desk looks at it with a puzzled expression.
“Is this mud?” she asks.
“No, blood.”
Her eyebrows shoot up and she drops the part of the dress she’s holding like it’s a hot potato. “Real blood?”
I nod. “Afraid so.”
“It looks like a lot,” she says, her voice shaky. Since she’s eyeing me like she expects I’m about to go batshit crazy and hack her to death, I figure an explanation is in order.
“Sorry about that. I work for the medical examiner so I’m afraid blood is something of an occupational hazard. Last night I got called out to the scene of a homicide while I was at a Halloween party. This”—I finger the dress—“was my costume.”
Her shoulders relax and she smiles. Then she leans across the counter and lowers her voice. “I heard about that,” she says in her best conspirator’s voice. “Someone said it was that waitress over at Dairy Airs, the one who models from time to time.”
Ah, the ubiquitous but mysterious “someone” and “they,” basic gossip fodder in any small town.
“They said she was shot,” the woman goes on. “Is that true?”
“I can’t say,” I tell her, smiling back. She frowns, but looks at me with a new level of respect.
Though I enjoy a juicy bit of gossip as much as the next person and have partaken of fact swaps in the past, I’ve also been privy to knowledge on many occasions that I couldn’t and wouldn’t share. As a nurse, I always followed a strict code of confidentiality, even before the whole HIPAA thing started. With this job, I find myself once again bound to secrecy often as not. But that’s okay because I’ve discovered two things over the years. One is that not sharing what I know can be as satisfying as doling out a juicy tidbit. And that’s because of the other thing: status when it comes to gossip is less about what you actually know than it is about what people think you know. And my new job jumps me up to a whole new level because now people realize I’m a gatekeeper for some of the town’s juiciest tidbits ever.
I leave the curious and frustrated dry cleaner behind and head for the office, arriving a little after eleven- thirty. Izzy is already there, sitting in the library with a cup of coffee and the Sunday paper.
“Morning,” I tell him, pouring a cup of java and scrounging a cruller from a Dunkin’ Donuts box left over from yesterday. I drop a ten-dollar bill on the table in front of Izzy and then settle into a nearby chair. “Congratulations,” I tell him. “You won.”
“Easy money,” he says, pocketing the bill. “I knew Hurley would be there. You forget how predictable we men can be.”
“I’ll have to remember to tell that to my divorce lawyer.”
“First you have to find one.”
“I will. I just need some time.”
“I thought last night’s events might prompt you to speed that process up,” he says, his voice laden with innuendo.
I give him a puzzled look. “I don’t follow.”
“Well, it looked like you and William hit it off pretty well. I told you he wasn’t that bad.”
“Are you kidding? It was an unmitigated disaster.”
“Oh, sure,” Izzy says with a smirk. “I saw him leave your place last night. Hurley and I both did. We saw the lip imprint on his cheek, the mussed-up hair, the unbuttoned shirt, and the big-assed grin on his face. Hell, you even scratched him, you wildcat you.”
I stare at Izzy, blinking hard for a moment, before I realize what he’s inferring. “No, no, no,” I say, holding my hands out to ward off his evil thoughts. “You have it all wrong. William is allergic to cats, so his hair was all messed up because he sneezed a bazillion times. The scratches were from when Rubbish attacked his comb-over. The lip print—well, that was legit, but I only kissed him the one time on the cheek because he looked so miserable and I felt sorry for him.”
I decide not to admit to the reason why my lipstick was so fresh.
“The evening wasn’t a total loss, though,” I continue. “I’m going to fix William up with my mother. I think they’ll be perfect together.”
“Well, if your intent was to make Hurley jealous, it worked. You should have seen the look on his face when he saw William leaving. He was fuming.”
I smile, recalling Hurley’s thunderous expression and imagining the thoughts that might have been going through his mind. “What was he doing there anyway?”
“He said he wanted to fill me in on some case facts but I’m pretty sure he was using that as an excuse to come by and check on you. He could have just called or waited until this morning.”
As if on cue, I hear the door open behind me and see Izzy’s gaze shift over my head. “Good morning, Detective,” he says.
I turn around and smile at Hurley. “Good morning, Detective,” I echo in the cheeriest voice I can muster.
He scowls at me, mutters, “Morning,” and then shifts his attention to Izzy, effectively dismissing me. “Are we still on for noon?”
“Ready anytime,” Izzy says, draining his coffee mug. “Let’s get to it.”
That’s my cue so I scarf down my cruller, take one more swallow of my coffee, and head to the morgue.
Arnie, who functions as our primary lab tech, sometime autopsy assistant, general gofer, and resident conspiracy theorist, had tucked Shannon’s body in the cold storage room last evening. It’s the only body in the room so it isn’t hard to find.
I grab the clipboard at the end of the stretcher and examine the checklist of items on the top page—all the things that have to be done before the actual cutting part of the autopsy begins.
A weight is obtained on each body, something that is relatively simple since the stretcher weights are known. Once a body arrives in our office and gets loaded onto a stretcher, the whole thing is wheeled onto a scale built into the floor. The scale automatically deducts the stretcher’s weight and flashes the remainder, which is the body’s weight, on a digital screen.
We also obtain vitreous samples—a needle aspiration of the fluid inside the eyeballs. Whereas blood and other bodily fluids deteriorate rapidly once death occurs, a process that can affect certain lab values or the presence of residual drugs, the vitreous fluid remains more stable. It can also help narrow down the time of death as there is a somewhat predictable rise in the potassium level in the vitreous fluid after death. Each body is also X-rayed soon after arrival, before it is removed from its body bag.
According to the checklist, Arnie did all of these things last night when the body arrived. I’m glad, not only because it makes my job that much easier this morning, but because I hate having to obtain the vitreous fluid. The process of pushing a needle into someone’s eyeball, even knowing they are dead, gives me the willies.
I wheel the stretcher into the main autopsy room where Izzy and Hurley are already waiting. Izzy and I move Shannon’s body from the stretcher onto the autopsy table, then Izzy, who is already suited and gloved, opens the body bag and starts taking photos while I don my own protective gear. Thirty minutes later we have photographed and examined her body and clothing for trace evidence, undressed her, scraped for evidence beneath her nails, and hosed her down. Izzy is posed over her upper chest with his scalpel, ready to make the first incision.
Hurley is standing off to one side and has been quiet up to now, watching us with an intensity that makes my pulse quicken every time I look at him. This is my fourth autopsy with him and so far he’s followed a regular modus operandi: standing by quietly, observing, and occasionally asking a question or two about the significance of a particular finding. Today, however, he breaks with tradition just as Izzy is making the first cut. Taking out his notebook, he flips it open and begins a running commentary on his investigation thus far.
“Turns out Erik Tolliver was at work both yesterday and the day before. He met with Shannon at Dairy Airs on the day he said he did and, according to the workers there, things ended on a fiery note when Erik threw the papers at Shannon, called her a bitch, and stormed out. His dinner alibi holds up for the day of the murder but after about six P.M. his whereabouts are unaccounted for.
“Shannon was alive at three o’clock on the day she was murdered because that’s when she left work, but I haven’t found anyone who saw her after that. So that narrows down our time of death to sometime after three P.M. on the thirtieth. Yesterday’s mail was still in the mailbox, presumably delivered sometime after Shannon was killed.
