that took up most of the room implanted in the linoleum-covered floor; here, gurneys with bodies on them would be weighed and measured before being autopsied. A door on the far wall led into the tile-walled autopsy room itself – “Welcome to my world” said Figlewski – and the moment it opened Gideon was reminded of why he hated fire fatalities so much; maybe even more than decomps (although it was a close call).
The thing was, badly charred bodies smelled wonderful – walking into an autopsy room with one of them on the table was like walking into a weirdly sterile-looking steakhouse. And then you got up to the table and had to face the thing that lay on it. For Gideon, the war between the appetizing smell and his notoriously hair-trigger gag reflex made for a queasy and unsettling time of it.
“I told you,” said Fausto, referring to the paucity of remains lying on the slanting, zinc-topped table.
Gideon nodded, trying to quiet the churning in his midsection. Once he got down to work, it would pass, but for the moment, what was left of Ivan Gunderson was pretty off-putting. As Fausto had said, the body, lying on its back, looked more like a charred chunk of wood – a piece of driftwood that had been used more than once as part of a campfire on the beach – than what had once been a human being. That was the bad part. It was also the good part, in that there was nothing at all in this blackened, desiccated hulk to make him think of Ivan. It might have been anybody. It might almost have been anything.
As Fausto had told him, there was nothing that anyone could call a face. Only the back parts of the palate and mandible were left, with a few heat-shattered molars. This was a common result in fires. The human face and cranial vault are “protected” only by some of the thinnest muscles in the entire body. Lower down, along the sides of the head and in back, where the heavier musculature of the jaw and the neck do afford some protection, both soft and skeletal tissue generally fare somewhat better. And this was the case here. The base of the cranium, thick to begin with, and shielded by dense muscles as well, was still present, but only as an empty, bowl-shaped basin with some blackened soft tissue – not soft anymore – still left on the outside. If there had been any brain tissue left inside, which was unlikely, Kaz had removed it during the autopsy.
As for the rest of the body, Fausto had been right about that too. There wasn’t much to see. One of his more lyrical anthropologist friends, Stan Rhine, had likened the appearance of a body as badly burned as this one to a derelict old sailing ship, dismasted and cast up on a beach somewhere, its curved, broken old ribs jutting up from the sands. The image had stuck with Gideon, and in Ivan’s case, it was particularly apt. “The body was burned beyond recognition” would have been putting it mildly.
“Well,” Gideon said, steeling himself. He stood a couple of feet from the table, looking down at it.
Kaz was on the other side of it, watching expectantly. Fausto was leaning back against a stainless steel sink four or five feet away, his arms folded. Gideon doubted that this tough little cop was worried about his stomach. More likely, he didn’t want to chance getting anything nasty on his pale blue, nubby linen suit or the soft, immaculate French cuffs of his buff-colored silk shirt. Gideon wished he could work from five feet away too.
“Tell me what you know so far, Kaz,” Gideon said.
“Well, we establish already that he is alive at time of fire-”
“How do you know that?”
“Elevated carbon monoxide level in blood. He is still breathing when fire started, for sure.”
Gideon looked down at the dried, crusted remains. “You were able to get blood?”
“Blood, yes, even urine. There was congealed mass of soft tissue in pelvic cavity – liver, colon…”
“And you already have the results?”
Fausto answered for him. “Told you, there isn’t too much going on here. Getting lab results in a hurry isn’t a problem.”
“What was the level?” Gideon asked.
“Fifty-five percent,” said Kaz.
“Enough to kill a man his age,” Gideon said.
“Oh, yes, for sure.”
“So is that your best guess? He died of smoke inhalation?”
“Oh, yes. For sure.”
“Okay, what else?” Gideon edged a step closer to the table. He liked to approach these things in stages, working his way up to the corpse. For him, it made it easier to take, like getting into cold water a few inches at a time, getting used to the shock, and then going in deeper.
“Else?” Kaz scratched his head. “Not so much, really. Uh, he was lying on back, in bed, during fire – I find pieces of melted, what do you call it, springs from bed, buried in soft tissue on back of hips and shoulders. And, well…”
“How sure are you that it’s him – Gunderson?” Gideon asked, looking down at the body, his hands still in back of him. It wasn’t that unusual for unrecognizable remains to turn out to belong to other people than were first assumed. While the fact that he had been found in Gunderson’s bed made it likely that he was indeed Ivan Gunderson, it wasn’t exactly proof. And nobody had identified this body by looking at it, that was for sure.
“One hundred percent,” Fausto answered for Kaz. “That’s one thing we’re sure about.”
“Was his teeth,” Kaz said. “Mostly broken or gone, yes, but two back ones, upper molar threes, are still okay, and we bring his dentist here first thing this morning to see them. A positive identification.”
Gideon shook his head admiringly. “You guys do work fast,” he said. Another step closer to the table.
“Wasn’t that hard,” Fausto said. “Total of twenty-four dentists in Gib. Took about fifteen minutes to find Gunderson’s. And he wasn’t doing anything else this morning.”
“So where you go from here?” Kaz asked. “You can do something with
… with this small remains?”
“It doesn’t look good, does it?” Gideon said with a sigh. “Is this it, then, Kaz? They didn’t come up with any more pieces of him?”
“No more pieces, but I got some of his liver and other organs” – another gesture of invitation toward the refrigerator – “if you want-”
Gideon fended him off with upraised hands. “ No! I mean, I wouldn’t know what to do with them. I meant bones. Especially pieces of the skull.”
Kaz shook his head. “I’m sorry, they find only this.”
“The cottage was a mess,” Fausto said. “Hardly anything standing. Roof collapsed, debris everywhere, all as burned up as he is, tons of water sloshed all over everything. Take you a year to try to find any bone at all, let alone from his skull. This is it, I’m afraid.”
Gideon nodded. He had made it all the way up to the table now. “Well, let’s see what we can see,” he said, not very hopefully.
“You would like lab coat?” Kaz asked. “Pair gloves?”
“I would love a pair of gloves, Kaz.”
Kaz gave him two pairs – since the advent of AIDS, wearing two sets instead of one had become common – which Gideon slipped on, not that the remains of Ivan Gunderson would be likely to pose any threat in that regard. Beside the table was a steel tray in which Kaz’s simple autopsy tools lay on a cloth: probes, scalpels, and the ubiquitous, wicked-looking, foot-long knife known familiarly as the “bread knife.” All the classic old instruments. Scissors, favored by most young pathologists nowadays, were not present. Gideon selected a dental pick, spatula- shaped at one end, hooked and pointed at the other, and bent over the ruins of the skull. Fausto stayed where he was, back a few feet, leaning against the sink. Kaz, anticipating edification, leaned keenly over the table from the other side. Gideon, for his part, would have been happy to edify, but the pickings looked slim; he might well be wasting everyone’s time.
He turned his attention to what was left of the skull, gently probing with the pick end of the probe. “So what we’ve got here is the base of the cranium from about the superior nuchal line on down,” he mused aloud, “with some of the heavy musculature – sternocleidomastoideus, masseter, trapezius – still adhering to the lower portions…”
Gingerly, he touched the gray-white, exposed bone with the tip of the probe. Bits of it crumbled away. “Upper parts are deeply burned, heavily calcined in places, graduating inferiorly to singed, buff-colored bone, and then to-” With the spatula end of the probe he prodded the surface of the burned musculature. The crusty top layer flaked off at the first touch, exposing a deeper stratum of red meat, much like – he couldn’t help thinking it – the middle of a rare, charcoal-broiled steak. When a bit of that too was picked and prodded away, fresh, ivory-colored, unharmed bone showed through. “-to muscle-protected, unburned bony tissue from about the zygomatic process and the
