Robin Cook - Critical

"Now that you remarried, are you still tormented by what happened to your family?"

Jack stopped and stared at Lou as if he couldn't believe Lou had asked such a question. "I'm always going to be tormented. It's just a matter of degree." Jack had lost his wife of ten years and two daughters, aged ten and eleven, to a commuter plane crash fifteen years earlier.

"What does Laurie think of you having surgery so soon?"

Jack's lower jaw slowly dropped open. "What is this?" he questioned with obvious irritation. "Is this some kind of conspiracy? Has Laurie been talking to you about this behind my back?"

"Hey!" Lou voiced, raising his hands as if to fend off an attack. "Calm down! Don't be so paranoid! I'm just asking, trying to be a friend."

Jack went back to finishing his suiting up. "I'm sorry to jump on you. It's just that Laurie has been on my case to postpone my surgery since it was scheduled. I'm a little touchy about it because I want the damn thing fixed."

"Understood," Lou said.

With hoods in place and tiny, battery-powered fans recirculating the air through high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters, the two men entered the windowless autopsy room, which had not been upgraded for almost fifty years. The eight stainless-steel autopsy tables bore witness to the approximately five hundred thousand bodies that had been painstakingly disassembled to reveal their forensic secrets. Over each table hung an old-fashioned spring-loaded scale and a microphone for dictation. Along one wall were Formica countertops and soapstone sinks for washing out intestines, and along another wall were floor-to-ceiling glass-enclosed instrument cabinets, the contents of which looked like something that should have been in a house of horrors. Next to them were backlit x-ray view boxes. The whole scene was awash in a stark blue-white light coming from banks of ceiling-mounted fluorescent fixtures. The illumination appeared to suck the color out of everything in the room, especially the ghostly pale corpse on the nearest table.

While Vinnie continued the preparations by getting out instruments, specimen bottles, preservatives, labels, syringes, and evidence custody tags, Jack and Lou went to the view box to look at the whole-body X-rays that Vinnie had put up. One was anterior-posterior; the other was lateral.

After checking the accession number, Jack gazed at the films. Then he said, "I think you are right."

"Right about what?" Lou asked.

"It being small-caliber," Jack said. He pointed to a cylindrical, half-centimeter-long translucent defect within the lower part of the skull's image. Composed of metal, bullets totally absorb X-rays, and since X-rays are viewed as negatives, the image appears in the color of the background illumination.

"Twenty-two-caliber would be my guess," Lou said, moving his face close to the film.

"I think you're also right about it being execution-style," Jack said. "From its position in the films, it's undoubtedly lodged in the brain stem, where a professional killer would aim. Let's take a look at the entrance wound."

With Vinnie's help, Jack rolled the corpse on its side. First, Jack took a digital photo. Then, with his gloved hand, he separated the hair covering the point where the bullet entered the victim's head. Since the victim had bobbed around in the Hudson River, most of the blood had been washed away.

"It's a near-contact wound," Jack said. "But certainly not contact, since it's a circular, not a stellate defect." He took another photo.

"How far away?" Lou questioned.

Jack shrugged. "By the looks of the stippling, I'd say somewhere around twelve inches. Noticing the position of the entrance wound in relation to the bullet's position on the X-ray, I'd guess the perpetrator was behind and above the victim, maybe with the victim seated. That's seemingly confirmed by slightly more stippling below the entrance wound than above."

"More weight to it being execution-style."

"I'd have to agree."

Jack took some measurements of the position of the wound, and another photo with a ruler in close proximity. Then, with a scalpel, he dislodged some of the embedded soot from within points of stippling. He put the material in a specimen tube. Finally, he took additional photos before motioning for Vinnie to allow the body to roll back into a supine position.

"What do you make of these deep slices across the thigh?" Lou asked, pointing to two parallel sharp cuts in the anterior aspect of the right thigh.

Jack took a photo before inspecting the wounds and palpating them. "They were certainly made by a sharp object," he said, looking at the clean edges. "There's no skin bridges. I'd guess they are propeller injuries, and I'd be willing to bet they were postmortem. I don't see any extravasated blood within the tissues."

"Do you think the victim could have been run over after being thrown from a boat?"

Jack nodded, but something more subtle caught his attention. Moving down to the ankles, he pointed out some oddly shaped abrasions.

"What is it?" Lou asked.

"I'm not sure," Jack said. He went over to the counter and hefted a dissecting microscope detached from its base. Bracing his elbows on the edge of the table, he studied the subtle abrasions.

"Well?" Lou questioned.

"I'm going out on a limb," Jack admitted, "but it looks as if his legs might have been tied with chains. There's not only abrasions but also suspiciously shaped indentations."

"Occurring after he was dead or before?"

"Whatever it was, it was after he was dead. I don't see any blood in the tissues here, either."

"It could have been he was chained to a weight and supposed to sink and stay sunk. Somebody could have screwed up."

"Could be," Jack said. "I'll take a photo, even though it probably won't show up."

"If this was a screwup, it could be important to keep it quiet," Lou said.

"How come?"

"If it is an organized-crime war, there will be more bodies. I'd want them to all come to the surface."

"Our lips will be sealed," Jack said.

"Hey, can't we move this along?" Vinnie complained. "At this rate, with you two long-winded old farts carrying on, we're going to be here all day."

Jack let his arms go limp at his sides and stared at Vinnie as if shocked. "Are we keeping the super mortuary tech from something more important?" he questioned.

"Yeah, a coffee break."

Jack switched his gaze to Lou and said, "See what I have to put up with around here? The place is going to the dogs." He then reached up, adjusted the overhead microphone, and began dictating the external examination.

LAURIE SLIPPED David Jeffries's file back into its envelope. It included a case worksheet, his partially filled-out death certificate, his inventory of medicolegal case records, two sheets for the autopsy notes, a telephone notice of his death as received by communications, his completed identification sheet, the PA's investigative report, his lab slip for an HIV test, and the slips indicating that the body had been weighed, fingerprinted, photographed, and x-rayed. She had read the material over several times, as she had done with her second assigned case, Juan Rodriguez, but it was Jeffries she was more interested in.

Feeling appropriately prepared, she pushed back from her desk and headed toward the back elevator. Fifteen minutes earlier, she'd called down to the mortuary office and had had the good fortune to get Marvin Fletcher. She was pleased and recognized his voice instantly, as he was her favorite mortuary tech. He was efficient, intelligent, experienced, eager, and always in a good mood. Laurie had an aversion for those techs who were moody, such as Miguel Sanchez, or those who always seemed to be moving at half-speed, such as Sal D'Ambrosio. She also was not fond of the sarcastic, black-humor repartee in which some of the other techs indulged. When she briefly described David Jeffries's case, warning that it involved an infection and asking for the body to be put up for an autopsy, Marvin's response had been simply: "No problem. Give me fifteen minutes, and it's a go."