“Why is the sky blue?” Jack questioned superciliously. “Don’t ask me unless you are willing to drop the Adderall issue, at least be open to discuss school for Emma, and, perhaps most important, propose some sort of a timetable for your mother to move back to Park Avenue. On top of everything else, we really shouldn’t tolerate her continued anti-vaccine stance and her refusal to get the Covid vaccine.”
“Let’s not bring up my mother while we’re on the phone!” Laurie stated, in a tone that precluded further discussion. “Not now! Besides, it’s only been three months since my father passed away. She’s doing the best she can, and she has been invaluable for the progress Emma has made. I’m sure you recognize that. I’m heading out the door as we speak and will be there shortly. Get Sue’s autopsy done, so I’ll be able to speak to Abby, Nadia, and Jamal.”
It took him a moment to recognize that she had disconnected as he had begun speaking to bring up Jennifer’s point about his not being the correct gender to do Sue Passero’s autopsy. When he realized he was talking into a dead phone, he pulled it away from his face and glanced at it to check if she had really hung up on him. Shaking his head in frustration, he was beginning to seriously rue his encouragement of Laurie to take on the job of chief medical examiner when it had been offered to her. At the time he had thought that she would change the chief’s role to give the MEs more investigative freedom, but it seemed as if the role was changing her.
“I heard part of that,” Jennifer said. “What was her take?”
“She wants me to do the post on Passero and get it done quickly. I tried to bring up the gender issue you mentioned, but she hung up on me. Do you mind if I do it?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Laurie’s the boss.”
“Yeah, right,” Jack added. He stood up. “But can you do me a favor? Can you try to find me a case to follow this one that might provide a bit of forensic challenge?”
“Funny you should ask,” Jennifer said, holding up a folder in her hand. “This one might fit the bill. It’s a supposed suicide with a contact gunshot wound in the left temple.”
“That hardly sounds exciting,” he said.
“True, but Janice Jaeger thinks otherwise.”
Janice Jaeger was one of the more senior and hence experienced night-shift MLI investigators, someone whose work Jack particularly highly respected. On numerous cases that she had investigated, she had anticipated his need for additional information so that it was available before he even knew to request it. Over the years she’d developed a sixth sense for what information was ultimately required to button up a difficult case.
“That sounds intriguing,” Jack said. He walked over to take the folder. “What was it that sparked Janice’s interest? Do you know?”
“I’m not sure, but she underlined that it involves a thirty-three-year-old female who was found naked.”
“Hmmm. Interesting! Was there a suicide note?”
“Apparently not.”
“I’ll take it,” Jack said without even looking at the folder’s contents.
“It’s yours,” Jennifer said. She picked up the next folder in front of her and slid out the contents.
He turned to Vinnie, who was hidden behind his beloved New York Post. After finishing with the coffee making, Vinnie had repaired to the second easy chair to commit to memory the day’s sporting minutiae. “Let’s go, big guy!” Jack said, trying to marshal his own enthusiasm. “We have to bang out this case in record time to satisfy the big boss.”
As Jack retrieved his mug of coffee, he noticed Vinnie hadn’t budged. As he’d done a hundred times over the years, he snatched away the mortuary tech’s paper and quickly exited the room, which elicited a string of curse words from Vinnie as he leaped up and followed. It was a ritual that they had repeated over and over, week in and week out. Even on more normal days, Jack was an early bird, eager to start work, and he always had to build a fire under Vinnie. Part of the routine involved Vinnie bellyaching that they were the only ones in the pit for at least an hour until other, more civilized people arrived well after 8:30 a.m.
“Okay,” Vinnie said as they waited for the rather slow back elevator to arrive. “Tell me, why did you jump on the suicide case? A contact temporal suicide wound sounds pretty routine to me.”
“Simply because the woman was found naked,” Jack said as he stepped into the car, holding the door open for Vinnie. “Women who kill themselves are never naked. The fact that this one was, means something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and we need to listen to the dead woman to find out what it is.”
“No shit,” Vinnie remarked, wrinkling his forehead in apparent disbelief. “Although I can’t imagine the issue is going to come up very often in normal conversation, it is an interesting tidbit to know. I have to say: You can learn something every day in forensics. It never stops.”
“That’s exactly why I love being an ME,” Jack said. “Back in my previous life as an ophthalmologist, before I saw the light, so to speak, every day was like every other day. In many ways, I didn’t know what I was missing. It’s also nice that you don’t have to worry about screwing up because the patients are already dead.”
Vinnie laughed uproariously despite having heard the joke more times than he could count. He was a great fan of dark humor.
Jack and Vinnie went into the locker room together and changed out of their street clothes, putting on scrubs, face masks, face shields, and other protective paraphernalia for working in the autopsy room. While Vinnie went into the pit to get everything ready for the case, including instruments and sample bottles and the like, Jack took a quick moment to scan Janice Jaeger’s investigative report on the suicide case. There was no doubt it was going to be forensically interesting, hopefully just what the doctor ordered as far as he was concerned. The deceased was the wife of an NYPD officer, and the gun was the husband’s service weapon, not an infrequent circumstance. The woman was found in bed, and it was the husband who called 911, supposedly after hearing the fatal shot.
While Vinnie was busy in the autopsy room, to speed things up Jack went into the walk-in cooler to get Sue’s body. Although the other MEs insisted on a sharp separation of their duties and those of the mortuary techs, Jack was more egalitarian, especially early in the morning when he was eager to get underway. The big walk-in cooler was a relatively new addition to the morgue and had been installed in the same area where the old bank of body drawers had been. The body drawers were the ones seen in movies and TV shows from which bodies would be pulled out on rollers. Although such storage was visually interesting, as a whole they take up too much space and were ultimately inconvenient, especially in mass-casualty situations. Instead, a large cooler that could accommodate more than twice the number of bodies with easier access had been designed.
Conveniently, all the shrouded new arrivals from the previous night were already on individual gurneys near the entrance. He needed to locate the correct body, which he knew wasn’t going to be difficult. All he had to do was raise the covering sheets enough to check out the respective faces. He certainly didn’t have to check the ID tags on the corpses’ toes. When he did find Sue on the fourth try, seeing her face gave Jack pause, more than he expected. Even in death, she was a physically impressive person.
For a moment Jack just stared at her. Her usually carefully coifed hair was plastered against her forehead and her face was paler than it had been in life. Her mouth was also distorted by an endotracheal tube and her red silk dress had been cut open to expose her chest where a few ECG connectors were still in place, all remnants of her having been through a major resuscitation attempt in the Emergency Department. “Sorry, my friend,” he whispered, his breath visible in the chilled air. Seeing her there in the cooler reminded him how fragile life was.