I smell creosote and Dumpsters baking in the sun as Colin and I reach the morgue, a windowless pale yellow cinder-block building flanked by HVACs and an industrial backup generator on one side and the bay on another. Beyond the back fence, tall pines sway in the wind, and in the distance, lightning shimmers in blooming black clouds and I can see veils of rain far off to the southwest, a bad storm heading this way from Florida. The huge metal shutter door is rolled up, and we walk through an empty concrete space to another door that Colin unlocks with a key.
“We probably autopsy on average two per year, and then another five or six that we sign out after a view.” He picks up where he left off when Lucy called, explaining the types of cases he typically gets from the GPFW.
“If I were you, I’d review all of them for however many years Tara Grimm has been the warden,” I reply.
“Mostly we’re talking cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, liver disease, congestive heart failure,” Colin says. “Georgia’s not exactly known for compassionate release if an inmate is terminally ill. That’s all we need. Convicted felons getting out early because they’re dying of cancer and they rob a bank or shoot someone.”
“Unless the inmate died in hospice, in other words, a death that was beyond questioning, I’d go back and look,” I suggest.
“I’m thinking.”
“Any case that gave you even the slightest concern. I’d review it again.”
“No concern at the time, to be perfectly honest, but you’ve got my hindsight kicking in. Shania Plames,” he then says. “A really sad story. Suffered from postpartum psychiatric problems, depressed and delusional, and ended up killing her children, all three of them. Hanged them from a balcony railing. Her husband owned a tile company in Ludowici, was out of town on a fishing trip. Imagine coming home to that?”
He checks the big black log inside the receiving area that has a floor scale, a walk-in refrigerator, and a small office with in-out boxes.
“Good, she’s here.” He means Kathleen Lawler is.
“Shania Plames was a sudden death at the GPFW,” I suppose.
“On death row,” he says. “About four years ago, she asphyxiated herself after she came in from the exercise cage one morning. Used a pair of her uniform pants, wrapped one leg around her neck, the other leg around her ankles, sort of hog-tying herself, and lay on her belly. The weight of her legs hanging over the edge of the bed put just enough pressure on her jugular to cut the oxygen off to her brain.”
We follow a white tiled hallway past locker rooms, bathrooms, various storage rooms, and the decomp autopsy room, with its solitary table and double drawer refrigerator-freezer, and Colin continues to tell me it was an unusually creative way to kill oneself in an environment that is virtually suicide-proof, and he wasn’t really sure if what Shania Plames had rigged up with her trousers would work but he wasn’t about to try it. He gives me every detail he can recall about her and one other case, Rea Abernathy, who was just last year, found with her head in the toilet bowl, the steel rim of it compressing her neck, her cause of death positional asphyxia.
“She didn’t have a ligature mark, but one might expect the absence of that when what she’d allegedly used to strangle herself was a wide, relatively soft fabric,” Colin says, about Shania Plames. “There were no injuries to the internal structures of the neck, and that wasn’t unusual, either, in a suicidal hanging by partial suspension or ligature strangulation by positioning. No injuries or evidence that gave me anything to go on with Rea Abernathy, either.”
As in the Barrie Lou Rivers case, his diagnoses were based mainly on the history, a process of elimination.
“Not at all the way I want to practice forensic medicine,” Colin says darkly, as we enter an anteroom of deep steel sinks, red biohazard trash cans, hampers, and shelves of disposable protective clothing. “Frustrating as hell.”
“Why was Rea Abernathy in prison?” I ask.
“Paid someone to drown her husband in the swimming pool. Was supposed to look like an accident and it didn’t. He had a big contusion on the back of his head, a big intracranial hematoma. Dead before he hit the water. Plus, the guy she paid to do it was someone she was having an affair with.”
“And what about her? She absolutely didn’t drown in the toilet?”
“Wouldn’t have been possible. Prison toilets are shallow and elongated, the water below the level of the bowl. Built to be suicide-resistant, like everything else inside the cell. You’d have to get your face way down inside it to drown or suffocate, and that’s not going to happen unless someone holds you forcibly, and there was no sign of that, no injuries, like I said. The story was she was sick, was gagging. Or maybe was trying to throw up. There was a suggestion she might have had an eating disorder. And she passed out or had an arrhythmia.”
“Assuming she was alive when she ended up in that position.”
“I’m not in the business of assuming,” Colin says unhappily. “But there was nothing else. Negative tox. Another diagnosis of exclusion.”
“The symbolism,” I point out. “Her husband supposedly drowns, and she dies with her head in a toilet and at a glance, at least to the uninitiated, might appear to have drowned. Shania Plames hangs her children and then herself.” I remember what Tara Grimm said about not forgiving anyone who harms a child or an animal, and that life was a gift that could be given or taken away. “Barrie Lou Rivers poisons people with tuna-fish sandwiches, and that’s what she ate for her last meal,” I add.
We pull on splash-proof sleeves and fluid-resistant aprons, then shoe covers, and surgical caps and masks.
“I liked the old days better, when we didn’t have to bother wearing all this shit,” Colin says, and he sounds angry.
“It’s not that we didn’t need to.” I cover my nose and mouth with a surgical mask. “We just didn’t know any better.” I put on a pair of safety glasses to protect my eyes.
“Well, there’s more to worry about now, that’s for sure,” he says, and I can tell he feels terrible. “I keep waiting for some God-awful scourge we haven’t heard of or dealt with before. Weaponizing chemicals and diseases. I don’t give a damn what anybody says. Nobody’s prepared for vast numbers of infectious or contaminated dead bodies.”
“Technology can’t fix what technology destroys, and if the worst happens, nobody’s going to deal with it very well,” I agree.
“That’s something for you to say with the resources you’ve got. But the fact is, there’s no cure for human nature,” he says. “No putting the genie back into the damn bottle when it comes to what shitty people can do to one another these days.”
“The genie was never in the bottle, Colin. I’m not sure there is a bottle.”
We pass the open door of the x-ray room, and I catch a glimpse of a C-arm fluoroscope that I never use anymore. But advanced technologies such as computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging with 3-D software wouldn’t help us if we had it. Whatever killed Kathleen Lawler probably wouldn’t be visible on a CT or MRI or any other type of scan, and I hope Sammy Chang already is receipting documents and swabs to the labs.
Inside the main autopsy room a muscular young man in soiled scrubs and a bloody plastic apron is suturing closed the body of what I assume is the motor-vehicle fatality from earlier today. The head is misshapen like a badly dented can, the face smashed beyond recognition, blood streaking flesh, all of it in stark contrast to sterile cold concrete and shiny metal, to the lack of color and texture typical of morgues.
I can’t tell the victim’s age, but his hair is quite black and he is lean and well built, as if he went to a lot of trouble to be physically fit. I smell the early hints of blood and cells breaking down, of biology giving itself up to decomposition as a long surgical needle glints in the overhead light with each sweep of white twine, and water dribbles into a sink, tap-tapping on steel. On the far side of the room, Kathleen Lawler is on a gurney, a body shape pouched in white.