The skin of the chest was now flayed open, the breasts concealed beneath the peeled-back flaps, the ribs and muscles exposed. Yoshima leaned forward with pruning shears and cut through the ribs. Each snap made Maura wince. How easily a human bone is cracked, she thought. We think of our hearts as protected within a sturdy cage of ribs, yet all it takes is the squeeze of a handle, the scissoring of blades, and one by one, the ribs surrender to tempered steel. We are made of such fragile material.
Yoshima snipped through the last bone, and Abe sliced the last strands of gristle and muscle. Together they removed the breastplate, as though lifting off the lid of a box.
Inside the open thorax, the heart and lungs glistened. Young organs, was Maura’s first thought. But no, she realized; forty years old wasn’t so young, was it? It was not easy to acknowledge that, at age forty, she was at the halfway mark in her life. That she, like this woman on the table, could no longer be considered young.
The organs she saw in the open chest appeared normal, without obvious signs of pathology. With a few swift cuts, Abe excised the lungs and heart and placed them in a metal basin. Under bright lights he made a few slices to view the lung parenchyma.
“Not a smoker,” he said to the two detectives. “No edema. Nice healthy tissue.”
Except for the fact it was dead.
He dropped the lungs back into the basin, where they formed a pink mound, and he picked up the heart. It rested easily in his massive hand. Maura was suddenly aware of her own heart, thumping in her chest. Like this woman’s heart, it would fit in Abe’s palm. She felt a twinge of nausea at the thought of him holding it, turning it over to inspect the coronary vessels as he was doing now. Though mechanically just a pump, the heart sits at the very core of one’s body, and to see this one so exposed to view made her own chest feel hollow. She took a breath, and the scent of blood made her nausea worse. She turned away from the corpse and found herself meeting Rizzoli’s gaze. Rizzoli, who saw too much. They had known each other almost two years now, had worked enough cases together to have developed the highest regard for each other as professionals. But along with that regard came a measure of respectful wariness. Maura knew just how acute were Rizzoli’s instincts, and as they looked at each other across the table, she knew that the other woman must surely see how close Maura was to bolting from the room. At the unspoken question in Rizzoli’s eyes, Maura simply squared her jaw. The Queen of the Dead reasserted her invincibility.
She focused, once again, on the corpse.
Abe, oblivious to the undercurrent of tension in the room, had sliced open the heart’s chambers. “Valves all look normal,” he commented. “Coronaries are soft. Clean vessels. Geez, I hope my heart looks this good.”
Maura glanced at his enormous belly and doubted it, knowing his passion for foie gras and buttery sauces. Enjoy life while you can, was Abe’s philosophy. Indulge your appetites now, because we all end up, sooner or later, like our friends on the table. What good are clean coronaries if you’ve lived a life deprived of pleasures?
He set the heart in the basin and went to work on the contents of the abdomen, his scalpel slicing deep, through peritoneum. Out came the stomach and liver, spleen and pancreas. The odor of death, of chilled organs, was familiar to Maura, yet this time so disturbing. As if she was experiencing an autopsy for the very first time. No 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.”