The perseverance in this world, despite it all, of things done right.
Carefully Dr. Fenton cuts free the black leather belt and slips it off Zell’s neck, measures the width of the band and the length from end to end. With brass calipers she takes the dimensions of the bruising beneath the eye, and the bruise from the belt buckle, digging up beneath the chin, yellowish and dry like a patch of sere terrain running up on either side toward his ears, an angry ragged V. And she’s pausing, moment to moment, to take pictures of everything: the belt while it’s still on the neck, the belt alone, the neck alone.
And then she cuts away the clothes, rinses off the insurance man’s pallid body with a damp cloth, her gloved fingers moving rapidly over his midsection and his arms.
“What are you looking for?” I venture, and Fenton ignores me; I fall silent.
With a scalpel she tucks into the chest, and I take another step forward, now I’m standing beside her under the bright halo of the mortuary light, peering wide-eyed as she makes a deep Y-shaped incision, peels back the skin and the flesh beneath. I’m leaning way over the body, pushing my luck, as Fenton draws the dead man’s blood, piercing a vein near the center of the heart, filling three vials in quick succession. And I realize at some point during all this that I’m barely breathing, that as I’m watching her go point by point through this process, weighing the organs and recording their weights, lifting the brain from the skull and turning it in her hands, I’m waiting for her impassive expression to sharpen, waiting for her to gasp or mutter “hmm” or turn to me in astonishment.
To have found whatever it is that will prove that Zell was killed, and not by his own hand.
Instead, at last, Dr. Fenton puts down her scalpel and flatly says, “Suicide.”
I stare at her. “Are you sure?”
Fenton doesn’t answer. She’s moving rapidly back over to her cart, opening a box containing a thick roll of plastic bags, and peeling the top one off.
“Wait, ma’am. I’m sorry,” I say. “What about that?”
“What about what?” I can feel myself growing desperate, a heat building in my cheeks, a squeak sneaking into my voice, like a child’s voice. “That? Is that bruising? Above his ankle?”
“I saw that, yes,” Fenton says coolly.
“Where did it come from?”
“We shall never know.” She doesn’t stop bustling, doesn’t look at me, her flat voice glazed with sarcasm. “But we do know he didn’t die from a bruise to the calf.”
“But aren’t there are other things we do know? Just in terms of determining the cause of death?” I’m saying this and I’m fully conscious of how ridiculous it is to be challenging Alice Fenton, but this can’t be right. I scour my memory, flipping frantically in my mind through the pages of the relevant textbooks. “What about the blood? Do we perform a toxicity screening?”
“We would if we’d found anything to indicate it. Needle marks, muscles atrophied in suggestive patterns.”
“But we can’t just do it?”
Fenton laughs dryly, shaking open the plastic bag. “Detective, are you familiar with the state police forensic lab? On Hazen Drive?”
“I’ve never been there.”
“Well, it is the only forensic laboratory in the state, and right now there is a new person running the show over there, and he is an idiot. He is an assistant to an assistant who is now chief toxicologist, since the real chief toxicologist left town in November to go study life drawing in Provence.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.” Fenton’s lip curls up with evident distaste. “Apparently it’s what she’s always wanted to do. It’s a mess over there. Orders getting left on the table. It’s a mess.”
“Oh,” I say again, and I turn to what remains of Peter Zell, the chest cavity yawning open on the table. I’m looking at him, at it, and I’m thinking how sad it is, because however he died, whether he killed himself or not, he’s dead. I’m thinking the dumb and obvious thought that here was a person, and now he’s gone and he’s never coming back.
When I look up again, Fenton is standing beside me, and her voice has changed a little, and she’s pointing, directing my gaze to Zell’s neck.
“Look,” she says. “What do you see?”
“Nothing,” I say, confused. The skin is peeled back, revealing the soft tissue and muscle, the yellow-white of the bone beneath. “I don’t see anything.”
“Exactly. If someone had snuck up behind this man with a rope, or strangled him with bare hands, or even with this extremely expensive belt you’ve become fixated on, the neck would be a mess. There would be tissue abrasion, there would be pools of blood from internal hemorrhaging.”
“Okay,” I say. I nod. Fenton turns away, back to her cart.
“He died by asphyxiation, Detective,” she says. “He leaned forward, on purpose, into the knot of the ligature, his airway was sealed, and he died.”
She zips the corpse of my insurance man back into the body bag from whence it came and slides the body back into its designated slot in the refrigerated wall. I’m watching all this mutely, stupidly, wishing I had more to say. I don’t want her to leave.
“What about you, Dr. Fenton?”
“Excuse me?” She stops at the door, looks back.
“Why haven’t you left, gone off to do whatever it is you’ve always wanted to do?”
Fenton tilts her head, looks at me like she’s not exactly sure she understands the question. “This is what I’ve always wanted to do.”
“Right. Okay.”
The heavy gray door swings closed behind her, I rub my knuckles into my eyes, thinking, what next? Thinking, what now?
I stand there alone for a second, alone with Fenton’s rolling cart, alone with the bodies in their cold lockers. Then I take one of the vials of Zell’s blood off the cart, slip it into the inside pocket of my blazer, and go.
I find my way out of Concord Hospital, weaving my way through the unfinished corridors, and then, because it’s already been a long and difficult day, because I am frustrated and exhausted and confused, and wanting to do nothing but figure out what I’m going to do next, my sister is waiting for me at my car.
Nico Palace in her ski hat and winter coat is seated cross-legged on the sloping front hood of the Impala, undoubtedly leaving a deep dent, because she knows I will hate that, and tapping ash from her American Spirit cigarette directly onto the windshield. I trudge toward her through the snow-crusted emptiness of the hospital parking lot, and Nico greets me with one hand raised, palm up, like an Indian squaw, smoking her cigarette, waiting.
“Come on, Hank,” she says, before I can say a word. “I left you, like, seventeen messages.”
“How’d you know where I was?”
“Why’d you hang up on me this morning?”
“How’d you know where I was?”
This is how we talk. I pull the sleeve of my jacket up over my hand and use it to brush ash off the car down into the snow.
“I called the station,” says Nico. “McGully told me where I could find you.”
“He shouldn’t have done that,” I say. “I’m working.”
“I need your help. Seriously.”
“Well, I’m seriously working. Would you climb down off the vehicle, please?”
Instead she casts out her legs and settles back on the windshield like she’s spreading out on a beach chair. She’s wearing the thick army-issue winter coat that was our grandfather’s, and I can see where the brass buttons are etching little trails into the paint job of the department’s Impala.