The tops of buildings in the downtown skyline have vanished in clouds, the air thick with snow. I stare out my office window, distracted by big flakes drifting past as phones ring and people move along the corridor. I worry that state and city government will shut down. This can't happen on my first day back.
"Rose?" I call out to my secretary in the adjoining office. "Are you keeping up with the weather?"
"Snow," her voice sails back.
"I can see that. They aren't closing anything yet, are they?" I reach for my coffee and silently marvel over the unrelenting white storm that has seized our city. Winter wonderlands typically grace the commonwealth west of Charlottesville and north of Fredericksburg, and Richmond is left out. The explanation I have always heard is that the James River in our immediate area warms up the air just enough to replace snow with freezing rains that sweep in like Grant's troops to paralyze the earth.
"Accumulation of possibly eight inches. Tapering off by later afternoon with lows in the twenties." Rose must have logged on to an Internet weather update. "Highs not to get above freezing for the next three days. It looks like we'll have a white Christmas. Isn't that something?"
"Rose, what are you doing for Christmas?"
"Nothing much," her response comes back.
I scan stacks of case files and death certificates and push around phone message slips, mail and interoffice memos. I can't see the top of my desk and don't know where to start. "Eight inches? They'll declare a national emergency," I comment. "We need to find out if anything's closing besides schools. What's on my schedule that hasn't already been canceled?"
Rose is tired of yelling through the wall at me. She walks into my office, looking sharp in a gray pants suit and white turtleneck sweater, her gray hair pinned up in a French twist. She is rarely without my big calendar and opens it. She runs her finger over what is written in it for today, peering through half-moon reading glasses. "The obvious is we now have six cases and it's not even eight o'clock yet," she lets me know. "You're on call for court, but I have a feeling that's not going to happen."
"Which case?"
"Let's see. Mayo Brown. Don't believe I remember him."
"An exhumation," I remember. "A homicidal poisoning, a rather shaky one." The case is on my desk, somewhere. I start looking for it as muscles tense in my neck and shoulders. The last time I saw Buford Righter in my office it was over this very case, which was destined to create nothing but confusion in court even after I spent four hours explaining to him the dilution effect on drug levels when the body has been embalmed, that there is no satisfactory method to quantitate the rate of degradation in embalmed tissue. I went over the toxicology reports and prepared Righter for the defense of dilution. Embalming fluid displaces blood and dilutes drug levels, I drilled into him. So if the decedent's codeine level is at the low end of the acutely lethal dose range, then prior to embalming, the level could only have been higher. I meticulously explained that this is what he needs to focus on because the defense is going to muddy the waters with heroin versus codeine.
We were seated at the oval table in my private conference room, paperwork spread before us. Righter tends to blow out a lot when he is confused, frustrated or just pissed off. He continued to pluck up reports and frown at them, and then put them back down, all the while blowing like a whale breaking surface. "Greek," he kept saying. "How the hell do you make the jury understand things like 6-mono-acetylmorphine is a marker for heroin, and since it wasn't detected, then it doesn't necessarily mean heroin wasn't present, but if it was present, then that would mean heroin was, too? Versus telling if codeine is medicinal?" I told him that was my point, the very thing he didn't want to focus on. Stick to the dilution offense_that the level had to have been higher before the person was embalmed, I coached him. Morphine is a metabolite of heroin. Morphine is also a metabolite of codeine, and when codeine is metabolized in the blood we get very low levels of morphine. We can't tell anything definitively here, except we have no marker for heroin, and we do have levels of codeine and morphine, indicating the man took something_willingly or unwillingly_before he died, I painted the scenario for him. And it was a much higher dose than is indicated now because of the embalming, I stressed again. But do these results prove the man's wife poisoned him with Tylenol Three, for example? No. Don't get gummed up in the tar baby of 6-mono-acetylmorphine, I told Righter repeatedly.
I realize I am obsessing. I am sitting at my desk, angrily going through stacks of backed-up work as I anguish over how much trouble I went to preparing Righter for yet another case, promising I would be there for him, just as I always have been. It is a shame he does not seem inclined to return the favor. I am a free lunch. All of Chandonne's Virginia victims are free lunches. I just can't accept it and am beginning to resent the hell out of Jaime Berger, too. "Well, check with the courts," I say to Rose. "And by the way, he's being released from MCV this morning." I resist saying Jean-Baptiste Chandonne's name. "Expect the usual phone calls from the media."
"I heard on the news this New York prosecutor's in town." Rose flips through my date book. She doesn't look up at me. "Wouldn't that be something if she gets snowed in?"
I get up from my desk, take off my lab coat and hang it on the back of my chair. "I don't guess we've heard from her."
"She hasn't called here, not for you." My secretary hints she knows that Berger did track down Jack or at least someone besides me.
I am very skilled at becoming prepossessed with business and deflecting any effort on another person's part to probe an area I choose to avoid. "To expedite things," I say before Rose can give me one of her pregnant looks, "we'll skip the staff meeting. We need to get these bodies out of here before the weather gets any worse."
Rose has been my secretary for ten years. She is my office mother. She knows me better than anyone but doesn't abuse her position by pushing me in directions I don't want to go in. Curiosity about Jaime Berger fizzes on the surface of Rose's thoughts. I can see questions rising in her eyes. But she won't ask. She knows damn well how I feel about trying the case in New York instead of here, and that I don't want to talk about it. "I think Dr. Chong and Dr. Fielding are already in the morgue," she is saying. "I haven't seen Dr. Forbes yet."
It occurs to me that even if the Mayo Brown case goes forward today_even if the courts don't close because of snow_Righter isn't going to call me. He will stipulate my report and resort to putting the toxicologist on the stand, at best. There is no way in hell Righter is going to face me after I called him a coward, especially since the accusation is true and a part of him must know it. He will probably figure out a way to avoid me the rest of his life, and that unpleasant thought leads to another one as I cross the hallway. What does all this bode for me?
I push through the ladies' room door and make the transition from civilized paneling and carpeting, through a series of changing rooms, into a world of biological hazards, starkness and violent attacks on the senses. Along the way, one sheds shoes and outer clothing, stowing them safely in teal-green lockers. I keep a special pair of Nikes parked near the door that leads inside the autopsy suite. The shoes are not destined to walk through the land of the living ever again, and when it is time to get rid of them, I will burn them. I clumsily arrange my suit jacket, slacks and white silk blouse on hangers, my left elbow throbbing. I straggle into a full-length Mega Shield gown that has viral-resistant front panels and sleeves, sealed seams and a gripper neck, which is a snug stand-up collar. I pull on shoe covers, then an O.R. cap and surgical mask. The final touch of my fluid-proofing is a face shield to protect my eyes from splashes that might carry such frights as hepatitis or HIV.