Harvest

by Tess Gerritsen

  “Gee, I don’t know. This is a pretty old TV . . .”

  Vivian had managed at last to sidle around to where Abby was standing. There was another knock on the door, and a fresh spurt of relatives pushed into the room, with more cries of “He looks so good!” “Doesn’t he look good?” Through the crowd of O’Days, Abby caught a fleeting glimpse of Josh. He was looking their way. He gave them a helpless smile, a wave.

  Quietly Abby and Vivian left the room. They stood in the hallway, listening to the voices beyond the door. And Vivian said, “So, Abby. To the question of Was it worth it?, that’s your answer.”

  * * *

  At the nurses’ station, they asked to speak to Dr. Ivan Tarasoff. The ward clerk suggested they look in the surgeons’ lounge. That’s exactly where Abby and Vivian found him, sipping coffee and scribbling in his charts. With his drooping glasses and tweed jacket, Dr. Tarasoff looked more like some puttering English gentleman than the renowned cardiac surgeon.

  “We just saw Josh,” said Vivian.

  Tarasoff looked up from his coffee-splattered notes. “And what do you think, Dr. Chao?”

  “I think you do good work. The kid looks fantastic.”

  “He has a little postcode amnesia. Otherwise, he’s bounced back the way kids always do. He’ll be out of here in a week. If the nurses don’t kick him out sooner.” Tarasoff closed the chart and looked at Vivian. His smile faded. “I have a very big bone to pick with you, Doctor.”

  “Me?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. That other transplant patient at Bayside. When you shipped us the boy, you didn’t tell me the whole story. Then I find out the heart was already assigned.”

  “It wasn’t. There was a directed-donation consent.”

  “Obtained through a certain amount of subterfuge.” He frowned over his glasses at Abby. “Your administrator, Mr. Parr, told me all the details. So did Mr. Voss’s attorney.”

  Vivian and Abby glanced at each other.

  “His attorney?” said Vivian.

  “That’s right.” Tarasoff’s gaze shifted back to Vivian. “Were you trying to get me sued?”

  “I was trying to save the boy.”

  “You withheld information.”

  “And now he’s alive and well.”

  “I’m only going to say it once. Don’t ever do anything like this again.”

  Vivian seemed about to reply, but then thought better of it. Instead she gave a solemn nod. It was her deferential Asian act, eyes downcast, head dipping in a faint bow.

  Tarasoff didn’t buy it. He regarded her with a look of mild vexation. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. Turning back to his charts, he said: “I should have expelled you from Harvard. When I had the chance.”

  * * *

  “Ready about. Hard a lee!” Mark yelled, and shoved the tiller.

  The bow of Gimme Shelter turned into the wind, sails crackling, ropes lashing the deck. Raj Mohandas scurried across to the starboard winch and began cranking the jib sheet. With a loud whap, the sail filled, and Gimme Shelter heeled to starboard, sending off a clatter of soft drink cans in the cabin below.

  “Upwind rail, Abby!” Mark yelled. “Get to the upwind rail!”

  Abby scrambled across the deck to the port side, where she clung to the lifeline and offered up another fervent vow of never again. What was it about men and their boats? she wondered. What was it about the sea that made them yell?

  They were all yelling, all four of them, Mark and Mohandas and Mohandas’s eighteen-year-old son Hank, and Pete Jaegly, a third-year resident. Yelling about sheets that needed tightening and spinnaker poles and wasted wind puffs. They were yelling about Archer’s boat, Red Eye, which was gaining on them. And, every so often, they would yell at Abby. She actually had a role in this race, a role known politely as ballast. Dead weight. A job that could be performed by sandbags. Abby was a sandbag with legs. They’d yell and she’d run across to the opposite rail, where, with some regularity, she’d throw up. The men weren’t throwing up. They were too busy scampering around in their expensive boat shoes and yelling.

  “Coming up on the mark! One more tack. Ready about!”

  Mohandas and Jaegly resumed their frantic deck dance.

  “Hard a lee!”

  Gimme Shelter turned through the wind and heeled to port. Abby scrambled to the other side. Sails flapped, ropes thrashed. Mohandas cranked the winch, the muscles of his brown arm rippling with each turn of the handle.

  “She’s coming up on us!” Hank called.

  Behind them, Red Eye had gained another half boat length. They could hear Archer yelling at his crew, exhorting them to Come up, come up!

  Gimme Shelter rounded the buoy and started her downwind course. Jaegly struggled with the spinnaker pole. Hank pulled down the jib.

  Abby was throwing up over the side.

  “Shit, he’s right on our tail!” yelled Mark. “Get the fucking spinnaker up! Go, go, go!”

  Jaegly and Hank hoisted the spinnaker. The wind filled it with a thunderous whomp and Gimme Shelter suddenly surged ahead.

  “That’s it, baby!” Mark whooped. “Baby, baby, here we go!”

  “Look,” said Jaegly, pointing aft. “What the hell’s happening?”

  Abby managed to raise her head and look back, toward Archer’s boat.

  Red Eye was no longer in pursuit. It had turned around near the buoy and was now heading back to port.

  “They’ve started their motor,” said Mark.

  “Think they’re conceding defeat?”

  “Archer? Not a chance.”

  “So why’re they going back?”

  “I guess we’d better find out. Get the spinnaker down.” Mark started the engine. “We’re heading back too.”

  Thank you, God! thought Abby.

  Her nausea was already subsiding by the time they motored into the marina. Red Eye was tied up at the dock and her crew was busy folding up sails and coiling ropes.

  “Ahoy Red Eye!” yelled Mark as they glided past. “What’s going on?”

  Archer waved his cellular phone. “Got a call from Marilee! She told us to come in. It’s something serious. She’s waiting for us in the yacht club.”

  “Okay. Meet you at the bar,” said Mark. He looked at his own crew. “Let’s tie up. We’ll have a drink and take her back out again.”

  “You’ll have to do it without your ballast,” said Abby. “I’m jumping ship.”

  Mark glanced at her in surprise. “Already?”

  “Didn’t you see me hanging over the side? I wasn’t admiring the scenery.”

  “Poor Abby! I’ll make it up to you, okay? Promise. Champagne. Flowers. Restaurant of your choice.”

  “Just get me off this goddamn boat.”

  Laughing, he steered toward the dock. “Aye aye, first mate.”

  As Gimme Shelter glided alongside the visitor’s dock, Mohandas and Hank stepped onto the pier and tied fast the bow and stern lines. Abby was off the boat in a flash. Even the dock seemed to be swaying.

  “Just leave her rigged,” said Mark. “Until we find out what’s up with Archer.”

  “He’s probably got the party started already,” said Mohandas.

  Oh Lord, Abby thought as she and Mark walked up the pier, his arm slung possessively around her shoulder. More boat talk coming up. Tanned men standing around with their gin and tonics and their polo shirts and their booming laughter.

  They went inside the club, stepping from sunlight into shadow. The first thing she noticed was the silence. She saw Marilee standing at the bar with a drink in her hand. Saw Archer sitting by himself at a table, no drink, just a paper coaster in front of him. Red Eye’s crew was gathered around the bar, no one moving, no one saying a thing. The only sound in the room was the clatter of ice cubes in Marilee’s glass as she lifted the drink to her lips, took a sip, and set it back down again on the counter.

  Mark said, “Is something wrong?”

  Marilee looked up and blinked, a
s if noticing Mark for the first time. Then she looked back down at the counter. At her drink.

  “They found Aaron,” she said.

  It was the grinding of the Stryker bone saw that usually did it; that or the smell. This one smelled pretty bad.

  Homicide Detective Bernard Katzka glanced across the autopsy table and saw that the stench had gotten to Lundquist. His younger partner was turned partially away from the table, gloved hand cupped over his nose and mouth, his movie-star good looks twisted into a squint of nausea. Lundquist had not yet developed the stomach for autopsies; most cops never did. While the cutting open of dead bodies was not Katzka’s favorite spectator sport, over the years he had trained himself to view the procedure as an intellectual exercise, to focus not on the humanity of the victim but on the purely organic nature of death. He had seen bodies cooked in fires, bodies scraped off the pavement after twenty-story free falls, bodies shot or stabbed or both, bodies gnawed by rodents. Except for the children, which always upset him, one body was like any other on the table, a specimen stripped, examined, and cataloged. To view them any other way was to invite nightmares.

  Bernard Katzka was forty-four years old and a widower. Three years ago, he had watched his wife die of cancer. Katzka had already lived his worst nightmare.

  He focused impassively on the body now being autopsied. The corpse was a fifty-four-year-old white male, married with two college-aged children, a cardiologist by profession. His identity had been confirmed by fingerprints as well as visual ID by the widow. The experience must have been profoundly upsetting to her. Viewing the corpse of a loved one is difficult enough. When that loved one has been hanging by the neck for two days in a warm and unventilated room, the sight would be truly horrifying.

  The widow, he’d been told, had fainted dead away on the morgue floor.

  And no wonder, thought Katzka, looking down at the corpse of Aaron Levi. The face was a bloodless white; its arterial supply had been cut off by the pressure of the leather belt looped around the neck. The protruding tongue was a scaly black, its mucous surface dried out by two days’ exposure to air. The eyelids were only partially closed. The slitted openings revealed scleral hemorrhages that had turned the whites of the eyes a frightening blood-red. Below the neck, where the belt had imprinted its ligature mark, the skin showed the classic pattern of dependent pooling, a bruiselike discoloration of the lower legs and arms as well as pinpoint hemorrhages, called Tardieu spots, where vessels had ruptured. All of this was consistent with death by hanging. The only visible injury, aside from the ligature marks around the neck, was a coin-shaped bruise on the left shoulder.

  Dr. Rowbotham and his assistant, both gowned, gloved, and wearing protective goggles, completed the thoraco-abdominal incision. It was Y-shaped with two diagonal incisions starting at the shoulders and joining at the lower end of the sternum, then a vertical slice down the abdomen to the pubic bone. Rowbotham had served thirty-two years with the ME’s office, and very little seemed to surprise or excite him. If anything, he looked slightly bored as he cut into the body. He was dictating in his usual monotone as his foot clicked on and off the recording pedal. Now he lifted off the triangular shield of rib and breastbone and exposed the pleural cavity.

  “Take a look, Slug,” he said to Katzka. The nickname had nothing to do with Katzka’s appearance, which was average in every way. Rather, it was a reflection of Katzka’s unflappable nature. Among his fellow cops, the running joke was that if you shot Bernard Katzka on a Monday, he might react by Friday. But only if he was pissed.

  Katzka leaned forward to peer inside the chest cavity, his expression every bit as flat as Rowbotham’s. “I don’t see anything unusual.”

  “Exactly. Maybe a little pleural congestion. Probably due to capillary leakage from hypoxia. But it’s all consistent with asphyxiation.”

  “So I guess we’re out of here, huh?” said Lundquist. Already he was sidling away from the table, away from the smell, impatient to get on to other things. He was like all the other young bucks, eager to cut to the chase. Any chase. Suicide by hanging was not something he wanted to waste his time on.

  Katzka did not move from the table.

  “We really need to watch the rest of this, Slug?” asked Lundquist.

  “They’re just starting.”

  “It’s a suicide.”

  “This one feels different to me.”

  “The findings are classic. You just heard it.”

  “He got out of bed in the middle of the night. He got up, got dressed, and climbed in his car. Think about it. Getting out of your nice warm bed to go hang yourself on the top floor of a hospital.”

  Lundquist glanced at the body, then looked away again.

  By now Rowbotham and his assistant had severed the trachea and the great vessels and were removing the heart and lungs in one floppy bundle. Rowbotham dropped them onto a hanging scale. The steel cradle bounced a few times, squeaking with the weight of the organs.

  “It’s your only chance to view it,” said Rowbotham, his scalpel now at work on the spleen. “We finish up here, and it goes straight to burial. Family request.”

  “Any particular reason?” asked Lundquist.

  “Jewish. You know, quick interment. All the organs have to be returned to the body.” Rowbotham dropped the spleen onto the scale and watched as the indicator needle quivered, then came to a rest.

  Lundquist yanked off his autopsy gown, revealing shoulders bulky with muscle. It was all those hours in the gym, pumping and sweating. He had restless energy and he was showing it now. Always on to bigger and better things, that was Lundquist. Katzka still had to work on him, and the lesson today ought to be the fallibility of first impressions—not an easy thing to get across to a young cop who had all that confidence, all those good looks. That and a full head of hair.

  Rowbotham continued with the disembowelment. He cut free the intestines, pulling out what seemed like endless loops of bowel. The liver, pancreas, and stomach were removed in a single mass. Finally, the kidneys and bladder were dissected out and dropped onto that squeaky scale. Another weight was called out, recorded. A few more mutterings into the tape recorder. What was left was a gaping cavity.

  Now Rowbotham circled around to the corpse’s head. He made an incision behind one ear and cut straight across the back of the scalp. He peeled the scalp forward in one flap, doubling it over the face. Then he peeled the other flap back over the neck, exposing the base of the skull. He picked up the oscillating saw. His expression twisted into a grimace as the bone dust began to fly. No one was talking at this point. The saw was too noisy, and the procedure had turned sickening. Cutting into a chest and abdomen, though grotesque, was somehow impersonal. Like butchering a cow. But peeling a man’s scalp over his face was mutilating the most human, the most personal aspect of a corpse.

  Lundquist, looking a little green, suddenly sat down in a chair by the sink and dropped his head in his hands. Many a cop had made use of that particular chair.

  Rowbotham put down the saw and removed the skull cap. Now he freed up the brain for removal. He cut the optic nerves and severed the blood vessels and spinal cord. Then, gingerly, he lifted the brain out in one quivering mass. “Nothing unusual,” he said, and slid it into a pail of formalin.

  “Now we get down to the nitty-gritty. The neck.”

  Everything that had come before this was merely preliminary to this stage. The removal of viscera and brain had allowed drainage of fluids out the cranial and chest cavities. The neck dissection could proceed with a minimum of obscuring blood and fluids.

  The belt ligature had been removed from the neck early in the autopsy. Rowbotham now examined the furrow left behind on the skin.

  “Your classic inverted V shape,” he noted aloud. “See here, Slug, you’ve got parallel ligature marks which match the edges of the belt. And at the back here, you see this?”

  “Looks like a mark from the buckle.”

  “Right. No surprises so far.”
Rowbotham picked up his scalpel and began the neck dissection.

  By now Lundquist had recovered and was back at the table, looking a little humble. Nausea, thought Katzka, was so satisfyingly democratic. It brought down even muscle-bound cops with full heads of hair.

  Rowbotham’s blade had already sliced through the skin of the anterior neck. He cut deeper, exposing the pearly white superior horns of the thyroid cartilage.

  “No fractures. You’ve got some hemorrhage over here, in the strap muscles. But the thyroid cartilage and hyoid bone both seem intact.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Not a thing. Hanging doesn’t necessarily cause much internal neck damage. Death results purely from interruption of the blood supply to the brain. All that’s needed is compression of the carotid arteries. It’s a relatively painless way to kill yourself.”

  “You seem pretty sure it’s suicide.”

  “The only other possibility is accidental. Autoerotic asphyxiation. But you say there was no evidence of that.”

  Lundquist said, “His cock was still zipped up. Didn’t look like he’d been jerking off.”

  “So we’re talking suicide. Homicidal hanging is almost unheard of. If someone was strangled first, you’d see a different ligature pattern. Not this inverted V. And forcing a man’s head in a noose, well, that would almost certainly leave other injuries. He’d fight back.”

  “There’s that bruise on the upper arm.”

  Rowbotham shrugged. “He could have hurt himself in any number of ways.”

  “What if he was drugged and unconscious before he was hanged?”

  “We’ll do a tox screen, Slug, just to make you happy.”

  Lundquist cut in with a laugh, “And we do have to keep Slug happy.” He moved away from the table. “It’s four o’clock. You coming, Slug?”

  “I’d like to see the rest of the neck dissection.”

  “Whatever turns you on. I say we just call it a suicide and leave it.”

  “I would. Except for the lights.”

  “What lights?” said Rowbotham, his eyes finally registering interest behind the protective goggles.

  “Slug’s hung up on the lights in that room,” said Lundquist.