could commit the perfect crime. When I’m with my colleagues
and throw back enough whiskey, we love to come up with
scenarios that we’d never present at professional meetings or
mention to family, friends, certainly not to our enemies!
I asked her what her favorite whiskey is.
Maybe a toss-up between Knappogue Castle single-malt Irish
whiskey and Brora single-malt Scotch.
Never heard of either.
Why would you? Knappogue is probably the finest Irish
whiskey in the world and costs close to seven hundred dollars.
And Brora is so rare and exquisite, each bottle is numbered and
costs more than your schoolbooks in a year.
How can you afford to drink such expensive
whiskey, and don’t you feel guilty when there are so
many people losing their homes and unable to fill their
cars with gas?
My turning down a magnificent Irish whiskey isn’t going to fill
your car with gas—assuming you have a car. It’s a fact that the
finer labels—whether it’s a Chateau Petrus, a single-malt
whiskey, or very fine pure agave tequila—are less damaging to
your liver and brain.
So wealthy people who drink the good stuff aren’t
as affected by alcohol abuse? That’s something I’ve
never heard.
How many human livers and brains have you seen and
sectioned?
How about some other examples from the dark
side? What else do you say behind the scenes,
especially when you’re with your colleagues?
We brag about famous people we’ve autopsied (all of us
secretly wish we’d done Elvis or Anna Nicole Smith or Princess
Diana). Listen, I’m no different from anybody else. I want the
case nobody else gets. I want the Gainesville serial murders. I
want to be the one who arrives at the scene and finds the
severed head on a bookshelf staring at me when I walk through
the door. I would have loved to have been cross-examined by
Ted Bundy when he represented himself at his own murder trial.
Hell, I would have loved to have done his autopsy after he was
executed.
Share some sensational cases you have worked.
I’ve been fortunate to have a number of them. For example,
lightning strikes, where nobody else could figure out the cause of
death, because you’ve got this body lying in a field, her clothes
ripped off and scattered. First thought? Sexual assault. But no
sign of injury at autopsy. Dead giveaways, excuse the pun? The
branching pattern known as the Lichtenberg figures or electrical
treeing. Or if the person was wearing anything ferrous, such as
a steel belt buckle, it would have become magnetized, or the
wristwatch might have stopped at the time of death—I always
check for things like that. Most medical examiners don’t because
they’re inexperienced or naive or just not very good at what
they do.
You don’t sound as compassionate as I expected.
Let’s face it. Dead is dead. I can show all the empathy in the
world and move any jury to tears. But do I really feel that my
heart has been snatched out of my chest when the latest
tragedy’s rolled in? Do I really care when the cops make
comments that the public never hears?
Such as?
Typically, comments with sexual overtones. The size of the
deceased’s penis—especially if it’s small or huge. The size of the
deceased’s breasts—especially if they’re what I’d call centerfold
material. I know plenty of medical examiners who take souvenirs.
Trophies. An artificial hip from someone famous. A tooth. A
breast implant, and it’s always the men who want those. (Don’t
ask me what they do with them, but they’re usually within easy
reach.) A penile implant—those are amusing.
Have you ever kept a souvenir?
Only one. This was twenty years ago, a case early in my
career, serial murders in Richmond, where I was the brand-new
chief. But the trophy wasn’t from a dead body. It was from
Benton Wesley. The first time we met was in my conference
room. When he left, I kept his coffee cup. You know, one of
these tall Styrofoam cups from a 7-Eleven? I was totally in lust
with him the first minute I saw him.
What did you do with his coffee cup?
I took it home with me and ran my tongue along the rim of it,
as if by tasting it, I was tasting him.
But you didn’t actually sleep with him until, what?
About five years later?
That’s what everybody thinks. But that’s not what really
happened. I called him after that first meeting and invited him
over for a drink—allegedly so we could continue discussing the
cases in private, and the instant my front door shut behind us,
we were all over each other.
Who started it?
I seduced him. That made it less of a moral struggle for him.
He was married. I was divorced and not seeing anyone. His poor
wife. Benton and I had been lovers for almost five years before
he finally admitted it to her, feigning that his adultery had just
begun because their marriage had gotten stale, lifeless.
And nobody knew? Pete Marino? Lucy? Your
secretary, Rose?
I’ve always wondered if Rose suspected it. Just something
about the way she’d act when Benton would show up for yet
another case discussion, or when I was on my way to Quantico
for yet another consultation. She died of cancer last summer. So
you can’t ask her.
Doesn’t sound as if working with the dead makes
