tell anyone, including Jessica Coran or even the impatient and obsessed Dr. Coudriet.
Jessica made a few additional quick assumptions about the killer and his modus operandi, but she wisely kept these to herself for the time being. It was late, and Coudriet was being a tad more than strange and eccentric now. When he signaled with a slight nod that he was finished, Ted Thorn took charge to remove the body.
Jessica thanked Coudriet for his opinion and his time, adding that she was tired and thought she’d go back to the hotel to get some rest, in order to return refreshed in the morning.
“ Yes, of course,” Coudriet agreed as if coming out of a trance. She wondered if, besides the booze she now smelled on his breath, he were on something-perhaps medication for an ailment.“Well, good night to you all. I’ll likely see you tomorrow.”
She quickly exited, noticing the embarrassment on the faces of the two junior men in the room. Perhaps their mentor was slipping in more ways than one.
FIVE
Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Jessica stared momentarily at her watch as she made her way from the bowels of the teaching hospital’s morgue and back toward Miami-Dade Central Police Headquarters through a series of tunnels, stairwells and twists and turns that eventually brought her to ground level. She wondered why morgues were always located below ground, as if in constructing them a kind of subconsciously created perdition was ever the aim, but she also knew two truths which led architects and builders to place morgues at the base of modern buildings. First, like their Egyptian counterparts who placed their most distinguished dead in secret chambers where cavernous mazes terminated, modern builders utilized the principles of cold storage, and nature provided the first refrigerator in the earth itself; and second, everybody knew that no one really wanted to be reminded of the dead on a daily basis, even if those dead were frozen or mummified. Out of sight, out of mind. Nowhere was that truer than in modern America.
