high-rise building, freeing space in the old building. All medical examiners now had their own, separate offices on the third floor.
In addition to his desk, Jack now had his own lab bench, which meant he could leave out his microscope, slides, and paperwork without fear it would be disturbed.
Jack walked into the building, vowing to rise above his raw emotions and focus on his work. Feeling suddenly as if he were on a mission, he didn’t wait for the back elevator but took the stairs. He quickly traversed the new sudden infant death syndrome offices and cut through the old medical records room, which now housed the warren of new investigator cubbies. The graveyard shift of medicolegal investigators was finishing up reports for the seven-thirty shift change. Jack gave a cursory wave to Janice Jaeger, the night-shift investigator he’d known since he’d started work at OCME, and with whom he frequently partnered.
He tossed his jacket into an aged leather club chair when he reached the ID office, where all the medical examiners eventually started their day. Stacked on the solitary desk were the records of the cases that had come in during the night and that fell within OCME
jurisdiction, according to the medicolegal investigation team. These cases represented those deaths that had occurred in any unusual or suspicious manner, including suicide, accident, criminal violence, or merely suddenly when the victim was in apparent good health.
Jack sat down at the desk and began going through the cases. He liked to pick out the more challenging ones because they gave him the opportunity to learn. That was what he most enjoyed about forensics. The other medical examiners tolerated this behavior because Jack also did the most cases of anyone.
The normal morning process involved the medical examiner on first call for the week to come in early, usually about seven or slightly before, and go through the cases to determine which ones definitely needed postmortems, then assign them out on an equitable basis. Even Jack had the duty about a dozen times a year, which he never minded since he was invariably there anyway.
Within a couple of minutes Jack found an apparent meningitis case of a teenage boy from a private school on the Upper East Side. Since Jack was generally known as the infectious-disease guru after having made several lucky diagnoses in the past, he read the record slowly and put it aside. He thought that case might be good for him, since many of his colleagues shunned infectious cases. He truly didn’t care.
Jack slowed down on his perusal of the next case as well. It was another relatively young individual, although this time it was a female. The victim was a twenty-seven-year-old woman who’d been brought into an emergency room with supposed rapid onset of confusion, spastic gait, and ultimately coma and death. There had been no fever or malaise, and according to her friends, she was an avid health enthusiast, shunning drugs and alcohol. Although her friends had been enjoying cocktails at the time of her collapse, they claimed the victim had consumed only soft drinks.
“Oh, shit!” a voice lamented, loud enough to snap Jack’s head up.
Standing in the opened doorway leading out into the empty ID room was Vinnie Amendola, one of the mortuary technicians, a newspaper under his arm. He was still holding on to the doorknob of the connecting door as if he might change his mind and flee. It was clear that the source of his outburst was Jack’s presence.
“What’s the matter?” Jack demanded, wondering if there was some emergency.
Vinnie didn’t answer. He glared at Jack for a beat before closing the door behind him.
He stood in front of Jack’s desk, arms crossed. “Don’t freaking tell me you’re reverting to your old ways,” he said.
Jack could not suppress a smile. He’d suddenly realized the cause of Vinnie’s feigned anger. Prior to John Junior’s birth, when Jack would come to work early to cherry-pick the autopsy cases, he’d drag Vinnie down with him to the autopsy room to get a jump on the day. In addition to his regular mortuary-tech duties, Vinnie was responsible for coming in early to facilitate the transition from whatever the night techs were doing, although what he mostly did was make the communal coffee and then read the sports section of the
Although Vinnie always complained about having to start autopsies earlier than the chief medical examiner decreed, he and Jack were a great team despite their merciless teasing of each other. Together they could frequently do one and a half or even two cases while others did just one.
“I’m afraid so, sport,” Jack said. “Vacation is over. You and I are going to get back down to work. It’s my New Year’s resolution.”
“But it’s not New Year’s for another month,” Vinnie complained.
“Tough,” Jack responded. He reached out and pushed the chart of the twenty-seven-year-old woman in Vinnie’s direction. “Let’s start with Keara Abelard.”
“Not so fast, supersleuth,” Vinnie protested, using his old nickname for Jack. He made a production of inspecting his watch as if he were about to refuse Jack’s order. “I might be able to accommodate you in, say, ten minutes, after I make the house coffee.” He smiled.
Feigning the opposite, he’d actually missed his special relationship with Jack based on their early starts.
“It’s a deal,” Jack said. After a quick high-five with Vinnie, he went back to the stack of charts.
“Since you stopped coming in early when your son was born, I thought it was a permanent schedule change,” Vinnie said as he loaded the pot with fresh coffee, whose aroma quickly permeated the room.
“It was just a temporary slowdown,” Jack said. Although most everyone at the OCME
knew about his child’s birth, no one, as far as Jack knew, was aware of the infant’s illness. Jack and Laurie were both intensely private people.
“How do you know Dr. Besserman won’t want this Keara Abelard for himself?”
“Is that the ME who’s on this week and supposed to be here already?”
“None other,” Vinnie said.
“I don’t think he’ll be too upset,” Jack said, with his usual sarcasm. He knew full well that Besserman, one of the most senior MEs, would just as soon pass on all autopsies at this stage of his career. Nonetheless, Jack scribbled a quick note to Arnold, telling him he’d taken the Abelard case but would be happy to do another couple of cases if need be.
He put the Post-it on top of the pile of records and scraped his chair back.
In less than twenty minutes Jack and Vinnie were down in the autopsy room, which had been renovated to a degree during the previous year. Gone were the old soapstone sinks.
In their place were modern composite ones. Gone also were the giant glass-fronted cabinets with the collections of medieval-appearing autopsy tools. In their place were nondescript Formica ensembles with solid doors and significantly more space.
“Let’s do it!” Jack said. While he’d filled out the initial paperwork, not only had Vinnie gotten the body on the table and the X-rays on the view box, he’d also gotten all the supplies laid out, including the instruments he thought Jack was likely to want: specimen bottles, preservatives, labels, syringes, and evidence custody tags, in case Jack happened to detect an element of criminality.
“So, what are you looking for?” Vinnie asked, as Jack went through his exhaustive external examination. He ranged over the whole body but devoted particular attention to the head.
“Signs of trauma, for one thing,” Jack said. “That would be my number-one guess at this point. Of course, it could have been an aneurysm as well. She apparently became quickly disoriented and spastic, which led to coma and death.” Jack glanced into both external ear canals. He then used an ophthalmoscope to look at eye grounds. “Reputedly, she’d been out having cocktails with friends—nonalcoholic, according to history, and no drugs.”
“Could she have been poisoned?”
Jack straightened up and looked across the body at Vinnie. “That’s a strange suggestion at this point. What made you think of that?”
“There was a poisoning on a TV show last night.”
Jack laughed behind his mask. “That’s an interesting source for differential diagnosis.
I’m guessing that’s not too likely, but we’ll still need to do a toxicology screen. We’ll also make sure she’s not pregnant.”
“Good point about the pregnancy idea. That was what happened in the show last night.
The boyfriend wanted to get rid of the baby and the mom at the same time.” Jack didn’t respond. Instead, he began carrying out a painstaking examination of Keara’s scalp. Her thick, shoulder-length hair made progress slow.
