I will send Anne a message to hose down my station and wash all of its instruments before we autopsy the man from Norton’s Woods. I will have this entire goddamn autopsy room cleaned from the ceiling to the floor. I will have all of its systems inspected before my first week home has passed, I decide, as I pull on a fresh pair of gloves and walk to a countertop where a large roll of white paper—what we call butcher paper—is attached to a wall-mounted dispenser. Paper makes a loud ripping sound as I tear off a section and cover an autopsy table midway down the room, a table that looks cleaner than mine.
I cover my AFME field clothes with a disposable gown, not bothering with the long ties in back, then return to my messy station. Against the wall is a large white polypropylene drying cabinet on hard rubber casters with a double clear acrylic door, which I unlock by entering a code in a digital keypad. Hanging inside are a sage-green nylon jacket with a black fleece collar, a blue denim shirt, black cargo pants, and a pair of boxer briefs, each on its own stainless-steel hanger, and on the tray at the bottom are a pair of scuffed brown leather boots, and next to them, a pair of gray wool socks. I recognize some of the clothing from the video clips I saw, and it gives me an unsettled feeling to look at it now. The cabinet’s centrifugal fan and HEPA exhaust filters make their low whirring sound as I look at the boots and the socks by picking them up one by one, finding nothing remarkable. The boxer briefs are white cotton with a crossover fly and elastic waistband, and I note nothing unusual, no stains or defects.
Spreading the coat open on the butcher paper-covered table, I slip my hands into the pockets, making sure nothing has been left in them, and I collect a clothing diagram and a clipboard and begin to make notes. The collar is a deep-pile synthetic fur and covered with dirt and sand and pieces of dry brown leaves that adhered to it when the man collapsed to the ground, and the heavy knit cuffs are dirty, too. The sage nylon shell is a very tough material, which appears to be tear-resistant and waterproof with a black fiberfill insulation, none of it easily penetrable unless the blade was strong and very sharp. I find no evidence of blood inside the liner of the coat, not even around the small slit in the back of it, but the areas of the outer shell, the shoulders, the sleeves, the back, are blackened and stiff with blood that collected in the bottom of the body pouch after the man was zipped inside it and then was transported to the CFC.
I don’t know how long he might have bled out while he was inside the bag and then the cooler, but he didn’t bleed from his wound. When I spread open the denim shirt, long-sleeved, a men’s size small, that still smells faintly of a cologne or an after-shave, I find only a spot of dark blood that has dried stiffly around the slit made by the blade. What Marino and Anne have reported seems to be accurate, that the man began bleeding from his nose and mouth while he was fully clothed inside the body bag, his head turned to the side, probably the same side it was turned to when I examined him in the x-ray room a little while ago. Blood must have dripped steadily from his face and into the bag, pooling in it and leaking from it, and I can see that easily when I look at it next, an adult-size cadaver pouch, typical of ones used by removal services, black with a nylon zipper. On the sides are webbing handles attached with rivets, and that’s often where the problem with leakage occurs, assuming the bag is intact with no tears or flaws in the heat-sealed seams. Blood seeps through rivets, especially if the pouch is really cheap, and this one is about twenty-five dollars’ worth of heavy-duty PVC, likely purchased by the case.
As I imagine what I just saw on the CT scan and realize how quickly the damage occurred in what clearly was a blitz attack, the bleeding makes no sense at all. It makes even less sense than it did when Marino first told me about it in Dover. The massive destruction to the man’s internal organs would have resulted in pulmonary hemorrhage that would have caused blood to drain out of the nose and mouth. But it should have happened almost instantly. I don’t understand why he didn’t bleed at the scene. When the paramedics were working to resuscitate him, he should have been bleeding from his face, and this would have been a clear indication that he hadn’t dropped dead from an arrhythmia.
As I leave the autopsy room to go upstairs, I envision the video clips again and remember my wondering about his black gloves and why he put them on when he entered the park. Where are they? I haven’t seen a pair of gloves. They weren’t in the evidence locker or in the drying cabinet, and I checked the pockets of the coat and didn’t find them. Based on what I saw in the recordings covertly made by the man’s headphones, he had the gloves on when he died, and I envision what I saw on Lucy’s iPad when I was riding in the van to the Civil Air Terminal. A black-gloved hand entered the frame as if the man was swatting at something and there was a jostling sound as his hand hit the headphones while his voice blurted out, “What the…? Hey… !” Then bare trees rushing up and around, then chipped bits of slate looming large on the ground and the thud of him hitting, and then the hem of a long, black coat flapping past. Then silence, then the voices of people surrounding him and exclaiming that he wasn’t breathing.
The x-ray room door is closed when I get to it, and I check inside, but everyone is gone, the control room empty and quiet, the CT scanner glowing white in the low lights on the other side of the lead-lined glass. I pause to try the phone in there, hoping Anne might answer her cell, but if she’s already at McLean and in the neuroimaging lab, it will be impossible to reach her through the thick concrete walls of that place. I am surprised when she answers.
“Where are you?” I ask, and I can hear music in the background.
“Pulling up now,” she says, and she must be inside the van with Marino driving and the radio on.
“When you removed his clothing,” I say, “did you see a pair of black gloves? He may have been wearing a pair of thick black gloves.”
A pause, and I hear her say something to Marino and then I hear his voice, but I can’t make out what they’re saying to each other. Then she tells me, “No. And Marino says when he had the body in ID first thing, there were no gloves. He doesn’t remember gloves.”
“Tell me exactly what happened yesterday morning.”
“Just sit right here for a minute,” I hear her say to Marino. “No, not there yet or they’ll come out. The security guys will. Just wait here,” she says to him. “Okay,” she says to me. “A little bit after seven yesterday morning, Dr. Fielding came to x-ray. As you know, Ollie and I are always in early, by seven, and anyway, he was concerned because of the blood. He’d noticed blood drips on the floor outside the cooler and also inside it, and that the body was bleeding or had bled. A lot of blood in the pouch.”
“The body was still fully clothed.”
“Yes. The coat was unzipped and the shirt was cut open, the EMTs did that, but he was clothed when he came in and nothing was done until Dr. Fielding went in there to get him ready for us.”
“What do you mean, ‘to get him ready’?”
I’ve never known Fielding to get a body ready for autopsy, to actually go to the trouble to move it out of the refrigerator and into x-ray or the autopsy room, at least not since the old days when he was in training. He leaves what he considers mundane tasks to those whom he still calls dieners and whom I call autopsy technicians.