“Easy now!” the director shouted. “Hold on!”
The men halted, faces covered with sweat. But ominously, with a crumbling sound, the crack continued to work its way along the bottom and up around the other side.
“Quickly! Another sling around the middle!” the man cried as more workmen came rushing up. But it was too late: the two halves of the coffin separated down the center, and then something inside began peeping out through the widening gap — the midsection of a corpse.
“Close up the gap!” Fatterhead screamed.
But the two halves of the coffin appeared to have taken on lives of their own. They now swung open sideways, like a candy bar broken in half — and the body, itself cracking into two pieces, slid out in a cloud of rotten silk and decayed clothing, landing on the damp ground with a hollow sound. The corpse, pickled from a decade of water leaks, belonged to a woman with a mass of brown hair, wearing what might have been a black dress and pearls.
Coldmoon was deeply shocked. He had been raised to have the utmost respect for the dead.
“Son of a bitch!” Fatterhead shouted as everyone else stared in horrified fascination.
Silence. Then the director recovered himself and spoke more calmly. “Please get the body shroud and transfer the remains of the deceased into it.”
The workmen took the body bag that had been lying on the cart, laid it out parallel to the corpse, and together, hands under the remains, shifted the two pieces into the bag, zipped it up, and placed it on the coffin transport.
“What about the coffin?” asked one of the workers.
“We’ll get that on the next trip,” said Fatterhead. He turned to Pendergast. “I am so sorry, sir. This is the very first time... exceptional circumstances... ” He wrung his hands, words failing him.
“I wouldn’t worry,” said Pendergast, laying a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I doubt if either half of Ms. Flayley will bear you any grudge.”
17
Dr. Charlotte Fauchet did not like to work with rubberneckers around, be they cops or feds. The green ones often made involuntary noises, breathed loudly, or even vomited. Worse, the experienced ones tried to show off their nonchalance with jokes and asinine comments.
She waited, arms crossed, by the gurney, with the subject still zipped in a body transport bag. The chief FBI agent entered first. He was a typical fed, crisp blue suit peeking from under his scrubs, salt-and-pepper hair trimmed short, square jaw, broad shoulders. He was followed by a strikingly pale man in a black suit who looked uncommonly like many of the undertakers she dealt with — except no undertaker she’d ever met had quite such piercing silver-blue eyes. Clearly these two were big fish, indicative of the case’s high profile. Important or not, they’d get no privileges in her morgue. Nor would there be chummy introductions or shaking of hands, which, at any rate, was forbidden in the autopsy chamber.
This duo was followed by a younger man, with longish black hair parted in the middle, whose ethnicity she was uncertain of. They all looked gratifyingly uncomfortable in their scrubs, and she gave them an unfriendly stare as they lined up. “Gentlemen,” she said as soon as they’d introduced themselves, “the rules are simple.” She looked at them in turn. “Rule number one: no talking or questions unless absolutely necessary. Rule number two: silence. That means no whispering or rustling. Rule number three: no sucking on menthol drops. If you start to feel sick, please leave immediately.”
Nodded acquiescence.
“I will be speaking out loud during the procedure. Please understand that I am not talking to you; I am talking to the videorecorder.”
More nods. They seemed agreeably cooperative — at least, so far.
“Thank you. Now I will begin.”
She turned to the body, lying on a trolley next to the gurney. It was an unusual shape. Her supervisor, Chief Forensic Pathologist Dent Moberly, had warned her the remains were in poor condition and would be challenging to work with. So much the better. Fauchet, an assistant M.E. only five years out of medical school, had ambitions of running her own department in a great city — preferably New York. It was the difficult, the celebrated cases that would get her where she wanted to go. She was glad that, for once, Dr. Moberly had not insisted on seizing the spotlight.
She began by reading off the information on the medical card — the subject’s name, personal data, date and recorded cause of death. Then she unzipped the body bag and nodded to the diener waiting in the background. The morgue assistant came forward and expertly transferred the remains from the bag to the gurney.
She began her general observations. “I note that the corpse has sustained significant deterioration,” she said. “This includes what is evidently a series of wet-dry cycles, decomposition followed by desiccation.” There was still a smell of embalming fluid, but it had not been able to hold back the ravages of decay. The corpse was in two pieces, and examining it grossly, she saw that the poor state of the body rendered the original — and evidently hasty — autopsy almost academic. She would essentially be starting from scratch.
All the better.
She began with a new Y-incision, and the diener handed her shears to open the chest cavity. The bones were brittle and snapped like dry twigs. The organs had already been removed in the autopsy eleven years before, then returned to the body cavity — now they were little more than shriveled black lumps adhering to the peritoneal wall, in an advanced state of decomposition. Soon she was “in the zone,” as she called that moment when her entire attention became focused on the body and all else faded away. She slowed down when she reached the genital area and performed a very careful dissection. This was a forensic autopsy, and as such there was always the possibility of sexual assault. But this body was too far gone to see much beyond the original M.E.’s work and the grossest of injuries.
The clock ticked. The three spectators remained gratifyingly silent. And her boss, thank God, remained elsewhere.
Finally she moved up to the head. According to the records, the decedent had hanged herself. She saw with a frown that the doctor who’d performed the initial autopsy had barely examined the neck, beyond confirming its role in the woman’s death. She made a U-shaped incision in the frontal aspect of the neck and began a meticulous dissection, freeing the sternocleidomastoid muscle from its lower attachments, exposing the carotid sheath and artery, the vagus nerve, and the omohyoid and sternothyroid. She finally exposed the cervical spine and noted the trauma still visible from the hanging.
“Dr. Fauchet, a question?”
She turned. It was the pale one, the one she believed was named Pendergast, who spoke. She was about to reiterate her rules, but something in his eye — soft and entreating — caused her to hesitate. “Yes.”
“Do you see any evidence of strangulation prior to hanging?”
“No.”
“None? From what I saw, the neck showed considerable abrasive trauma.”
“According to the coroner’s report, it was what we call an incomplete hanging — one where there wasn’t a long drop involved. Typical in a suicide. The abrasion and trauma you see here... and here—” she pointed with a scalpel — “was caused by the subject thrashing about during the period of suffocation. There is no traumatic spondylolisthesis of C2, that is, a fracture of the spine, between cervical one and two, because the drop was not long enough. For the same reasons, I do not observe any severe ligature injuries. Again, all of this is consistent with a suicidal hanging.”
“Thank you.”
She turned to continue her work when a sensor chimed and the door was flung open by her boss.