by Radclyffe
“Do we use the same kit every day?” Jay asked.
“I prefer to keep my own field kit and restock as needed.” Olivia handed one to Jay. “You can either pick up a new kit when you’re on call or keep one and restock as needed. I advise you to check the contents before going out if you’re not stocking yourself.”
“And restocks?”
“Right here.” She pointed to the shelves. All the bins had coded locks. “You punch in your code for each item when you restock so we can keep track of inventory and, obviously, what each individual is using.” She handed Jay a clipboard. “You can sign right here for the kit. I’ll go over its contents with you when we have a chance.”
“All right, thanks.”
“We’ll take my car, it’s out back.”
“I haven’t felt quite so green since my first few days of medical school,” Jay muttered, keeping pace with Olivia despite the faint protest in her knee.
“I’m sure you’ll feel more comfortable after a few days.”
“I’m a pretty quick study,” Jay said.
Olivia did not reply.
*
“I’m over here,” Olivia said, leading the way across the gated lot behind the empty building.
Jay scanned the vehicles, looking for some kind of coroner’s wagon or van. When Olivia keyed the doors on a battered gray Chevy Tahoe that looked like it might have been new when Clinton was president, she said, “You drive your personal vehicle?”
“I like having all the gear I need accessible.” Olivia slid behind the wheel. “I know I’ll have what I need if I transport it myself.”
Jay hastened to climb in as Olivia started the engine. Glancing over her shoulder, she took in neat stacks of equipment cases and wrapped packs of coveralls. “Is that a metal detector back there?”
“Mmm—similar. It’s a sonar of sorts—detects uneven density in the ground.”
“Like buried bodies.”
“Yes.”
Jay tried to picture Olivia marking off a grid, searching for buried bodies. Yeah, she could, absolutely. Olivia was no desk jockey—she looked capable of any kind of fieldwork, looked like she was the kind of chief to get her hands dirty. That suited Jay just fine—she wanted to learn from a hands-on expert. “So what do the MLIs do, exactly?”
“Much the same things that the police CSIs will do, but from a slightly different viewpoint.” She pulled the big rig out into traffic, continuing as she adroitly maneuvered between the slower-moving vehicles headed into Center City. “Photograph the body, preserve evidence in the immediate vicinity of the body, note environmental temperatures, disturbances in the physical terrain, and any other data that may impact our investigation.”
“And what do we do?”
Olivia cast her a quick glance. “You’re going to be my scribe.”
“Is that an ME term for scut monkey?”
Olivia smiled, almost laughed. Jay felt a thrill of accomplishment. If she worked at it, she might actually discover some way to provoke another one of those full-blown smiles. Right then, she decided that was going to become her real goal if she stuck with this crazy idea of training to be a pathologist.
“No,” Olivia said, “it’s a learning tool. And while in this situation not entirely critical, it will be when we’re dealing with a mass casualty situation, for example. It’s impossible for an examiner to stop and record everything, and it’s essential to have every observation noted.”
“Just how am I supposed to do this?”
“I have a tablet with the templates you need, and if we find something beyond routine…well then, you’ll scribble.”
Jay laughed. “I sort of like the term scribbler better than scribe. Sounds more contemporary.”
“For today, we’ll double-record and then go over everything when we get back.” Olivia pulled onto the expressway to circle around downtown Philadelphia to the broad boulevard that ran along the river, separating the city from New Jersey across the way. “Compare notes and impressions.”
“Sure,” Jay said, not relishing being relegated to the position of student again. She’d climbed the Mount Everest of surgical hierarchy without much trouble, but somehow, this mountain range looked a lot more formidable. She might as well get rid of the elephant hulking on the console between them. “I guess my turning up again was unexpected.”
“This entire morning has been unexpected,” Olivia said dryly.
“How many other fellows are you taking this year?”
“Ordinarily, we take three. I’m not sure what we’ll do now, but the conventional two-year fellowship starts in the summer.”
“So I’m an add-on.”
“That remains to be seen.”
Jay began to see the problem with Greenly’s abrupt edict to bring her into the program under less-than-ordinary terms. “So I might be taking someone else’s place?”
“As I said—”
“No wonder you’re not happy.”
“I’m neither happy nor unhappy,” Olivia said. “It wasn’t my decision to make.”
“But you’re stuck with me.”
“That’s not how I think of it,” Olivia said.
Jay shifted, stretching out her knee, subtly hoping to ease the cramp in her calf. “How do you look at it, then?”
Olivia shook her head. “Dr. Greenly has accepted you on somewhat unusual terms, but you’re here now. As long as you are here to work and to learn, I’m going to do my damnedest to make sure you do both.”
Jay grinned. “I can get behind that.”
Olivia shot her another look, and this time there was a hint of fire in her eyes that rocketed a bolt straight to the center of Jay’s chest. She’d been wrong in her initial assessment. There was nothing icy about Olivia Price. She was a banked fire, smoldering and ready to flare, but only on her own terms. A twist of interest coiled in Jay’s belly, a feeling she hadn’t experienced in a long, long time. “Why did you choose forensic pathology?”
“It suits me.” Olivia looked back to the road and didn’t answer.
So there was the barrier—the personal. Intrigued, Jay wanted to probe but decided to wait until she understood the ground a little better. If she made the wrong move one time, she’d never get anther chance with Olivia.
“This looks like it,” Olivia said, pulling over to the curb behind a cluster of police cruisers with light bars flashing and a couple of unmarkeds with blue dashboard beacons. The empty vehicles blocked most of the street in front of a ramshackle row of deserted buildings. A red and white van pulled behind them as they were getting out of Olivia’s SUV. A man and a woman, both wearing blue nylon windbreakers with Medical Examiner stenciled in yellow block letters on the back, jumped down and hurried over to them as Olivia opened the rear of her Tahoe.
“Hi, Doc,” the curly-haired blond female said.
The African American man who had been driving nodded to Olivia and looked at Jay’s cane quizzically.
“Darrell, Bobbi, this is Dr. Reynolds.” Olivia passed Jay a plastic pack containing a white Tyvek coverall. “She’s a new fellow who will be working with us.”
The techs both said hello, and the group headed down the cracked and uneven sidewalk toward the building with the crime-scene tape blocking it off from the street. Jay dodged piles of trash, dog litter, and foul-smelling puddles, doing her damnedest to keep her pant legs from getting soaked in biohazardous swamp water.
A bored-looking uniformed police officer stood on the sidewalk in front of a brick building with broken-out windows, a doorless entryway above a crumbling set of concrete stairs, and the desperate look of a dying time written all over its façade. The officer seemed to perk up as they approached.
Olivia held out her ID. “Dr. Olivia Price, medical examiner’s office.”
“Hey, Doc. Maybe now we’ll be able to wrap this up.” He noted something on a clipboard as Olivia passed.
The blond MLI paused and took out a tablet. “You first on scene?”
“Yeah.” He winced. “My lucky day, all right.”
She stayed behind talking with him as the other MLI went on ahead. Olivia waited at the top of the crumbling steps for Jay to climb them.
Following Olivia, Jay stepped into a dark, dank hallway and uncharted territory. The only thing she knew with certainty was that Olivia Price held her future in her hands.
Chapter Five
Sandy paced in the hallway beyond the yellow plastic tape the CSU guys had strung to keep lookie-loos from further trashing the scene. The landlord, the EMTs, and the first officer on scene had already tracked muddy water across the stained, torn linoleum that covered the floor of what was once the parlor of an elegant town house. A hundred freaking years and a different world ago. Now the big room with the blown-out windows was an empty shell, everything of value, like the lifestyle of those who’d inhabited the house so long ago, stripped away. The ornate woodwork framing ceilings, doors, and windows had been pulled down by the homeless to fuel a barrel fire in some alleyway, the cast-iron radiators carted away for the scrap, and the hammered tin torn from the ceilings. She’d seen a hundred rooms just like it, even slept in a few, but the one thing she’d never done was stick a needle in her arm for a few hours of forgetfulness like those who inhabited this place now.
Not that she’d been any smarter or better than the girl on the floor—from what she could see, the DB wasn’t much older than late teens—she’d just refused to surrender. As long as she could think, she could fight. It had helped that Frye had taken an interest in her, even if the cop had been pumping her for information. Frye fed her, paid her, and kept an eye out for her long before Dell and the others had come along. Long before she’d traded in her miniskirts and halter tops for these ugly-ass cop clothes.
She had Frye to thank, and her own stubbornness, for ending up different than the girl on the floor in this cold, forgotten wasteland.
“You’re gonna wear out the floor, partner,” Oz said as he leaned against the wall scanning his phone.
“I hate waiting.”
“Part of the job.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” She frowned. “Palmetti and Chu sure lit out like their pants were on fire.”
Oz snorted. “That’s ’cause we took the bait. We don’t even know if we got a crime scene yet.”
“What, you think she lay down in there for a nap and died in her sleep?”
“If she OD’d and the MEs call it accidental, we got nothing to investigate.”
“Unless we got a new poison on the streets.”
Oz’s eyes darkened. “Yeah. But one case doesn’t mean anything.”
One case might just be the first case. Sandy went back to pacing.
*
From what Jay could see of the first floor, the place was unoccupied. At least by conventional tenants. A dingy passageway ran straight to the back of the building. Doors hung askew or were entirely absent, and piles of trash billowed out from the rooms on either side of the hall. A bit of daylight filtered through a small grimy window at the top of the back entrance. What was left of the staircase hugged the wall, the banister missing sections and leaning dangerously out into the air. They were apparently going up, as voices and footsteps echoed above them. Olivia, already on the stairs, turned on a flashlight and passed it back to her.
“Watch where you’re stepping,” Olivia said. “Some of these treads are about to disintegrate, and the place is probably full of needles.”
“Right,” Jay muttered, alternating her light between the stairs beneath her feet and the landing above. She was careful not to brush her shoulder against the wall. Whatever was growing there, she didn’t want it on her jacket or anywhere near any part of her. She started to itch just thinking about it. The OR was as sterile an environment as possible outside a research lab. She’d somehow ended up in the mirror image of that world, where the living were dead, order gave way to chaos, and she was no longer a king but a peasant. She swiped at a cobweb that laced her cheek and swore.
As if reading her thoughts, Olivia said, “When we get back, I’ll show you where the showers are.”
“Thanks.” Jay was pretty sure she heard Olivia laugh again, and spared a moment to be sorry she hadn’t witnessed it before concentrating on avoiding some level 4 biohazard. “Where do I get one of these flashlights?”
“There’s one in your kit,” Olivia said.
“Right.” Of course, that was tucked under her arm, and since she hadn’t had a chance to go through it, she had no idea what goodies might be secreted away there. What a way to start her new job. This reminded her of the first day of her internship, when she’d shown up at six thirty a.m., sparkling clean in her white coat, stethoscope in one pocket and a manual of emergency care in the other one, and her chief resident had said, “Welcome aboard, here’s your list of patients, and remember, to call for help is a sign of weakness. See you tomorrow.”
And she’d been left with an intensive care unit full of critically ill patients and another twenty-five post-ops on the floor, first call and green as spring grass. She’d survived that, so she’d damn well survive this too. If she didn’t die of disgust.
Olivia waited for her on the landing.
“Darrell will photograph the scene before we do anything else. Unfortunately, any number of people have probably already trekked through it.”
“I thought everyone was supposed to protect the integrity of the scene,” Jay said, using the terminology that everyone seemed familiar with from watching television.
“Well, that’s the theory, and the protocol is supposed to prevent disruption of the scene, but usually the way things happen, someone calls in to report the body to 9-1-1, who are then obligated to call emergency services to determine that, in fact, the individual in question is really dead. If they should be alive still, they’d need emergency treatment and transport to hospital. So once the EMTs assess the victim to assure the individual is indeed dead—which almost always involves them touching if not actually moving the body—they’ll notify the police, who may or may not examine the scene before contacting us. They will also alert the Crime Scene Unit if a crime is suspected, and their control of the scene supersedes ours. Our calls go through communications to our investigators, who get as much information as they can to make a determination as to whether we need an on-scene investigation or can transport.” Olivia shrugged. “Multiple levels in the chain of command.”
“Lots of opportunity for people to tramp around, you mean.”
Ever cautious, Olivia only smiled, but even in the dim light cast by a couple of bare bulbs dangling from the ceiling, her eyes sparkled. Damn. She was beautiful. And Jay needed to stomp on that little bit of interest right now. Hospital romances were legion, and she’d indulged in a few herself. Hell. Everyone was adult, often well past thirty, and even those still in training were licensed professionals and hardly impressionable students. But she was in unfamiliar terrain with no idea what the hell she was doing, and the last thing she needed was to have a little fling and then, when it was over, have to maneuver the awkwardness or worse, by seeing the ex every damn day. Assuming, of course, Olivia had an interest. Big assumption there. “So, after the photographs?”
Olivia gave her a curious glance, almost as if she knew Jay had just taken a mental detour. “Then you put your gloves on—and don’t touch anything before you do have them on.”
“I’m good with that.” Jay hefted the pack. “When can I put this on?”
Olivia laughed. Jay’s resolution not to be affected by her flew out the window. She swallowed around the fist in the throat. Yeah, Olivia was a heart-stopper.
“Save it until we actually cross the perimeter to the scene,” Olivia said. “Those suits are hot.”
“To say nothing of ugly,” Jay muttered. “So what’s first?”
“Then we’ll start at the outer perimeter of the room and work our way around, slowly circling in until we reach the body.”
“What
about…determining time of death and all that.”
“That’s important,” Olivia said, “and much less precise than popular fiction would have people think. She’s already dead, and another few minutes won’t make any difference in our determination. Missing something else in there might make all the difference if this turns out to be homicide.”
“Right.”
A young blonde in a navy polo shirt, dark pants, a kick-ass leather jacket, and even more kick-ass three-inch, square-heeled boots came toward them with her gaze nailed to Olivia.
“Are you the ME?” the blonde asked.
“That’s right, Olivia Price, assistant chief medical examiner.” Olivia held out her hand and the blonde shook it.
“I’m Sandy Sullivan, Narcotics Enforcement Unit. CSU is just finishing up in there. Can we get a look at the body now?”
“It will be a while yet,” Olivia said. “Darrell, get started on the photos as soon as CSU clears out.”
“Got it,” Darrell rumbled. He pulled on his Tyvek coveralls, shoe covers, and hat.
“What do we know about her?” Olivia asked Sandy.
“Not much,” Sandy said. “We might be looking at a designer drug new to the area. CSU bagged a couple of envelopes that we’ll be testing, but you know how long that takes. Tox on the vic will be key.”
“Let’s ascertain she’s an overdose first,” Olivia said. “Once we’ve finished here, I’ll need you to fill me in on this drug.”
“No problem. I was planning to hang around until you took her.”
“Good.”
Olivia moved off and Jay kept pace.
“The first thing you need to learn, and remind yourself of frequently,” Olivia said quietly, “is not to let the expectations of the other professionals color your observations or your judgments. Your job is not to solve crimes. Your responsibility is determining the cause and manner of death.”
They stopped in the doorway and Jay watched as Darrell moved around the outer edges of the room with the grace of a dancer, despite his heavy frame. He adroitly stepped over the piles of trash and remnants of old mattresses and other things Jay couldn’t identify, photographing the body and the contents of the room from multiple angles.