“Thus far, no one had checked to see if there were any vital signs. No one outside of his family had even seen or touched the body.
“The police arrived and saw the same scene. The guy looked dead. They might have checked, except probably they were lulled by the assurance of the family physician that he would sign the death certificate and that the M.E. would release the body.
“The uniformed police called Homicide and lulled your officers into believing what everyone else already believed. So Homicide said, ‘We’re not going out.’
“Then Mrs. Green and her daughter prepared the body. They might have found a very faint pulse or an occasional shallow breath. But it would’ve been sheer luck if they had. They certainly weren’t looking for, or expecting, any vital signs-vital signs that, even if present, would be barely functioning.”
“So, Dr. Price,” Koznicki said, “you are suggesting that it is at least possible that Dr. Green was in a coma and not dead.”
“I am suggesting that Dr. Green was in a coma.”
“What about rigor mortis?” Koesler asked.
“What about it?” Price responded.
“I hate to bring it up because I think it destroys the side of this thing that I’m supposed to be defending-that what we’re dealing with here is a miracle.”
“How do you mean, Father?”
“Well,” Koesler explained, “to have a miracle here, Dr. Green would have had to be dead, truly dead. Now, you say he could have been in a coma. But, at least to this point, you cannot say it without fear of contradiction.
“I mean, okay, if he was in a coma, he would appear to be dead. But maybe he wasn’t dead. No one checked closely enough to make certain he was alive. So we are where we were at the beginning: He might have been dead; he might have been in a coma. Because no one checked carefully enough, we cannot prove or disprove one theory or the other.
“But what about rigor mortis? If Dr. Green was dead, wouldn’t rigor mortis set in?” Dr. Price was slowly shaking her head. Koesler found this somewhat disconcerting, but pressed on. “If not while Mrs. Green and Judith were handling his body, surely then, much later, when the undertakers were preparing the body, getting it in the shroud and everything? Wouldn’t especially those professionals have some doubts? No rigor mortis, no death, correct?”
Dr. Price smiled. “When Inspector Koznicki asked me to come here this morning, and told me what we were going to discuss, I anticipated some attention would be paid to rigor mortis. I am, of course, very practically acquainted with the process. But I foresaw that some of the questions and answers might be kind of speculative. So I did a little research.
“Rigor mortis”-even though some of her information had been gleaned from research books, still she used no notes-“usually begins occurring between two to four hours after death. But there is a large window of time during which rigor may set in. It can, indeed, occur as late as twelve hours after death. One specific case reported twenty-four hours before the process began.
“I can tell you honestly that if I were examining a corpse that had been pronounced dead six hours previously, but there was no rigor mortis present, I would not necessarily at that point be suspicious.
“So you see, Father, the fact that no one detected rigor does not speak to the issue of whether or not Dr. Green was dead. As I understand it, the morticians got the body in a matter of just a few hours. And there you are.
“Really, while this sort of thing does not happen frequently, it does happen.” She searched through her purse and took out a newspaper clipping. “I saved this news story mostly because of the age of the woman involved. Let me read it to you. I clipped it from Newsday.” She read:
Albany, N.Y.-When a national health magazine rated Albany Medical Center as the best hospital in New York state, no one claimed it could raise the dead.
But earlier this week a worker at the hospital’s morgue removed a body bag containing an eighty-six-year-old woman from the morgue’s forty-degree refrigerator-and heard breathing inside.
The woman, Mildred Clarke, of Albany, N.Y., was rushed into emergency, then to intensive care, where she was in critical condition Thursday.
“We’re at a loss for words,” said Greg McGarry, the hospital spokesman.
On Wednesday, an emergency medical team was called to Clarke’s apartment after a manager found her there rigid, cold, unconscious, without pulse and not breathing.
“Sound like what we’ve just been discussing, gentlemen?” Price smiled broadly, then continued reading.
“You look at this woman and you assumed she was dead,” said the manager, Lori Goodman-DiPietro.
She wasn’t alone. She said two emergency fire department medics, a police officer, the coroner, and two morgue attendants thought she was dead, too.
County Coroner Philip Furie checked her. “She was cold as ice … stiff as a board.”
Albany County does not require its coroners to be licensed physicians. Furie, an insurance salesman who was elected to his post, declared Clarke dead. She was taken to the morgue at the medical center.
An hour or so later, the center was called by a funeral home. Morgue employee Herman Thomas, who was removing the body bag, dialed the emergency-room code as soon as he heard the breathing.
Price folded the clipping carefully and returned it to her purse. “Isn’t that a coincidence?” she said. “The details: ‘cold as ice … stiff as a board … rigid … unconscious … without pulse … and not breathing.’
“Not breathing! Well, not when the coroner as well as the apartment manager checked her. But she was breathing when the morgue employee moved her body bag.
“Was Mildred Clarke’s condition a return from the dead, or recovery from a coma? Was she ‘not breathing’-as in ‘dead’-when the coroner checked her? Or was she breathing shallow breaths many seconds apart? Is Mildred Clarke a miracle woman?
“Mrs. Green found her husband in much the same state as the apartment manager found Mildred. He wasn’t breathing, or his breathing went undetected.
“And, gentlemen, I particularly call your attention to the refrigerator in the morgue. Mildred survived that, too, along with all the other things they did to her. Wasn’t Dr. Green headed for a mortuary refrigerator?” she concluded.
“Very good and very helpful, Dr. Price,” said Koznicki.
“Then,” Koesler said, “rigor mortis has no relevance in either the case of Mildred Clarke or Dr. Green.”
“Except,” Price said, “if there is no sign of rigor, it does not necessarily mean that the person is not dead. There may be reasons, explanations, for the lack of rigor-to a point. If, on the other hand, rigor is clearly there, it is one definite sign of death.”
“So,” Koesler said, “is Mildred Clarke a miracle woman? It doesn’t seem as if anyone thinks so. The news of her coming out of a body bag after being pronounced dead is buried in one column of a daily paper.
“Dr. Green, on the other hand, is getting major media coverage not only locally, but also nationally. Is Dr. Green a miracle man? Certainly the public is leaning toward the miraculous.
“Before she was enclosed in a body bag, nobody had heard of Mildred Clarke. After she emerged from the body bag, a few people heard what happened to her. Now she’s lost again from the public’s brief attention span.
“Dr. Green is a celebrity, at least at some level. Before last night, lots of people knew him or knew of him.
“Mrs. Clarke was a nobody who made her extraordinary move in the privacy of a morgue with very few witnesses around. Moses Green was a Somebody who emerged from a casket in a Catholic church in view of an audience of a couple of hundred people.
“The assumption on the public’s part is, clearly, that Dr. Green had a miracle happen to him. And now the public will want a detailed account of what’s it like to be dead … and then to come back from the dead.”