“What have you been hearing?” I question him casually, as security cameras pick up Toby rolling the gurney toward the white transport van.
“Well, Toby said we have a Jane Doe coming in, that it could be the lady who’s been missing, the one you’re going to court about,” Ron says. “I guess you also were filmed by some TV crews while you were out there.”
“What makes you think it was TV crews, as in more than one?” I ask while I watch Toby from different angles on split screens.
He parks the gurney at the back of the van, points the key to unlock it, and I notice his lips are moving. It occurs to me he’s probably listening to his iPod as usual and singing along. But that’s not right, either. He appears to be talking emphatically. In fact, he looks agitated, as if he’s arguing with someone.
“From what I saw, you were in different locations, on different boats, at different times,” Ron describes. “The Coast Guard, the fireboat with a bunch of people from the aquarium. Some of it was filmed from the air. I do know that because you could hear the chopper in the background. But I’m not sure about all of it.”
Toby is on the phone. He’s wearing in-ear headphones that are connected to his iPhone, which is in a back pocket of his cargo pants. Maybe he’s fighting with his girlfriend again, and he shouldn’t be fighting with anyone or having any sort of personal conversation, period. He should be paying attention to his job, to his handling of evidence. It’s one of my most common complaints that staff devote just as much time to their personal lives as they do to their work, as if it’s perfectly fine to get paid for fighting with a partner or shopping online or chatting on Facebook or Twitter.
“You were doing something with what’s for sure the biggest turtle I ever saw,” Ron continues, and I’m barely listening. “Then you’re in the water getting her out. An old lady, it looks like, tied up with yellow rope.”
“You saw footage of me getting her out of the water?” I watch Toby cover the gurney with the sheet and open the tailgate, and he’s scowling now, clearly unhappy with whatever someone is saying over the phone. “Do you happen to know which TV station it was?”
“No, ma’am, Chief. That I can’t tell you for a fact,” Ron says. “Because it’s not just on the local stations. CNN, for sure, and a Yahoo headline on the Internet about a prehistoric monster turtle, and that’s the exact words, and a dead body tied to a cage that the turtle got tangled up with. I think it’s pretty much all over the Internet, pretty much everywhere.”
thirteen
THE CFC’S SEVEN CORRIDORS ARE PAINTED WHITE, their recycled glass tiles glazed a grayish brown called truffle. Soft reflective LEDs create a soothing cloud of light, and acoustical drop ceilings conceal miles of wire while cameras and RFID trackers monitor the passage of all who come here, the living and the dead.
Our round headquarters was built by a bioresearch company that went bankrupt late in construction, and with rare exception the original design is ideal for what we do—in fact, a medical examiner’s dream. We can look out energy-efficient solar windows that no one can look in, and a high-performance HVAC controls the environment so precisely we have our own customized weather. Boilers remove moisture from the air before chillers cool it, preventing condensation and an inconvenient phenomenon known as indoor rain, while robots and HEPA filters suck in and scrub away pathogens, chemical vapors, and accompanying awful odors.
The CFC is cleaner than most healthcare clinics, the tissue recovery room I briskly walk past a hundred times more sterile than a hospital OR. Patients declared brain-dead can be transported here while still on life support, ensuring that eyes, organs, skin, and bones are harvested without wasteful delays, the dead helping the living and the living helping the dead. The progress I’ve witnessed in my profession isn’t the straight trajectory I once imagined but a circle like the corridor I follow, passing ID now, then ducking inside large-scale x-ray to see if my technician Anne is there.
Her chair is pushed back and turned around as if she just got up, and glowing on flat video screens are 3-D images of a head and thorax with bright white areas of fresh hemorrhage into brain tissue and lungs, and the brighter white of bones, of a basilar skull fracture that extends into the sinuses, and shattered scapulas, and ribs broken so badly they’re detached from chest walls. The blunt-force trauma case from this morning, Howard Roth; I read the information on his CT scans. A forty-two-year-old black male from Cambridge who allegedly fell down his basement stairs, his body discovered late yesterday afternoon.
I don’t have time for this.
But I can’t let it go, and I click through more images, viewing the body on different planes from the inside out, and the gray shades of organs and muscles are vivid white where there is bleeding and dark where air is trapped. Then brilliant starburst and streaking artifacts are at a high Hounsfield unit value of almost 4000. Dense metal, possibly lead. Most likely old bullet fragments in the soft tissue of the left hip, and more of them in his right posterior thigh. A possible roadmap of the life this man lived, but not what killed him, and the massive internal damage that did is grossly inconsistent with a tumble down the stairs.
A flail chest is more common in the crushing injuries I associate with people pinned under machines or run over by tractors or cars. Most people who fall on the back of their heads also don’t have a basilar fracture. They don’t have broken cranial bones at foramen magnum, the hole in the base of the skull. I click through more images from the whole-body scan, finding no fresh injuries to the arms, hands, pelvis, or lower extremities.
Beyond a leaded glass window, the silhouette of the large bore CT scanner is indistinctly white in the near dark, no one home, and I decide Anne probably stepped out for coffee or to use the ladies’ room. I jot her a note and place it on her keyboard, letting her know I plan to post the body from the Massachusetts Bay later in the day and will need to scan it first.
Should discuss Howard Roth, I add as a PS. Confusing loc of fxx/injuries & lack of them. Need complete history & scene details. Do not want him released yet. Thx.—KS.
I check the autopsy room next and find it quiet and shiny clean, the floor still damp from mopping, long rows of empty steel tables gleaming dully in natural light that filters in through the one-way glass of side windows and those facing the parking lot. Banks of high-intensity lamps in the thirty-two-foot ceiling are turned off, the observation windows in the upper walls opening onto teaching labs that are dim and empty.
Luke Zenner often lingers down here, enjoying the quiet to do paperwork, to check on pending projects, or to tidy up his station, number 2, right next to mine. But I don’t see him or anyone else, my five other pathologists and team of investigators probably in their offices or taking care of various appointments or out on calls.
I enter my iPhone’s password to send Luke a message and notice I have a new one from Benton.
We still on for 5 & you ok? Have seen the news.
I write him back that I will return directly to the CFC after court and probably work into the early evening. I can meet with him and the other agents as soon as I’m done with the post.
Will call when I get a breath, I text him. Dinner? If really late, take-out here while we meet?