Patricia’s stomach flipped when she glimpsed the covered bulk. White light glinted like abstract art in the crinkles of the black plastic sheet.
Baker seemed nonchalant when she whipped the sheet off the table.
What am I doing here? Patricia yelled at herself.
The body lay there so candidly it seemed surreal, like the graphics in a CD-ROM game—a spooky veil like tulle that somehow enhanced details instead of detracting from them. The body lay on a stainless-steel morgue platform that came equipped with a removable drain trap, gutters for “organic outflow,” and a motorized height adjustment. The corpse’s image was blatant, like a surprise shout in the dark.
“Here he is,” Baker announced in her snippy Southern drawl. “Robert—Junior—Caudill.”
Patricia didn’t allow herself to look at the body directly, opting for peripheral side glances. The pallor of the flesh reminded her of the water chestnuts that Byron used to make rumaki at home; the unused chestnuts would always sit in the fridge too long, and start to turn brown. Junior Caudill was a big man—and a plump one—much of his body fat settling like raw lard on the stainless-steel table. One morbid glimpse at his groin showed her the purple nose of a penis shriveled so severely that it could’ve been a mushroom in a bird’s nest. Oh, my God, I’m looking at a cadaver. . . . When she closed her eyes she found the formalin fumes seemed to sting. The afterimage of the white face lingered behind her eyes. She only vaguely remembered the man from her youth, a problem child and troublemaker who’d dropped out of school early. Had she seen him and his brother at Dwayne’s funeral? Probably, but she didn’t even care. Come to think of it, she didn’t even care that he was dead. At least the body hadn’t been cut open yet. Had Baker been able to establish cause of death without a full autopsy?
Finally she choked out the question: “Okay, it’s a dead body, so what’s so strange about it?”
Baker snapped on a light board on the wall. “Here’s a transabdominal X-ray of Dwayne Parker,” she said, clipping a large sheet of film to the board. Murky shades and shapes seemed to throb. “It’s normal.” Her lithe finger pointed. “Normal GI tract, cardiopulmonary process, liver, bladder, spleen. Everything that’s supposed to be there is there.”
“Except his head,” Patricia noted when she looked higher and saw that the boundary of the X-ray ended at the shoulders.
“Yes, but this isn’t about Dwayne Parker’s head. This is about Robert Caudill.” And then just as quickly as she spoke, she pinned up another sheet of X-ray film.
Patricia caught the dissimilarity in an instant. Dwayne’s X-ray clearly showed the presence of his internal organs.
Junior Caudill’s X-ray clearly showed an absence of internal organs.
“Where are his organs?” Patricia asked baldly. “You haven’t autopsied the body yet—I don’t even see any cuts on it.”
“There aren’t any cuts, and, no, I haven’t done the post yet. I’ve only done some preliminaries so far.” Baker sat down as if fatigued or repressing an agitation. “The only thing I can think of is maybe the decedent was exposed to a strain of flesh-eating bacteria, like an internalized version of the one in England, or maybe he died from a corrosive digestive virus.”
Patricia asked the strangest question, then, ever to pass her lips: “So his organs dissolved?”
Baker’s sleek shoulders shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. There are no other contraindications if that’s the case. E. coli, for instance, has been known to liquefy parts of the digestive system, and then the effluent drains from the rectal canal—”
Patricia was suddenly delighted she hadn’t eaten yet today, for surely she would’ve deposited her last meal right here on the floor or perhaps even on the corpse of Robert “Junior” Caudill.
“But there’s virtually no clinical evidence of an effluent void from the rectum, because I inspected his rectum thoroughly,″ Baker insisted, as though her competency were in question.
Patricia closed her eyes. This woman has a lousy. job. . . . She let her eyes stray around the room, to any place away from the corpse. Her mind was ticking with questions. But then something snagged an eye: something on the counter, at the other side of the room.
Two clear plastic bags, one large, one smaller.
“What’s that? In those bags?”
Baker looked over, uninterested. “Oh, that’s some stuff the EMTs brought over; some of it was in his pockets or near the corpse on the floor. I bagged it as evidence.”
Patricia walked over; she was pretty sure she noticed what was in the larger bag. “But what is it exactly?”
“Looks like a couple of pieces of crystal meth in the little bag, and—”
“An envelope in the other bag?”
“Yes.”
Patricia leaned over and saw the outside of the envelope. Junior Caudill’s name and address, in craggy handwriting.
“Don’t open the bags,” Baker reminded her. “You don’t want your fingerprints on police evidence.”
No, of course not . . . Patricia came back toward the table. “What was in the envelope?”
“Just a piece of paper with a weird word written on it,” Baker replied. “Wend-something. I’m not sure.”
Just like the letter to Dwayne. Patricia already knew.
“So,” the coroner continued. She stood up with an exasperated sigh. “I might as well show you what I already know.” And next she skimmed off her lab coat, flapped on a rubberized apron, and snapped on rubber gloves.
She’s as confused about this as I am, Patricia realized, and she’s getting mad.
Now Baker donned a clear-visored face shield and flipped the shield down, blond hair shimmering around the straps. She snatched up a silver device that looked like a metal can lid fixed to the top of an electric toothbrush. A brand name could clearly be made out on the tool’s body—STRYKER—and a moment later Patricia realized with a jolt of adrenaline that this tool was an autopsy saw.
Patricia’s hands shot up. “Oh, no, really, it’s not necessary for you to show me. . . .” But her plea was too late.
Her skin crawled as if aswarm with cockroaches, and her shoulders contracted when the extraordinarily genteel and preposterously attractive coroner revved the saw like the most monstrous dentist’s drill and began to cut a straight line from Junior Caudill’s pubic bone to the bottom of his sternum. With the saw’s grisly whine, flecks of clotted blood flew out of the groove and specked her apron and face shield. As the blade continued to cut upward, Junior’s dead, pallid body fat jiggled on the slab.
I’ve got to get out of here, I’ve got to . . . Patricia began to feel faint. This was not a place for her. She liked to think of herself as a realist—and this was indeed reality—but by now she’d simply had enough. Just as she would have turned around and run out of the morgue suite, though, the saw’s awful whine stopped.
It was obvious now that the coroner’s perplexion and sheer rage at the anomaly had been building up within the constraints of her temper, and now those constraints were snapping.
She threw the saw down on the counter, flipped up her visor, then slapped her gloved hands down onto the corpse. She pulled open the great rift sawed into Junior’s belly, then thrust a hand in and felt around like someone searching for a lost object under the bed. “See? See? I’m showing you what we already know. Look!”
Patricia ground her teeth, her eyelids appalled slits, and she leaned over and glimpse into the absolutely vacant area of space that was Junior Caudill’s abdominal vault.
“There are no fuckin’ organs inside this fat fuckin’ redneck!” the coroner nearly wailed.