suspect only people who deal with the dead for a living can understand what I mean by that. During my medical- school residencies I was no different from other doctors, tending to the sick and injured on wards and in emergency rooms, and I assisted in surgical procedures in the OR. So I know what it is to incise warm bodies that have a blood pressure and something vital to lose. What I’m about to do couldn’t be more different from that, and the first time I inserted a scalpel blade into cold, unfeeling flesh, made my first Y-incision on my first dead patient, I gave up something I’ve never gotten back.
I abandoned any notion that I might be godlike or heroic or gifted beyond other mortals. I rejected the fantasy that I could heal any creature, including myself. No doctor has the power to cause blood to clot or tissue or bone to regenerate or tumors to shrink. We don’t create, only prompt biological functions to work or not work properly on their own, and in that regard, doctors are more limited than a mechanic or an engineer who actually builds something out of nothing. My choice of a medical specialty, which my mother and sister still consider morbid and abnormal, probably has made me more honest than most physicians. I know that when I administer my healing touch to the dead they are unmoved by me or my bedside manner. They stay just as dead as they were before. They don’t say thank you or send holiday greetings or name their children after me. Of course I was cognizant of all this when I decided on pathology, but that’s like saying you know what combat is when you enlist in the marines and get deployed to the mountains of Afghanistan. People don’t really know what anything is really like until it really happens to them.
I can never smell the acrid, oily, pungent odor of unbuffered formaldehyde without being reminded of how naive I was to assume that the dissection of a cadaver donated to science for teaching purposes is anything like the autopsy of an unembalmed person whose cause of death is questioned. My first one took place in the Hopkins hospital morgue, which was a crude place compared to what is beyond this room where I am this minute folding my AFME field clothes and placing them on a bench, not bothering with the locker room or modesty at this hour. The woman whose name I still recall was only thirty-three and left behind two small children and a husband when she died of postoperative complications from an appendectomy.
To this day I’m sorry she was my science project. I’m sorry she was ever put in a position to be any pathology resident’s project, and I remember thinking how absurd it was that such a healthy young human being had succumbed to an infection caused by the removal of a rather useless wormlike pouch from the large intestine. I wanted to make her better. As I worked on her, practiced on her, I wanted her to come to and climb off that scratched-up steel pedestal table in the center of the dingy floor inside that dreary subterranean room that smelled like death. I wanted her alive and well and to feel I’d had something to do with it. I’m not a surgeon. What I do is excavate so I can make my case when I go to war with killers or, less dramatically but more typically, with lawyers.
Anne was thoughtful enough to find a pair of freshly laundered scrubs, size medium and the institutional green I’m accustomed to, and I put them on, then over them a disposable gown, which I tie snugly in back before I pull shoe covers out of a dispenser and cover a pair of rubber medical clogs Anne dug up somewhere. Next are protective sleeves, a hair cover, a mask, and a face shield, and finally I double-glove.
“Maybe you could scribe for me,” I say to her as I return to the autopsy room, a big, empty vista of gleaming white and bright steel. Only the three of us are here, if I include my patient on the first table. “In the event I don’t get to dictate my findings directly afterward, and it appears I may have to leave.”
“Not by yourself,” she reminds me.
“Benton took the car key,” I remind her.
“Wouldn’t stop you, since we have vehicles, so don’t try to fool me. When it’s time, I’m calling him, and there won’t be an argument.” Anne can say almost anything and not sound disrespectful or rude.
She takes photographs while I swab the entrance wound on the lower back. Then I swab orifices in the off chance this homicide might involve a sexual assault, although I don’t see how, based on what has been described.
“Because we’re looking for a unicorn.” I seal anal and oral swabs in paper envelopes and label and initial them. “Not your everyday pony, and I’m not going to believe anything, anyway, since I didn’t go to the scene.”
“Well, nobody did,” Anne says. “Which is a shame.”
“Even if somebody had, I’d still be looking for a unicorn.”
“I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t trust what anybody says if I were you.”
“If you were me.” I lock a new blade into a scalpel as she fills a labeled plastic jar with formalin.
“Unless it’s me who’s talking,” she replies without looking at me. “I wouldn’t lie or cheat or help myself to things that aren’t mine. I would never treat this place as if it belongs to me. Never mind. I shouldn’t get into it.”
I won’t let her get into it. It isn’t necessary to put her in a position like that, betraying the people who have betrayed me. I know what it feels like to be put in a position like that. It’s one of the worst feelings there is and promotes lying, overtly or by omission, and I know that feeling, too. An untruth that lodges intact in the core of your being like undigested corn found in Egyptian mummies. There’s no getting rid of such a thing, of undoing it, without going in to get it, and I’m not sure I have the courage for that, as I think of the worn wooden steps leading down into the basement of the house in Cambridge. I think of the rough stonewalls belowground and the fifteen- hundred-pound safe with its two-inch-thick composite triple-lock door.
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard any rumors about where everybody is,” I then say. “When you were with Marino at McLean.” I begin the Y incision, cutting from clavicle to clavicle, then long and deep straight down with a slight detour around the navel and terminating at the pubic bone in the lower abdomen. “Did you get any idea of who is in our parking lot and what’s going on? Since I seem to be under house arrest for reasons no one has been inclined to make completely clear.”
“The FBI.” Anne doesn’t tell me something I don’t know as she walks to the wall where clipboards hang from hooks next to rows of plastic racks for blank forms and diagrams. “At least two agents in the parking lot, and one followed us. Someone did.” She collects paperwork she needs and selects a clipboard after making sure the ballpoint pen attached to it by a cord has ink. “A detective, an agent. I don’t know who followed us to the hospital, but someone who clearly had alerted security before we got there.” She returns to the table. “When we rolled up at the neuroimaging lab, there were three McLean security guys, most excitement they’ve had in years. And then this person in an SUV, a dark-blue Ford, an Explorer or an Expedition.”
Maybe what Benton just drove away in, and I ask Anne, “Did he or she get out of the SUV? I assume you didn’t talk to whoever it was?” I reflect back soft tissue. The man is so lean he has just the thinnest layer of yellow fat before the tissue turns beefy red.
“It was hard to see, and I wasn’t going to walk right up and stare. The agent was still sitting in the SUV when we left and followed us back here.”
She picks up rib cutters from the surgical cart and helps me remove the breastplate, exposing the organs and significant hemorrhage, and I smell the beginning of cells breaking down, the faintest hint of what promises to be putrid and foul. The odors emitted by the human body as it decomposes are uniquely unpleasant. It isn’t like a bird or an opossum or the largest mammal one can think of. In death we are as different from other creatures as we are in life, and I would recognize the stench of decaying human flesh anywhere.
“How do you want to do this? En bloc? And deal with the metal after we have the organs on the cutting board?” Anne asks.
“I think we need to synchronize what we’re doing inch by inch, step by step. Line things up with the scans as best we can, because I’m not sure I’m going to be able to see whatever these ferromagnetic foreign bodies are unless I’m looking right at them with a lens.” I wipe my bloody gloved hands on a towel and step closer to the video display, which Anne has divided into quadrants to give me a choice of images from the MRI.
“Distributed a lot like gunshot powder,” she suggests. “Although we can’t see the actual metal particles because they canceled the signal.”
“True. More blooming artifact, more voids at the beginning than the end. Greatest amount at the entrance.” I point my bloody gloved finger at the screen.
“But no residue of anything on the surface,” she says. “And that’s different from a gunshot wound, a contact wound.”
“Everything about this is different from a gunshot wound,” I answer.
“You can see that whatever this stuff is, it starts here.” She indicates the entrance wound on the lower back. “But not at the surface. Just beneath it, maybe half an inch beneath it, which is really weird. I’m trying to imagine it
