“If Dr. Fielding comes in you want me to call, ma’am. To alert you,” Ron repeats, as if he’s not sure that’s what I meant, or maybe he’s arguing.
“Affirmative,” I make myself clear. “No one should just walk in, doesn’t matter if they work here. Until I tell you otherwise. I want everything airtight right now.”
“I understand, ma’am.”
“Any calls from the media? Any sign of them?”
“I keep looking, ma’am.” Mounted on three walls are monitors, each split into quadrants that are constantly rotating images picked up by security cameras outside the building and in strategic areas such as the bays, corridors, elevators, lobby, and all doors leading into the building. “I know there’s some concern about the man found in the park.” Ron looks past me at Marino, as if the two of them have an understanding.
“Well, you know where we’ll be for now.” I open another door. “Thank you.”
A long white hallway with a gray tile floor leads to a series of rooms located in a logical order that facilitates the flow of our work. The first stop is ID, where bodies are photographed and fingerprinted and personal effects not taken by the police are removed and secured in lockers. Next is large-scale x-ray, which includes the CT scanner, and beyond that are the autopsy room, the soiled room, the anteroom, the changing rooms, the locker rooms, the anthropology lab, the Bio4 containment lab reserved for suspected infectious or contaminated cases. The corridor wraps around in a circle that ends where it began, at the receiving bay.
“What does security know about our patient from Norton’s Woods?” I ask Marino. “Why does Ron think there’s a concern?”
“I didn’t tell him anything.”
“I’m asking what he knows.”
“He wasn’t on duty when we left earlier. I haven’t seen him today.”
“I’m wondering what he’s been told,” I repeat patiently, because I don’t want to squabble with Marino in front of the others. “Obviously, this is a very sensitive situation.”
“I gave an order before I left that everyone needed to be on the lookout for the media,” Marino says, taking off his leather jacket as we reach the x-ray room, where the red light above the door indicates that the scanner is in use. Anne and Ollie won’t have started without me, but it’s their habit to deter people from walking into an area where there are levels of radiation much higher than are safe for living patients. “Wasn’t my idea for Janelle or the others to work from home, either,” Marino adds.
I don’t ask how long that’s been going on or who the “others” are. Who else has been working from home? This is a state government facility, a paramilitary installation, not a cottage industry, I feel like saying.
“Damn Fielding,” Marino then mutters. “He’s fucking up everything.”
I don’t answer. Now is not the time to discuss how fucked up everything is.
“You know where I’ll be.” Lucy walks off toward the elevator, and with an elbow pushes a hands-free oversized button. She disappears behind sliding steel doors as I pass my thumb over another biometric sensor and the lock clicks free.
Inside the control room, forensic radiologist Dr. Oliver Hess is seated at a work station behind lead-lined glass, his gray hair unruly, his face sleepy, as if I got him out of bed. Past him, through an open door, I can see the eggshell-white Siemens Somatom Sensation and hear the fan of its water-cooled system. The scanner is a modified version of the one used at Dover, equipped with a custom head holder and safety straps, its wiring subsurface, its parameter sealed, its table covered by a heavy vinyl slicker to protect the multimillion-dollar system from contaminants such as body fluids. Slightly angled down toward the door to facilitate sliding bodies on and off, the scanner is in the ready status, and technologist Anne Mahoney is placing radio-opaque CT skin markers on the dead man from Norton’s Woods. I get a strange feeling as I walk in. He is familiar, although I’ve never seen him before, only parts of him on recordings I watched on an iPad.
I recognize the tint of his light-brown skin and his tapered hands, which are by his sides on top of a disposable blue sheet, his long, slender fingers slightly curled and stiff with rigor.
In the video clips I heard his voice and saw glimpses of his hands, his boots, his clothing, but I did not see his face. I’m not sure what I imagined but am vaguely disturbed by his delicate features and long, curly brown hair, by the spray of light freckles across his smooth cheeks. I pull the sheet back, and he is very thin, about five-foot-eight and at most one hundred and thirty pounds, I deduce, with very little body hair. He could easily pass for sixteen, and I’m reminded of Johnny Donahue, who isn’t much older. Kids. Could that be a common denominator? Or is it Otwahl Technologies?
“Anything?” I ask Anne, a plain-looking woman in her thirties with shaggy brown hair and sensitive hazel eyes. She’s probably the best person on my staff, can do anything, whether it is different types of radiographic imaging or helping in the morgue or at crime scenes. She is always willing.
“This. Which I noticed when I undressed him.” Her latex-sheathed hands grip the body at the waist and hip, pulling it over so I can see a tiny defect on the left side of the back at the level of the kidneys. “Obviously missed at the scene because it didn’t bleed out, at least not much. You know about his bleeding, which I witnessed with my own two eyes when I was going to scan him early this morning? That he bled profusely from his nose and mouth after he was bagged and transported?”
“That’s why I’m here.” I open a drawer to retrieve a hand lens, and then Benton is by my side in a surgical mask and gown and gloves. “He’s got some sort of injury,” I say to him as I lean close to the body and magnify an irregular wound that looks like a small buttonhole. “Definitely not a gunshot entrance. A stab wound made by a very narrow blade, like a boning knife but with two edges. Something like a stiletto.”
“A stiletto in his back would drop him in his tracks?” Benton’s eyes are skeptical above his mask.
“No. Not unless he was stabbed at the base of his skull and it severed his spinal cord.” I think of Mark Bishop and the nails that killed him.
“Like I said at Dover, maybe something was injected,” Marino offers as he walks in covered from head to foot with personal protective clothing, including a face shield and hair cover, as if he’s worried about airborne pathogens or deadly spores, such as anthrax. “Maybe some kind of anesthesia. A lethal injection, in other words. That could sure as hell drop you in your tracks.”
“In the first place, an anesthesia like sodium thiopental is injected into a vein, as are pancuronium bromide or potassium chloride.” I pull on a pair of examination gloves. “They aren’t injected into the person’s back. Same thing with mivacurium, with succinylcholine. You want to kill somebody decisively and quickly with a neuromuscular blocker, you’d better inject it intravenously.”
“But if they were injected into a muscle, it would still kill you, right?” Marino opens a cabinet and gets out a camera. He rummages in a drawer and finds a plastic six-inch ruler for size reference. “During executions, sometimes the injection misses the vein and goes into the muscle, and the inmate still dies.”
“A slow and very painful death,” I reply. “By all accounts, this man’s death wasn’t slow, and this injury wasn’t made by a needle.”
“I won’t say the prison techs do it on purpose, but it happens. Well, it’s probably on purpose. Just like some of them chill the cocktail, making sure the dirtbag feels it hit, the ice-cold hand of death,” Marino says for Anne’s benefit, because she is passionately anti-capital punishment. His way of flirting is to offend her whenever he can.
“That’s disgusting,” she says.
“Hey. It’s not like they cared about the people they whacked, right? Like they cared if they suffered, right? What goes around comes around. Who hid the damn label maker?”
“I did. I lie awake at night figuring out ways to get you back.”
“Oh, yeah? For what?”
“For just being you.”
Marino digs in another drawer, finds the label maker. “He looks a hell of a lot younger than what the EMTs said. Anybody notice that besides me? Don’t you think he looks younger than his twenties?” Marino asks Anne. “Looks like a damn kid.”
“Barely pubescent,” she agrees. “But then, all college kids are starting to look like that to me. They look like babies.”
“We don’t know if he was a college student,” I remind everyone.
Marino peels the backing off a label printed with the date and case number, and sticks it on the plastic ruler. “I’ll canvas the area over there by the common, see if any supers in apartment buildings recognize him, just do it
