"Sounds like a good idea," Laurie responded. She was momentarily distracted by seeing George come in through the door to the ID room, removing his coat. Allowing Kevin and Arnold to get back to their bickering, Laurie joined George at the coffee machine.
George had been at the OCME for almost as long as Kevin and Arnold, but he hadn't picked up any of their personal habits. He appeared significantly more stylish, with pressed pants, a clean shirt, and a colorful tie, all of which were reasonably contemporary, which was how he liked to present himself. He also looked dramatically younger by avoiding the common middle-age weight gain. Although Laurie knew Jack did not hold George in high esteem professionally, she had always found him easy to work with.
"I heard your gunshot case yesterday had a surprising denouement," Laurie said.
"What an ordeal," George complained. "If Bingham ever offers to do another case with me, remind me to graciously refuse."
Laurie laughed and chatted about the case for a few minutes before switching to her real interest. As she'd spoken with Kevin concerning Moskowitz, she asked if George remembered doing Antonio Nogueira some two weeks earlier.
"Give me a hint," George responded.
"I'm guessing at the details, since I don't know them for certain," Laurie said, "but I believe he would have been relatively young, he would have been within twenty-four hours of having surgery at the Manhattan General, and he would have been suspected of having suffered some sort of cardiac catastrophe."
"Okay, I remember the case: a real teaser. I found zilch on the post and nothing to hang my hat on with the microscopic. The folder is up on my desk, waiting for toxicology possibly to come up with something. Otherwise, I'm going to be forced to sign it out as a spontaneous ventricular fibrillation or a massive heart attack that was so sudden and so global that there wasn't any time for pathology to develop. Of course, that means whatever caused it had to magically disappear. One way or the other, the heart stopped. I mean, it couldn't have been that his breathing stopped, because there was no cyanosis." He shrugged and gestured helplessly with his hands.
"So the microscopic didn't show much in the coronary vessels?"
"Minimal."
"And the heart muscle itself looked normal? I mean, like something capable of causing a sudden lethal arrhythmia. Was there any sign of inflammation?"
"Nope! It was completely normal."
"Do you mind if I look at the folder later this afternoon?" Laurie asked.
"Be my guest! Why the interest? How did you hear about it?"
"I heard about it from Janice," Laurie said. "I'm interested because I had a case surprisingly similar yesterday." Laurie felt mildly guilty about not mentioning the two other cases, but not guilty enough to bring them up. For one thing, her suspicion that they were connected in any way was purely speculative, and second, at this early stage she couldn't help but feel proprietary about what she was beginning to think might be some kind of series.
Leaving the ID office, Laurie descended a floor and sought out Marvin. She found him in the mortuary office. As she had hoped, he was already in his scrubs.
"Are you ready to rock and roll?" Laurie asked. She was eager to start.
"You're on, sister!" Marvin said as if it today was a rerun of the previous day.
Laurie gave him Darlene Morgan's accession number before going into the locker room to change into scrubs. She was excited. It was the first time in her career as a medical examiner that she hoped to find nothing on the autopsy, meaning Morgan would be like McGillan, Nogueira, and Moskowitz. The longer the series idea played out, the better the diversion it would be and the less apt she'd be to agonize over personal unpleasantries.
Leaving the locker room, she crossed over to the storage room and rescued her battery pack from the charger. Fifteen minutes later, she was in the moon suit and pushing into the pit from the anteroom where she'd gloved. There was only one case under way. She had no trouble distinguishing between Jack and Vinnie, since Vinnie was shorter and considerably slighter. Jack was peering through the viewfinder of a camera set on a tripod. Laurie tried not to look at the tiny, naked infant splayed out on the table. Laurie blinked by reflex when the camera's flash went off.
"Is that you, Laurie?" Jack called out. He had straightened up and turned in her direction in response to the sound of the door closing.
"It is," Laurie said. Not finding Marvin in the autopsy room, she twisted around to look through the wire-embedded glass in the door leading out to the corridor. Marvin was approaching with a gurney in tow. At the back, pushing, was another mortuary tech, Miguel Sanchez. Laurie guessed there had been a problem. Marvin was customarily super-efficient and invariably waiting for her.
"Come on over here!" Jack said with some excitement. "I have something to show you. This case is a corker."
"I'm sure it is," Laurie said. "But I think I'll let you tell me about it after the fact. You know that autopsies on children are not my cup of tea."
"I'm pretty certain this case is another one like those yesterday," Jack said. "I'm more than ninety percent sure the cause and manner of death are going to surprise everyone. I'm telling you, it's textbook!"
Despite her distaste for dealing with kids in the autopsy room, her professional curiosity urged her over to Jack's side. With some difficulty, she made herself look down at the hapless child. Just as Riva had described, the poor little girl appeared bruised, abraded, and burned over much of her tiny body, including her face. The awfulness of the image made Laurie sway slightly, as if dizzy. She spread her feet to stabilize herself. Behind her, she heard the door open, followed by the squeak of the wheels of an old gurney as it was pushed in.
"What if I told you the whole body X-ray of this infant was completely negative for fractures, old or new? Would that influence your thinking about this case?"
"Not particularly," Laurie said. She tried to look in at Jack's face, but it was difficult with the overhead lights reflecting off his plastic face mask. They hadn't seen each other or talked for almost twenty-four hours, and when they first met that morning, she had hoped for something other than a repeat of his playful professorial role.
"What if I told you that in addition to the X-ray being normal, the frenulum is intact?"
"It certainly wouldn't negate what I'm looking at," Laurie responded. Despite her repugnance, Laurie bent over and looked closely at the skin lesions, particularly where Jack had made a small incision through one of the abrasions. There had been no blood or edema. All at once, she knew now what Jack was implying when pointing out signs that suggested abuse was not at issue. "Vermin!" she said suddenly. She straightened up.
"Give this lady a prize!" Jack said like a carnival barker. "As expected, Dr. Montgomery has expertly corroborated my impression. Of course, Vinnie isn't convinced, so we have a five-dollar bet riding on finding nonspecific evidence of an asphyxial death when we do the internal part of the autopsy, and everybody knows what that would imply."
Laurie nodded. The chances were good that the child in front of her had died of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, which shows signs of asphyxial death on autopsy. Although on first glance she had thought all the skin lesions had been inflicted prior to death, she now guessed they were most likely postmortem damage caused by a variety of vermin, such as ants, cockroaches, and possibly mice or rats. If this indeed proved to be the case, then the manner of death was not homicidal but accidental. Of course, that didn't lessen the tragedy of the young life lost, but it surely had very different implications.
"Well, I better get cracking here," Jack said as he detached the camera from the tripod. "This child was maimed by the circumstances of poverty, not abuse. I've got to get her parents out of jail. Keeping them there is like adding insult to injury."