by Susan Dunlap
The light through his bedroom window had been filtered by a maple tree then. He could still see the lines of yellow and gray as they cut across … He shook his head sharply. This was not the time to think of that.
He went to the cabinet and extricated the Delaney file. After twelve years she calls him out of the blue, and what does she want? The Delaney file. He laughed soundlessly. Well, the other guys in that internship class wouldn’t be surprised, would they?
But what could she want to know about Delaney, the drowning? He pulled the coast guard report and scanned it. Thirty-foot waves the day Delaney’s boat must have capsized. Perfect weather to drown in. He had the cause of death, and the contributing factor. No question on this one.
No question—and yet he’d already had two other calls on Delaney. One from a Dwyer Cummings from Coastal Oil Group asked for the Delaney autopsy protocol. Who was this Cummings, and why did he want to know about Delaney? And Jessica Leporek. He’d heard of her, naturally. Woman running the local campaign for that initiative to impede oil drilling. She didn’t ask for the autopsy report, just left a request to call her back re: Delaney. No, not a request; a demand that implied she was a powerful woman, or would be if the initiative passed—which seemed pretty doubtful from what Rosten had read. The coroner’s office got calls about autopsies all the time, but from relatives or the press, not people like these. They’d made him uneasy enough to take a second look at Delaney.
He could, of course, not let Kiernan in. It was tempting. Who the hell was she to say he owed her? So he hadn’t come to her rescue when she got herself fired from the coroner’s office up north, but that was years ago. And she of all people should not have missed a single indicator in a single autopsy. All right, so he was the only pathologist in the area who’d said that. None of them knew her like he did. She hadn’t changed their lives.
At eight o’clock he could leave her standing at the back door. But he knew he wasn’t going to.
11
KIERNAN COULD HAVE TAKEN the freeway, but this late in the afternoon the coast road was just as fast and much more appealing. The Jeep was a St. Bernard, a savior in mud or blizzard, but the Triumph—she sighed, yearning for her sleek black convertible—the Triumph was a greyhound. She knew she was driving the Jeep too fast. It’s not a game, Tchernak had said before finally refusing to ride with her on roads like this. But for her it was—a dumb game, a lethal one. And the rush she got screeching out of a hairpin curve next to a two-hundred-foot drop was right up there with sex.
Past Monterey the road flattened. She passed Ano Nuevo, where the elephant seals came to mate, and headed on into miles of fog-laden dunes, cold, secret places washed by the sounds of eternity. The scenery reminded her of the Great Highway farther north, where Robin Matucci had left Garrett Brant for dead.
Why? Kiernan asked herself again. Take the evidence at face value: Matucci had struck Garrett with her car, stopped, got out, looked down at him, and then simply walked away. But why even stop? Remorse? To see if she could help? Apparently not. Why leave him to die? Panic? Possibly. And what about Delaney? Did she kill him, or was that Maureen’s wishful thinking? After she’d had a look at the body at the morgue, Kiernan thought, she’d have a better idea.
Tendrils of fog floated across the two-lane road. This part of Highway 1 was empty except for the illegally parked campers pulled off in beach lots. She turned on the radio, slowly twisting the dial, ear cocked for the moan of guitar strings. The words “Proposition Thirty-Seven” stopped her hand. The offshore drilling initiative.
A male voice was saying: “… debate between Dwyer Cummings of the Energy Producers’ Group and Jessica Leporek, Northern California Director of the Initiative Campaign. Good evening. Our first question will deal with the issue of offshore drilling itself. What’s at stake here? Mr. Cummings?”
“Lots, Barry.” Cummings’s voice held traces of a southern accent. “The D.O.L, that’s the Department of the Interior for those of you who aren’t on a nickname basis with these guys, well, they estimate that there’s one point three billion barrels of oil out there on the Outer Continental Shelf. We need that supply for virtually everything from driving our cars to heating our houses, cooking our food, and warming our bathwater. Our—”
“Let me interject here,” a woman, presumably Jessica Leporek, insisted, “that one point three billion barrels is merely seventy-seven days’ worth of oil. Are we willing to endanger our beaches for less than a three-months’ supply!”
Cummings let a moment pass before saying, “Well, Jessica, that just shows you how critical each drilling site is. But to get back to my point: we in the oil industry are frequently painted as the bad guys in this. I’ll tell you right now, we hate that. We don’t want oil spilling any more than you do. We go to the beach, we care about the birds and the otters just like everyone else. And, added to that, we have a big investment in that oil. With the cost of gasoline skyrocketing even if we cared nothing about the environment, we still wouldn’t want our supply wasted in a spill.”
“Wanting is one thing, Dwyer, but here’s the record. Spills the size of the one from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska—that’s eleven million gallons—occur every single year. Spills of one million gallons occur every single month. And nobody, Dwyer, neither the coast guard nor the petroleum industry, believe we can clean up more than a few thousand gallons.”
There was another pause. “I’m glad you raised the clean-up efforts. Let me tell you what we are doing. The—”
Kiernan moved the knob. She’d heard all this before. It didn’t matter what they were doing, Tchernak had insisted, because no one could clean up a bad oil spill. “It’d be like having someone dump tons of molasses down your chimney. It fills the whole house. There’d be just enough air space for Ezra to keep breathing,” he’d added quickly. “Now, your problem is to clean it up without letting that molasses get outside the house, where it will wreck something else. You can skim off the liquid, but how are you going to get the hardened gook off the ceiling, the carpets, the mattress? How will you clean your papers, your computer keyboard, and Ezra? All that and keep him from tracking goo back over every spot you’ve already cleaned, getting himself sick in the process? You can’t, of course. That’s the bottom line.”
She glanced across the sand to the breakers, now almost hidden behind the thickening fog. The latest pole listed the initiative as too close to call. She turned the radio knob until she heard guitar music. The moan of the strings moved down her spine. After a while it echoed between her breasts and she thought not about the Spill Initiative, but about Marc Rosten and what a dangerous decision it was to see him again.
Twelve years ago, with him everything had seemed fine, then without warning, it was rubble.
The coast road widened to eight lanes by the outskirts of the city. The dark and the fog billowing in from the Pacific made it feel unnaturally cozy. She pulled over at the top of Upper Market Street and looked down the slope at the lights of downtown San Francisco: ropes of yellow beads glowing against the silky blackness, diamond sparkles as the trolleys switched overhead power lines, blue and salmon neon outlining new high-rises. She loved this view of the city, the promise of freedom.
The morgue was a gray stone building in a low-rent, low-safety area, a place where the elderly and the poor slide into death. The lot behind it was nearly empty. She pressed the bell at the back door and waited.
The night guard was a stranger to her. “I’m Dr. O’Shaughnessy,” she said. “Will you tell Dr. Rosten I’m here?”
The guard raised an eyebrow. “Just a minute.”
Kiernan glanced down at her jeans and black Shaker-knit sweater. Lots of places, she wouldn’t have looked like a doctor, she thought, but in San Francisco—well, she just might be overdressed.
But not for this night. The Pacific wind chilled her neck, ruffled her short hair and made her sorry she’d left her jacket in the Jeep.
It had been in this parking lot that she�
��d first noticed Marc Rosten; he’d been grabbing the lapels of a Mercedes owner who’d stolen “his” parking space, a guy half a foot and fifty pounds bigger than he was. Rain dripped from the ends of his curly hair, his eyes seemed huge and fierce behind his rain-splattered glasses. He’d looked like a madman. Clearly the owner of the Mercedes agreed, as he backed out of the spot and watched Rosten pull his battered Nash Rambler in. Rosten had turned to her, grinned, and said, “We got to keep these rich bastards in their place, right? Or at least until we become rich bastards ourselves.” They’d been in the internship program just two days. Later they decided she was the only other intern who would have shared that opinion. Had he instinctively known that, as he had insisted, or didn’t he care? Marc Rosten had never been without do-or-die opinions, without ebullient enthusiasms, always eager to talk over his cases, to try everything for every patient, to be three places at once. After the Rambler died, also in this parking lot, he rode a ten-speed and made it to the lot faster than she did driving. Hospital administrators hated him, patients adored him, and other interns kept a wary distance away.
Yet in the dark of that turret room on the top floor of his brother’s Victorian house, all the energy had been focused, calm, patient. The thin, fierce lips had been surprisingly soft and giving. And his hands, with their long tapered surgeon’s fingers, stroked so lightly that it nearly drove her out of her skin. They were hands that were wasted on the dead.
That year had been the most exhausting of her life, when thirty-six-hour shifts were the norm, when the two-month rotations moved from O.B.-Gyn to Surgery, to Neurology, to Ophthalmology/Otolaryngology to Pathology. The life-and-death scene on each new ward called for knowledge she didn’t yet have, intuition for which she had no basis, and an alertness so long gone she could barely remember what it felt like. She should have spent every one of her free moments sleeping. But she’d spent them in that turret room with Rosten. Moments so intense that now, twelve years later, if she closed her eyes she could trace his whole body by touch. She could still recall the alkaline smell of his sweat, feel his thick wet curls, see those dark eyes staring down, demanding, celebrating, an inch from her own.
She could see just as clearly the front porch of his house, the pale blue paint merging with the thick fog, as she stood there waiting for him to come down. The door to the lower flat had opened. “Gone,” Marc’s brother had said. “His residency in Boston came through. He left this morning.”
She had blocked out the scene that followed. She could only recall that blue paint and the distant sound of shouting that she realized, now, must have been her own. And she remembered quite clearly the next frantic week before her own residency began, calling every medical school in the East, rage growing with each call. At first she’d expected to get Rosten on the phone and hear his apology. As the week progressed, she’d readied herself to fly East and demand an explanation. She had never reached him at all.
That was twelve years ago.
The door to the Bryant Street building opened. She realized she hadn’t heard the footsteps coming toward her. She hurried through into the wood-paneled lobby, then stopped, and looked at him.
Marc Rosten was still as magnetic as ever. The streaks of gray merely made his hair seem blacker. There were lines now around his eyes and mouth, but they lent a new and appealing steadiness to his features. He hadn’t changed, and yet was entirely different.
“You remember where the morgue is?” he said, turning and moving quickly down the hall. His eyes still had that burning intensity. For the first moments of any meeting they had always focused exclusively on her, “sucking you into me” he had said. Now he didn’t look at her directly. He spoke with a tight control that was the antithesis of the Rosten who had flung covers, sheets, and pillows in all directions as he made love.
The hallway was icy, the hum of the air-movement system was louder than the refrigerators would be in the morgue. She followed him into the elevator and rode down in silence. He could have commented that she hadn’t left him much choice when she’d said he owed her, but apparently he wasn’t going to deal with that one. And her first loyalty, she reminded herself, was to the case, not to old grievances.
She stepped out into the basement. The sharp smell of Clorox struck her. The first time she had come into an autopsy room she had expected it to reek of formaldehyde like the anatomy labs in college. She’d been surprised when the dominant smell was ammonia.
This autopsy room was just as she recalled it, a large rectangle with five porcelain tables surrounded by troughs. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find a body on one of the tables, the water running pink in the troughs, and a pathologist speaking into his microphone as he removed the heart for examination or sectioned the liver. The dead don’t choose their hour of death; pathologists don’t choose their hour of call. There had been weeks when the autopsy room was never empty. Now the room was silent and dark, and as Marc turned on the fluorescent lights one after another, they seemed to highlight the anonymity of death. And the immediacy of life. Or perhaps it was Marc himself who did both.
“Number eight,” Rosten snapped, without looking at her or stopping to check the register. He yanked open the metal door with the same angry tug he’d used on the Mercedes owner’s lapels. He hooked the chains around the slab, wheeled the corpse over by the autopsy tables. Then he waited, arms crossed, eyes at half-mast. He wasn’t tapping his foot or looking at his watch; he didn’t have to.
Who are you to be angry at me? Kiernan clenched her teeth to keep from blurting it out. She looked at the body on the slab.
Carlos Delaney was past the aid of Clorox and cold. The time he’d spent in the Pacific had turned his skin a sickly white. She knew that if she were to take his hand, the skin would slough off like a stretched-out rubber glove. But there wasn’t enough skin to come off. The crabs had seen to that. They’d eaten through to the plates of the skull. The ears were almost gone, as was the tissue above them, and the lips and cheeks. There were thick purplish rings around his eyes.
“Not too palatable,” Rosten muttered.
Glancing over, she could see him tightening his shoulders, forcing himself to keep looking at the partially decomposed corpse. After all these years, Marc Rosten still had not come to terms with his profession. “Crabs waste no time,” he said. “Guy falls into the sea and it’s Thanksgiving for them.” He turned away from the body. “Crabs eat us just like we eat them, take the easy parts first—hands, feet, ears, eyes, whatever they can get their choppers into. Us, we can’t be bothered with the hard stuff, the meat under the shell. Not unless we’re hungry enough.”
“Is that part of your opening remarks to new students?” she asked, fighting to keep her voice from betraying her anger. She would not allow him to condescend. Taking a deep breath, she looked back at Delaney, noting that there was no telltale discoloration that would have been caused by the blood settling in the dead body. “No specifically localized lividity,” she said. “You figure he was batted around in the water for a while after death?”
Rosten nodded abruptly.
“How long was he in the water? Five or six days at least, from the look of him.”
“Five,” he admitted. “The activity of the crabs and bottom feeders tells us he spent about a couple of days down there.”
Kiernan stared at the white skin of Delaney’s midsection. The waist was the most likely spot to find lividity, but there wasn’t any. She looked back at Delaney’s face. “How’d you ID him? Teeth?”
“Couldn’t find a match. Not every sailor or deckhand elects to spend his free time at the dentist’s.”
Another time she might have laughed. Now she simply asked, “So how?”
“The eyes!” There was a fleck of excitement and pride in his voice.
Kiernan nodded, feeling the pull of his enthusiasm, remembering how easy it had been to be caught up in it.
“Damned good thing he had the goggles on. Eyeballs are the first things crab
s go for.”
“Also the first thing to decompose. You were lucky.”
Rosten nodded sharply. “They were in reasonably good shape. But, I started to wonder, just why would a deckhand be wearing tinted goggles at night?”
“To keep the spray from the storm out of his eyes?”
“Tinted goggles. Except for the mast light it was pitch black out there.”
“Very odd. What did you find in the eyes?”
“Premortem damage to the foveal cones and the choroid layer of the eye.”
“So the insult to the eyes, or the disease, happened while he was still alive,” Kiernan said, giving up any effort to restrain her excitement. That same rush of the chase they’d shared here before. She pushed the memory away, and tried to call up a picture of the eyeball. It was not an organ usually sectioned in an autopsy. It galled her to have to say, “The sclera covers the outside of the eyeball. Beneath that is the choroid, which is heavily pigmented, right?”
Rosten nodded, the barest hint of a smile curling his lips.
“And internal to that is the retina, and the foveal cones in the retina are sensitive to color and provide visual acuity, right?” she went on.
“Right. So we checked with local ophthalmologists and found one who had seen a man fitting Delaney’s description. He mentioned that Delaney had listed a broken femur on his history form. He recalled Delaney said he’d been treated at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland before. I checked there and matched my femur to their X-ray!” He smiled with satisfaction.
The same smile. The smile that had misled her. This is not a contest, she cautioned herself, this is my only chance to find out about Delaney. “What about cause of death?”
“Asphyxiation,” he said. “Blood chloride levels unequal in both sides of the heart. There was aspirate material in the heart, stomach and microscopic flora in the lungs.” His smile had faded but there was a look of confidence about him, “the witness-stand look” they’d called it in med school: that expression of pleasant forbearance that said to juries, “Rest assured, I am the expert.”