Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

“Come on, old man, let’s get you suited up.”

“Oh, I don’t think I need to put on scrubs,” Gideon said. “I don’t really expect to be doing anything-just observing.” From as great a distance as I can get away with, he might have added.

Merrill laughed as merrily as if Gideon had told an amusing joke. “Nonsense,” he said, taking him by the elbow and shuffling him along the corridor. “Gets a bit splashy in there sometimes. Wouldn’t want to get anything nasty on that pretty shirt.”

Merrill himself was wearing the green, oversized, hand-me-down (from the hospital upstairs) scrubs that were usual in mortuaries around the world, fronted by a plastic apron, and complete with oversize booties. Gideon had noted before this preference of pathologists for roomy scrubs. They needed them, too. Unlike surgeons (other than orthopedic surgeons) who work mostly in small spaces with delicate instruments: scalpel, forceps, probes, retractors-pathologists use implements that look as if they came from a carpenter’s tool chest: hammers, chisels, saws, even pruning shears (for snipping through the ribs). A grizzled, old-school coroner Gideon knew claimed that he bought all his instruments at kitchen shops and hardware stores. “They’re the same damn knives and things, just as good, but if it has ‘autopsy’ in front of it, they charge you an arm and a leg.”

Five minutes later, in the locker room a few yards down the hall, Gideon was getting similarly outfitted in scrubs that must have been made for a professional wrestler. While he was swimming his way into them, Merrill used the time to browse through the file folder of materials that had come with Joey’s body.

“Oh, dear,” he said as Gideon wrapped the drawstring twice around his waist, “did you see what his blood alcohol level was?”

Gideon shook his head. “Pretty high, I imagine.”

“That’s putting it mildly. One hundred and fifty-two milligrams. Not surprising he fell off that catwalk. The wonder is that he was able to get out on it in the first place.”

“You’re inclined to go with the ‘accident’ theory, then?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go quite as far as that. That’s what we’re here to try and determine, isn’t it? But I must say it seems like a reasonable starting hypothesis. At that level of intoxication, one is anything but steady on one’s stumps.”

Gideon slipped into the booties-normal-sized ones-and the two men shuffled down the corridor to the autopsy room, Gideon stolidly, and Merrill practically skipping at his side.

“It’s a pity you weren’t here just two days ago,” the pathologist told him. “We had an astonishing case, really incredible. This chap had committed suicide by turning on his table saw and jamming his head into it. Never seen anything like it. Cleaved his head in half right down the middle, neat as a pin, exactly through the longitudinal fissure, clear down to the vermis of the cerebellum, can you believe it? Like looking at a median sagittal section of the head in an anatomy text.” He sighed. “Gone now, though. Had to release the body.”

“Sorry I missed it,” Gideon mumbled. “My bad luck.”

Merrill brightened. “We have photographs, though.”

“Oh, great. Maybe later if there’s time.”

“Here we are, then,” Merrill said with transparent pride, pulling open the door to a spic-and-span, white-tiled autopsy room. “Hic locus est ubi-”

“-mortui viventes docent.” Gideon finished for him. This is the place where the dead teach the living. A favorite motto of forensic labs. Gideon had it on a plaque on the wall of the anthropology department’s bone room at the university.

The moment the door opened, the mildly unsettling smell of hospital antiseptic was displaced by the more unsettling, though more familiar, mixture of formaldehyde and tissue going bad, l’arome de la morgue. Inside, Joey’s graying body lay faceup on the metal table, naked and pitifully vulnerable under glaring fluorescent light fixtures. Above the foot of the table hung the usual meat-market scale, shocking in its ordinariness, in which his internal organs would be weighed. A tall, somber, long-limbed Indian man, the diener-the autopsy assistant-was finishing up his tasks of preparing the body and the instruments, and taking the preliminary measurements and photographs.

“We are all ready, Doctor,” he said on seeing Merrill.

“Hello, Rajiv. X-rays?”

“Yes, Doctor. The physician from St. Mary’s sent them.” Rajiv nodded toward the wall-mounted viewing box, to which four X-ray plates had been clipped. Merrill walked to the box and, leaning over, peered briefly at the indistinct images. “Fractured spinous processes on these upper thoracic vertebrae, you see?” he said, pointing. “Some damage to the sacroiliac region as well. Both perfectly consistent with a fall onto his back, wouldn’t you say?”

Gideon nodded and placed a finger on a photograph of the left arm. “And I think the olecranon is broken, too; that’d go along with it as well.”

“Yes, I believe you’re right. The cranial photos are ambiguous, though, but then who can read a cranial X-ray? There’s damage to the head, all right, inside and out, but hard to tell exactly what kind.” Merrill straightened up, his eyes alight and already straying toward the saws and knives that Rajiv had set up on a small rolling table. “May as well have a look at the real thing, shall we?”

“May as well,” Gideon said forlornly.

“Well, let’s cover him up, Rajiv,” Merrill said.

“Cover him up?”

“For decency’s sake.”

“Decency’s sake?”

“Yes, we’ll start at the top-”

The top? Gideon said to himself.

Rajiv didn’t disappoint him. “The top?”

“Yes, the top. Dr. Oliver will be most interested in the skull, I believe, so let’s begin there. In the meantime, let’s drape him from the neck down, why don’t we?”

Rajiv was obviously dubious about the correctness of this-pathologists generally began with the trunk; the famous Y-incision-but he did as he was told without even a murmured “Drape him?”, pulling a sheet neatly, even tenderly, up over Joey’s body. Clearly, understanding that Gideon had known Joey, Merrill had had this done out of sensitivity for his feelings, and Gideon very much appreciated it. It was, for whatever reason, easier-less of a violation, less defiling-to open up Joey’s head with the rest of him covered up.

Rajiv handed both men plastic “bouffant-style” operating room caps, which they slipped on over their hair. Gideon was grateful that Clapper wasn’t there to see him.

“You didn’t want gloves, did you?” asked Merrill, who was partial to doing his dissecting bare-handed. “When I’m working with tissue, I find the sense of touch in my bare hands extremely sensitive,” he had once told Gideon-who much preferred gloves, and for exactly the same reason.

“Gloves?” Gideon said now, as if they were the furthest thought from his mind. “No, of course not.” With luck, he wouldn’t have to touch anything.

Many pathologists had their dieners do the gross cutting-the Y-incision, and the ear-to-ear over-the-top-of-the-head incision to get at the skull-but not Merrill, of course. He preferred to do it all himself, so once Rajiv had placed a support block under the back of Joey’s head and turned on the hanging microphone to record their observations, the diener stepped away from the table, awaiting further instructions.

“Well, let’s see what we have,” Merrill said happily. Gideon half expected him to rub his hands together, but with his arms remaining folded, he peered long and hard at Joey’s head. “What do you think?”

Until that moment, Gideon hadn’t looked directly at Joey’s face, but now he did. It helped, he found, that Joey didn’t look much like Joey anymore. In addition to the puffiness and distortion that went with death from cranial blunt-force trauma, on his face had blossomed a pair of bilateral periorbital hematomas-spectacular, purplish, shiny black eyes, which were known in the trade as “raccoon eyes,” and for good reason. Huge and round, blackening both his upper and lower eyelids, swelling them closed, and as dark as stage makeup, they made it look as if he were wearing a strange, pale face mask with black holes cut out for the eyes. His hair, so colorless and fine to begin with, had been rinsed by Rajiv under the faucet at one end of the autopsy table and was still damp, so that it seemed limper and sadder than ever. High on the back of his head, about two inches up from the part of the scalp overlying what anthropologists called “lambda”-the Y-shaped juncture where the two parietals meet the occipital bone-a circular area three or four inches in diameter had been shaved, the better to show a gaping, star-shaped laceration where his scalp had split open.