"You'll have to talk to Sergeant Kiley."
Not a good sign. Public relations officers were usually sergeants.
"Who?"
"Kiley. He's in charge of public relations."
The deskman resumed his reading.
"Who's heading the investigation?"
"You'll have to talk to Sergeant Kiley."
Jude was about to enter a grim-looking waiting room, when he saw a reporter he knew from the Daily News seated with his back to him. He ducked outside and walked to the corner. He fished in his pocket for a quarter, dialed the local paper and asked for the night editor. This was a calculated gamble: some local papers liked having a big city reporter in town and felt flattered by the sudden collegiality; others viewed him as competition and froze him out. Jude struck it lucky. He dropped a name or two and was connected to the reporter working the story, a woman called Gloria, who told him she was about to visit the medical examiner, and invited him along.
Ten minutes later, he was standing next to Gloria, a young woman about his age with a pleasing, open face, on a porch outside the office of Norman McNichol, M.D., medical examiner for Ulster Country. The office was in a white clapboard house on Broad Street, an elm-lined avenue where the overgrown lawns sloped down to a sidewalk whose slabs tilted wildly because of the irrepressible roots underground.
Idyllic small-town America, thought Jude, looking up and down the street. Gloria raised a finger with pale green nail polish and pressed a round white pearl button. They heard the muffled singsong of a bell within. Below the button was a discreet brass sign: MCNICHOL FUNERAL PARLOR.
"So the M.E. moonlights as a funeral director," said Jude. "He can funnel business to himself — there's more than a whiff of conflict of interest in that."
"Oh, he's okay. He's a character. Buried everyone around here. Parents, children — you name it. He just keeps going on."
McNichol, a tall, slender man of indeterminate age, with a trimmed gray beard, opened the door and gave Gloria a peck on both cheeks, European-style. He pumped Jude's hand vigorously. Jude felt she was right: he was okay.
"We've got to go to Poughkeepsie," he said. "That's where our boy is waiting for us."
He disappeared inside and reemerged, carrying an old-fashioned black leather doctor's satchel.
"Hop in your car," he said, bounding down the steps. "You can follow me."
McNichol drove like a maniac — typical, thought Jude, of someone who treats death like a work buddy. In no time they pulled up to an imposing brick building with a circular drive, in the center of which stood a thick metal sign with embossed letters: POUGHKEEPSIE PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL.
They followed in McNichol's wake, past the reception desk, where he breezed by and sent papers fluttering, to a staircase at the rear. It led to the autopsy suite in the basement of the maternity wing. A large red sign in block letters — RESTRICTED — was plastered on the main door. They entered through a side office, walked past a rabbit warren of cubicles with gray metal desks for the residents, and entered the scrub room. The walls were lined with lockers, hampers and two deep sinks. In a cupboard were stacks of faded green gowns, thick white aprons, masks and white slip-over shoe covers. On a table were two dispensers of cream-colored latex gloves.
"Suit up," ordered McNichol.
Jude hung up his jacket, switched his wallet to his back pants pocket and put his arms through the sleeves of a backward-facing gown, trying to suppress a look of amazement. He had never attended an autopsy before. He approached the sink basin and looked up questioningly.
"Go ahead." McNichol was chuckling. "This scrubbing's for him. To protect him from you and all the little microscopic critters you're carrying. You'll want to scrub thoroughly on your way out — that one's for you. To protect you from him. I'd say it's more important."
He disappeared through swinging double doors.
Jude turned to Gloria, who had tied her smock tightly around her waist with a neat bow.
"I don't get it," he said. "He's going to allow us in?"
"Oh, he does it all the time. Like I said, he's a character. And we don't get that many homicides, so he likes to show off."
They pushed through the swinging doors and found themselves in an anteroom. McNichol was waiting for them. It was cool and damp, like a walk-in meat locker. There were two doors ahead. On one was a printed sign that read: Please indicate No Head if the brain is restricted. Thank you.
"That's the isolation room," said McNichol. "Quarantine. It's for bodies with communicable conditions. By that I mean seriously communicable. Self-evidently, virtually any disease can be passed from one individual to another. In there we put tuberculosis, certain fevers, Creutzfeldt-Jakob… that's mad cow disease. We've never had one of those, knock wood" — he reached over to knuckle-rap the arm of a chair.
He saw Jude look at the No Head sign. "That's to prevent disposal — in these kinds of cases — without safeguards."
They took the other door, which led to the autopsy room.
The first thing that hit Jude was the smell, a combination of antiseptic and something else that gripped his stomach and made him want to retch. That would be formalin, a fixative, explained McNichol. They were in a room with chipped yellow paint, green tiles that rose three-quarters of the way up the walls, and large fluorescent ceiling lights. Glass cases lined two walls, filled with bottles and sterilized implements and various floating objects that Jude did not care to inspect too closely. Along a third wall were large sinks giving way to stainless steel counters, upon which stood five huge plastic containers of chemicals.
McNichol handed Jude a blue jar of Vaseline and told him to dab some in his nose. "Trick of the trade," he explained. "Overwhelms the olfactory sense. I don't require it. I lost my smell of death many years ago." He somehow made it sound like a deprivation.
Gloria passed up the blue jar. Jude was impressed; how many dead bodies had she seen?
In the center of the room were two L-shaped stainless steel tables, their long sides running parallel to one another. The long portions of the tables had a perforated surface, which, Jude theorized, would allow liquids to flow to tiny sinks at the angles of the L. The short sides were lined with various tools, small Tupperware containers that McNichol said were to hold tissue samples. Nearby were metal boxes, called "coffins," for eviscerated organs. Both were filled with formalin.
McNichol moved to the rear of the room, where large white drawers were set in the wall. He pushed a metal gurney alongside one, opened it full length, dropped a railing and moved to the other side so that he could hold the gurney in place with his hip.
"We don't have a single diener on duty today," he said. "They're the ones who are supposed to transport the body to and from the morgue. Technically, I shouldn't be doing this."
He leaned across and reached for a black body bag.
"The dieners are charged with 'running the gut.' It's a particularly heinous piece of work — you slit the gastrointestinal tract along its length and check the walls of the gut, as well as its contents. But the dieners like to do it — would you believe they actually choose for the honor?"
He grunted, and with a single smooth motion, pulled the top of the bundle onto the gurney. Then two more movements — one to hoist the hips, the other to center the feet — and the body was centered on board. It was all done quickly, as if he had done it hundreds of time, which Jude figured he probably had.