Body Double

longer the jaded pathologist, she watched Abe cut with scissors and knife, and the brutality of the procedure appalled her. Dear god, this is what I do every day, but when my scalpel cuts, it’s through the unfamiliar flesh of strangers.

This woman does not feel like a stranger.

She slipped into a numb void, watching Abe work as though from a distance. Fatigued by her restless night, by jet lag, she felt herself recede from the scene unfolding on the table, retreating to some safer vantage point from which she could watch with dulled emotions. It was just a cadaver on the table. No connection, no one she knew. Abe quickly freed the small intestines and dropped the coils into the basin. With scissors and kitchen knife, he gutted the abdomen, leaving only a hollow shell. He carried the basin, now heavy with entrails, to the stainless steel countertop, where he lifted out the organs one by one for closer examination.

On the cutting board, he slit open the stomach and drained the contents into a smaller basin. The smell of undigested food made Rizzoli and Frost turn away, their faces grimacing in disgust.

“Looks like the remains of supper here,” said Abe. “I’d say she had a seafood salad. I see lettuce and tomatoes. Maybe shrimp…”

“How close to the time of death was her last meal?” asked Rizzoli. Voice oddly nasal, her hand over her face, blocking the smells.

“An hour, maybe more. I’m guessing she ate out, since seafood salad’s not the kind of meal I’d fix for myself at home.” Abe glanced at Rizzoli. “You find any restaurant receipts in her purse?”

“No. She could’ve paid cash. We’re still waiting for her credit card info.”

“Jesus,” said Frost, still averting his gaze. “This just about kills any appetite I ever had for shrimp.”

“Hey, you can’t let that bother you,” said Abe, now slicing into the pancreas. “When you get right down to it, we’re all made up of the same basic building blocks. Fat, carbohydrates, and protein. You eat a juicy steak, you’re eating muscle. You think I’d ever swear off steak, just because that’s the tissue I dissect every day? All muscle has the same biochemical ingredients, but sometimes it just smells better than at other times.” He reached for the kidneys. Made neat slices into each, and dropped small tissue samples into a jar of formalin. “So far, everything looks normal,” he said. He glanced at Maura. “You agree?”

She gave a mechanical nod but said nothing, suddenly distracted by the new set of X-rays that Yoshima was now hanging on the light box. They were skull films. On the lateral view, the outline of soft tissue could be seen, like a semitransparent ghost of a face in profile.

Maura crossed to the light box and stared at the star-shaped density, startlingly bright against the softer shadow of bone. It had lodged up against the skull table. The bullet’s deceptively small entrance wound in the scalp gave little indication of the damage this devastating projectile could do to the human brain.

“Jesus,” she murmured. “It’s a Black Talon bullet.”

Abe glanced up from the basin of organs. “Haven’t seen one of those in a while. We’ll have to be careful. Metal tips on that bullet are razor-sharp. They’ll cut right through your glove.” He looked at Yoshima, who had worked at the M.E.’s office longer than any of the current pathologists, and who served as their institutional memory. “When’s the last time we had a vic come in with a Black Talon?”

“I’d guess it was about two years ago,” said Yoshima.

“That recent?”

“I remember Dr. Tierney had the case.”

“Can you ask Stella to look it up? See if that case got closed. Bullet’s unusual enough to make you wonder about any linkage.”

Yoshima stripped off his gloves and went to the intercom to buzz Abe’s secretary. “Hello, Stella? Dr. Bristol would like a search for the last case involving a Black Talon bullet. It would have been Dr. Tierney’s…”

“I’ve heard of them,” said Frost, who’d moved to the light box for a closer look at the X-ray. “First time I’ve had a vic with one.”

“It’s a hollow point, manufactured by Winchester,” said Abe. “Designed to expand and cut through soft tissue. When it penetrates flesh, the copper jacket peels open to form a six-pointed star. Each tip’s as sharp as a claw.” He moved to the corpse’s head. “They were taken off the market in ’93, after some nut out in San Francisco used them to kill nine people in a mass shooting. Winchester got such bad publicity, they decided to stop production. But there are still a few out there in circulation. Every so often, one’ll turn up in a vic, but they’re getting pretty rare.”

Maura’s gaze was still on the X-ray, on that lethal white star. She thought of what Abe had just said: Each tip’s as sharp as a claw. And she remembered the scratch marks left on the victim’s car. Like the claw mark of a raptor’s talon.

She turned back to the table, just as Abe completed his scalp incision. In that brief instant, before he peeled the skin flap forward, Maura found herself unavoidably staring at the dead woman’s face. Death had mottled the lips to a dusky blue. The eyes were open, the exposed corneas dry and clouded by exposure to air. The eye’s bright gleam during life is merely the light’s reflection off moist corneas; when the lids no longer blink, when the cornea is no longer bathed in fluid, the eyes turn dry and dull. It’s not the departure of the soul that drains the appearance of life from one’s eyes; it’s simply the cessation of the blink reflex. Maura gazed down at the two clouded bands across the cornea, and for an instant she imagined the eyes as they must have looked while alive. It was a startling glimpse into the mirror. She had the sudden, vertiginous thought that in fact she was the one lying on the table. That she was watching her own corpse being autopsied. Didn’t ghosts linger in the same places they frequented while alive? This is my haunt, she thought. The autopsy lab. This is where I’m doomed to spend eternity.

Abe peeled the scalp forward and the face collapsed like a rubber mask.

Maura shuddered. Looking away, she noticed that Rizzoli was once again watching her. Is she looking at me? Or at my ghost?

The whir of the Stryker saw seemed to drill straight into her marrow. Abe cut through the dome of exposed skull, preserving the segment where the bullet had punched through. Gently, he pried off and removed the cap of bone. The Black Talon tumbled out of the open cranium and clattered into the basin Yoshima was holding beneath it. It gleamed there, its metal points splayed open like the petals of a lethal blossom.

The brain was mottled with dark blood.

“Extensive hemorrhage, both hemispheres. Just what you’d expect from the X-rays,” Abe said. “The bullet entered here, left temporal bone. But it didn’t exit. You can see it there, in the films.” He pointed to the light box, where the bullet stood out as a bright starburst, resting against the inner curve of the left occipital bone.

Frost said, “Funny how it ended up on the same side of the skull it entered.”

“There was probably ricochet. The bullet punched into the cranium and bounced back and forth, slicing through brain. Expending all its energy on the soft tissue. Like spinning the blades of a blender.”

“Dr. Bristol?” It was his secretary, Stella, on the intercom.

“Yeah?”

“I found that case with the Black Talon. Victim’s name was Vassily Titov. Dr. Tierney did the autopsy.”

“Who was the detective on that case?”

“Um… here it is. Detectives Vann and Dunleavy.”

“I’ll check with them,” said Rizzoli. “See what they remember about it.”

“Thanks, Stella,” called Bristol. He looked at Yoshima, who had the camera ready. “Okay, snap away.”

Yoshima began to take photos of the exposed brain, capturing a permanent record of its appearance before Abe removed it from its bony house. Here is where a lifetime’s worth of memories were laid down, Maura thought, as she gazed at the glistening folds of gray matter. The ABC’s of childhood. Four times four is sixteen. The first kiss, the first lover, the first heartbreak. All are deposited, as packets of messenger RNA, into this complex collection of neurons. Memory was merely biochemistry, yet it defined each human being as an individual.

With a few nicks of the scalpel, Abe freed the brain and carried it in both hands, as though bearing treasure, to the countertop. He would not dissect it today; instead he would let it soak in a basin of fixative, to be sectioned later. But he needed no microscopic examination to see the evidence of trauma; it was there, in the bloody discoloration on the surface.

“So we’ve got the entrance wound here, in the left temple,” said Rizzoli.

“Yes, and the skin hole and cranial hole line up perfectly,” said Abe.

“That’s consistent with a straight shot into the side of the head.”