18
The only reason Audrey attended autopsies was that she had no choice. It was department policy. The Medical Examiner’s office required that at least one detective on a case be present. She told herself she didn’t see the need, since she knew she could ask the pathologist anything she wanted, anything that wasn’t in the path report.
In truth, of course, it made perfect sense to have a detective there. There were all sorts of things you found out at an autopsy that didn’t appear in the sterile lines of a report. Even so, they were the part of her job she most disliked. The dissection of bodies made her queasy. She was always afraid she might have to vomit, though she hadn’t done so since her first one, and that was a terribly burned female.
But that wasn’t what she hated most about autopsies. She found them deeply depressing. This was where you saw the human body devoid of its spirit, its soul, a carapace of flesh meted out in grams and liters. To her, on the other hand, homicide cases were about setting things right. Solving the crime didn’t always heal the wounds of the victim’s family-often it didn’t-but it was her way of restoring some kind of moral order to a deeply messed-up world. She’d taped a sign to her computer at work, a quote from one Vernon Geberth, whose name was well known to all homicide investigators, the author of a classic text, Practical Homicide Investigation. It said, “Remember: We work for God.” She believed this. She felt deeply that, as much as she was troubled by her work-and she was, most of the time-she really was doing God’s work here on earth. She was looking for the one lost sheep. But autopsies required a detachment she preferred not to have.
So she uneasily entered this white-tiled room that stank of bleach and formaldehyde and disinfectant, while her partner got to make phone calls and do interviews, though she wondered just how hard Roy Bugbee was working to solve this case of what he called “a shitbird crackhead.” Not too hard, she figured.
The morgue and autopsy room were located in the basement of Boswell Medical Center, concealed behind a door marked PATHOLOGY CONFERENCE ROOM. Everything about this place gave her the heebie-jeebies, from the stainless-steel gurney on which the victim’s nude body had been placed, head a few inches higher than the feet to facilitate drainage of bodily fluids, to the handheld Stryker bone saw on the steel shelf, the garbage disposals in the stainless-steel sink, the organ tray whose plastic drainage tube, once clear, was now discolored brown.
The assistant medical examiner, one of three attached to the department, was a young doctor named Jordan Metzler, strikingly handsome and he knew it well. He had a head of dark curly hair, great brown eyes, a strong nose, full lips, a dazzling smile. Everyone knew he wasn’t long for this job, or this town: he’d recently been offered a job in pathology at Mass General, in Boston. In a matter of months he’d be sitting at some fancy restaurant on Beacon Hill, regaling a beautiful nurse with tales of this backwater town in Michigan where he’d been stuck the last couple of years.
“Audrey’s in the house!” he crowed as she entered. “’S’up, Detective?”
What was it with white guys who felt compelled to use black slang when African-Americans were around? Did they think it made them seem cool, instead of ridiculous? Did they think that made black folks connect with them better? Did Metzler even notice that she didn’t talk that way?
She smiled sweetly. “Dr. Metzler,” she said.
He found her attractive; Audrey could tell by the way he grinned at her. Her antennae still worked, even after eight years of marriage to Leon. Like most women, she was adept at reading males; sometimes she was convinced she knew them better than they knew themselves. Eight years of marriage to Leon hadn’t knocked the self-esteem out of her, not even the terrible last couple of years. She knew that men had always been drawn to her, because of her looks. She didn’t consider herself beautiful, far from it, but she knew she was pretty. She took care of herself, she exercised, she never went without makeup and she was adept at choosing the right lipstick for her skin tone. She liked to think that it was her deep abiding faith that kept her looking good, but she had seen enough women of equally deep abiding faith at church, women whose looks only God could love, to know better.
“Have you found any bullets?” she asked.
“Well, we’ve got two in there, X-ray shows. No exit wounds. I’ll get ’em. You don’t have an ID on this one yet, do you?”
She found herself avoiding looking at the body, the wrinkled flesh and the yellow-brown toenails, which meant she had to keep looking at Metzler, and she didn’t want to send him the wrong signals. Not a horn-dog like him.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and score a hit on AFIS,” she said. The crime scene techs had just finished fingerprinting the victim, having collected whatever trace evidence they could find on the body, scraping and clipping the fingernails and all that. Since the body was unidentified, they’d run the prints right away through the Michigan Automated Fingerprint Identification System in Lansing.
She asked, “Evidence of habitual drug use?”
“You mean needle marks or something? No, nothing like that. We’ll see what tox finds on the blood.”
“Look like a homeless guy to you?”
He jutted his jaw, frowned. “Not based on his clothes, which didn’t smell unusually bad. Or grooming or dental care or hygiene. I’d guess no. In fact, the guy’s pretty clean. I mean, he could take better care of his cuticles, but he looks more like a house case than a police case.” That was what the pathologists called the autopsies they did on hospital patients, whose bodies were always clean and well scrubbed when they got here.
“Any signs of struggle?”
“None apparent.”
“The mouth looks sort of bashed in,” she said, forcing herself to look. “Broken teeth and all. Is it possible he got hit with, say, the butt of the gun?”
Metzler looked amused by her hypothesis. “Possible? Anything’s possible.” He probably sensed that he’d come off as too arrogant, so he softened his tone. “The teeth are chipped and cracked, not pushed in. That’s consistent with a bullet. And there’s no trauma to the lips-no swelling or bruising you’d find if there was a blunt-force injury. Also, there’s the little matter of the bullet hole in his palate.”
“I see.” She let him enjoy his moment of superiority. The fragile male ego needed to be flattered. She had no problem with that; she’d been doing that all of her adult life. “Doctor, what do you estimate as the time of death? We found the body at six-”
“Call me Jordan.” Another dazzling smile. He was working it. “We can’t tell. It’s in full rigor at this point.”
“At the crime scene you said there was no rigor mortis, and since rigor doesn’t really start setting in until three, four hours after death, I figured-”
“Nah, Audrey, there’s too many other factors-physique, environment, cause of death, whether the guy was running or not. Doesn’t really tell you anything.”
“What about the body temperature?” she pointed out, careful to sound tentative. She wanted answers from the pathologist; she had no interest in showing him up.
“What about it?”
“Well, at the scene, didn’t you take a body temperature reading of ninety-two? That means it dropped around six degrees, right? If the body temperature drops one point five to two degrees per hour after death, I estimate the victim had been killed three or four hours before the body was found. Does that sound about right to you?”