Murphy's Law

by Lisa Marie Rice

  “Sure,” Nick said easily. “I’ve mopped up liters of blood, my own and that of teammates. There’s not much that turns my stomach, believe me.”

  Guzzanti nodded. “It’s hard enough to clean up after the dead, we don’t like to worry about cleaning up after the living. So, now we can—”

  “Wait a minute.” Dante tried to quell the panic he’d felt at Guzzanti’s words. “I’m—we’re here to pick up the results of the autopsy.”

  Guzzanti scratched his crown of gray hair. “Well,” he drawled, “that would be kind of hard to do. Seeing as how the body hasn’t been posted yet.”

  Dante frowned. “Not posted? Why not? What is this? The man should’ve been posted yesterday. Who knows what clues we’re losing?”

  Guzzanti sighed. “You’re not losing anything. The American has been kept in the morgue under stable, chilled conditions. No deterioration has taken place. Trust me.”

  “Why wasn’t the autopsy done before?” Dante could feel his heart racing and a cold sweat filming his torso. His family knew about his weak stomach and gave him some mild grief, but nobody really realized how weak it was. At the thought of witnessing an autopsy his stomach seemed to float up his esophagus.

  In all his years as a cop, he’d managed to adroitly avoid attending autopsies. Loiacono attended them religiously, but Dante couldn’t figure out what a non-doctor could possibly get out of watching the process. He figured the doctor’s report was more than good enough.

  “The autopsy wasn’t done before because we are understaffed and because we had, not one, but two cases of suspected Creutzfeld-Jacob disease.”

  Dante was horrified. “Mad cow disease?” he breathed. “Here? In Siena?” Just the other night he’d had a big, juicy bistecca fiorentina. Maybe encephalopathy prions were even now settling in his brain, eating big holes.

  “That’s right.” Guzzanti nodded grimly. “And I had the Local Health District Administrator, the head of this hospital, the heads of three trade unions, the head of the local farmers’ co-operative, our senator and my wife breathing down my neck as we examined the brains centimeter by centimeter under a microscope. And I mean that literally.”

  Oh, God, Dante thought. “And?”

  “Dementia praecox. Both of them.”

  “Whew.” Dante didn’t even want to think about an outbreak of mad cow disease.

  “And that, gentlemen,” Guzzanti declared, snapping his desk diary closed, “that is why we have one—” He glanced at the form he held in his hand. “—one American professor, presumably stabbed to death, though it is bad form to make pre-post guesses, still awaiting our scrutiny.” He walked over to his office door and opened it. “If you’ll come with me, we can start right away.”

  “Hey.” Nick had perked up. “We’re going to watch an autopsy. Cool.”

  Not cool. Hot. Dante pulled at his shirt collar. “Wait a minute. Won’t—won’t our presence, um, compromise the body? Contaminate the evidence?”

  “Dante.” Nick shot him a look. “The guy’s dead. And we’re not going to spit or jerk off into his corpse—pardon me, doctor—and leave foreign DNA. Our presence can’t hurt anything.” Nick stood, and Dante saw the first signs of excitement Nick had shown all morning. “Right, doc?”

  “Correct.” Guzzanti stood impatiently in the doorway. “So gentlemen, if you’ll follow me, we’ll see to your murdered corpse.” He opened his arms and ushered them out. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m looking forward to this. It’s been much too long since I’ve actually had a case of murder to deal with. Very exciting.”

  Dante’s guts did a slow roll.

  Chapter Twelve

  Everything put together falls apart sooner or later.

  The pathology lab was underground.

  Figured. Fitting for a hellish experience.

  Dante’s namesake had descended to hell, too, only with a different companion. Dante followed Guzzanti and an excited Nick. He battled reluctance and rising gorge.

  Guzzanti and Dante automatically adjusted their pace to Nick’s limp. “So, Niccolò, what are you doing here with your cousin? It’s Dante’s job, but you don’t necessarily have to be here. Watching an autopsy isn’t exactly my idea of the perfect Sienese summer holiday. Particularly during Palio season when there’s so much going on in town.”

  Amen, Dante thought. Nick was silent, so he answered for him. “Nick’s…retired from ice hockey and trying to figure out what to do next. Since he’s here, I thought I’d let him tag along. See if he’d like to become a cop.”

  “Retired, hmm?” Guzzanti cast shrewd eyes at Nick’s limping leg with the brace. “Anterior cruciate? I thought the Americans were so good at sports medicine, athletes just bought themselves new knees.”

  “Not the knee,” Nick said softly. “Secondary concussion.”

  Guzzanti’s lips pursed and his eyes opened wide as he emitted a soundless whistle. “Bad news. Sorry.”

  Nick nodded stiffly and Dante’s heart went out to him.

  They passed the canteen where the hospital staff and the patients were going to have pasta al pesto for lunch, to judge by the smell.

  The obitorio, the morgue, was right next door. They walked past a wall of steel lockers with pullout handles. Dante couldn’t figure out what they were.

  And then he could, and swallowed.

  Through another door was a corridor, then a room with a big white sign above it. Anatomia Patologica.

  Guzzanti held the door open for them, and Dante walked into a scene as hellacious as anything the other Dante had ever seen in his descent to the Inferno.

  The autopsy room was large with a heavy odor of dead meat and pesto overlaid by formalin and alcohol. Four large, rectangular stainless steel tables were in the four corners of the room. Three bodies in varying stages of butchery were lying on the slabs as gowned humans wearing face shields and wielding what looked like carpentry tools bent over them. It was impossible to detect the sex of anyone in the room, living or dead.

  “Carlo!” Guzzanti called out. “What the hell is going on here?”

  An amorphous body lifted its face shield. “A whole family found dead in San Rocco. Suspected asphyxiation.” The shield banged back down again like a space warrior’s.

  “Cristo. The insurance company is going to be all over us,” Guzzanti grumbled.

  The door swung open again and two people in white lab coats walked in—a tiny woman with plain, sharp, serious features and huge Coke-bottle glasses dwarfing her face, and a large, broad-shouldered, thick-necked man almost as large as Nick.

  “Right then,” Guzzanti said briskly. “Let’s get started. Sergio?”

  A glum, middle-aged man detached himself from the shadows at the far end of the big room. He slouched, his hands deep in the pockets of his stained lab coat. Dante didn’t even want to think about what had caused the stains.

  “Yeah?” The man’s voice was sullen, body language depressed.

  “You can bring him in now, Sergio.”

  The man grunted and turned. Guzzanti smiled apologetically. “Our diener, Sergio.”

  “Your diener seems to have an attitude problem,” Nick said, after the man had left the room.

  Guzzanti sighed. “He’s from the Wave.”

  “Ah,” Nick and Dante said together. The Onda, the Wave contrada, wasn’t running this year. Not running in the Palio, coupled with working with dead people for a living, would make anyone depressed.

  Dante shuddered. He couldn’t imagine a worse job than dealing with dead people.

  The door banged open, pulling Dante out of his thoughts. A stretcher with a dead body—presumably his dead victim, so he tried to straighten up and look interested instead of nauseated—rolled in, pushed by the diener, whose trip to the morgue had made him surlier than ever.

  The back wheels caught in the jamb and Sergio rattled the stretcher angrily. One of the wheels had locked in a sideways position and he couldn’t straighten it. The diener pushed and pul
led, cursing a blue streak.

  Finally, with a rusty creak, the wheel turned around and the stretcher jumped into the room with a bang. The body shifted and the head hung limply over the edge. Sergio reached out to deposit the head back on the stretcher with about as much emotion as a housewife putting a cantaloupe back on the greengrocer’s shelf after having sniffed it.

  “Ah, Sergio,” Guzzanti said genially. “Over here, please.”

  The diener wheeled the stretcher sharply right. It turned with a creak, pushed by Sergio’s large, broad hands until he had it parked next to the steel table by the window.

  He walked around the stretcher and the table, then reached across with his simian-long arms and tugged the body across. Two sharp yanks and the body had been pulled over to the steel table with as much emotion as a butcher shifting a side of beef.

  Sergio efficiently stripped the body until it lay naked and defenseless on the metal slab, the puncture wound small but clearly visible.

  Ashes to ashes, Dante thought with a shudder. Roland Kane might not have been much of a human being, but he’d still been human and, as such, deserving of pity for the state he was in now. Pity and horror vied in his chest.

  “The block, Sergio,” Guzzanti said.

  The diener placed an arm under the body’s neck and lifted. When the upper body was where sit-ups hurt, he slipped a block of plastic under the back and let the body fall back over the block.

  Sergio looked over with a truculent scowl.

  “That will be all, Sergio,” Guzzanti said and the diener gave a grunt and walked out. The door didn’t slam behind him because it was pneumatically driven, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

  “Not a great job,” Dante observed.

  “What, Sergio’s?” Guzzanti asked. “It’s not bad. At least he doesn’t get any backtalk from his clients.”

  Guzzanti beckoned to the two young people. They arranged themselves solemnly at either side of the body’s head, hands clasped behind their backs, necks craned, waiting. They gave Dante the creeps, like vultures around a corpse.

  “You don’t mind if I allow these two students of mine to attend the autopsy, do you, Dante?” Guzzanti asked. “It’s their first post, and a murder at that. Who knows when they’ll get a chance to see another one? Of course—” He frowned, looking at Nick, then Dante. “—it’s getting a little crowded around here, so maybe Nick could—”

  “That’s okay. I’ll step back,” Dante said swiftly. He moved back a step, then two. “Nick wants to see what being a cop is all about, after all. I’ll yield my place to him.”

  Guzzanti looked at him curiously and shrugged. “As you please. You don’t really need to watch because I’ll be dictating my findings.” He slipped his face shield on and fixed a little collar mike to the lapel of the lab coat. On a podium nearby was a file. He pressed a pedal with his foot and straightened.

  “Okay, let’s see what we have here. We have one—” He looked over to the file on the podium. “One Roland Francis Kane, deceased. Sixty-two years old. One meter seventy-seven centimeters, seventy kilos. This is a man who kept his figure, even though the muscle tone looks poor.”

  “One puncture wound of a sharp instrument inserted antero-posteriorally. No noticeable distinguishing marks or abnormalities. Okay, lady and gentlemen, here we go.” He picked up a scalpel and held it up to the light as if it were a jewel. The fluorescent light overhead reflected off the blue-gray surface.

  Guzzanti turned to the two students, holding the scalpel as if it were a pencil. “Okay now, Ricci and Barzi. Pay attention because this will be on the exam.” He waggled the hand holding the scalpel up and down, the maestro limbering up his baton hand. “You want to keep your wrist loose, so you can feel the feedback effect. You want to cut through the derma, down through the abdominal wall. We want to see what this man is made of, eh?”

  Polite titters from the two students. Dante‘s stomach gave a spasm of protest. They should just shut up, all of them, and get on with it.

  “So—” Guzzanti paused dramatically, scalpel high over Roland Kane’s naked, ash-gray, sunken chest. He turned to the two students. “So you want to cut quickly and deep. Three strokes. From the sternum to the pubis, cutting around the navel.”

  Nick leaned forward with a frown. “Why?”

  “Hmm?” Guzzanti’s hand hovered over the chest, an artist wavering before making that first brush stroke which would turn the canvas from potentiality to art. “Why cut around the navel? Well, because the navel’s tough to cut through. Grisly. Puts you off your slice, as it were.”

  Dante’s stomach gave another spasm.

  Guzzanti swooped down with the scalpel, opening Kane up in three swift strokes, from left shoulder to breastbone, from right shoulder to breastbone, then from sternum to pubis, delicately cutting around the belly button, while Dante’s stomach swooped up to his throat.

  Dante couldn’t watch the body, so he watched the faces. Guzzanti was rapt, the complete professional engrossed in a technical task. Nick looked fascinated as, gruesomely, he munched on his tomato and mozzarella sandwich.

  Dante’s peripheral vision told him that what was inside the body looked remarkably like the tomato and mozzarella…hastily he looked at the two students.

  The small woman was leaning forward eagerly, the overhead light glinting spookily off her unfashionable, oversized glasses.

  The big man had broken out in a sweat, his skin hue remarkably like the institutional gray-green color on the walls above the white tiling. Dante felt a deep kinship with him.

  Guzzanti took another, smaller scalpel in hand. He hooked his fingers under the skin at the sternum and pulled with his left, while skillfully flaying away the skin and underlying muscles with the scalpel.

  “Test time,” he said. “Anyone recognize this smell?”

  The tiny woman lifted her face shield a moment and sniffed deeply, pursing her lips in concentration. “Somewhere between fish and beef.” Her voice was as tiny as her body, high-pitched and breathless.

  “The slightly fishy smell is the beginnings of decomposition.” Guzzanti finished and pulled the flap he’d liberated up and over the body’s head as Dante felt his stomach roil greasily. “Nick?”

  Nick edged closer, holding his sandwich away from his body. His nostrils flared as he breathed deeply over the open body cavity. “Raw lamb,” he said. “I really miss good lamb in the States. Nonna cooks it with a sprig of rosemary and garlic.”

  Dante’s stomach lurched.

  “Bingo,” Guzzanti said. “Raw lamb.”

  The male medical student’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and he toppled to the floor with a heavy thump.

  “Sergio!” Guzzanti raised his voice and grunted in satisfaction as the diener walked in. Hands lifted, he pointed with his elbow to the floor. “Take him away. This guy’s going to be something nice and safe like a dentist or a dermatologist when he grows up and graduates.”

  The diener bent, hooked his hands under the big man’s armpits and heaved. Sergio couldn’t have weighed more than seventy kilos and the man must have been at least a hundred kilos . The diener managed to stagger to his feet and stand, but he was wobbling.

  “I’ll help you,” Dante said. He positioned himself at the feet of the medical student. “On my three, lift. One, two, three!”

  “Thanks,” Sergio said grudgingly. He knew Dante was a Snail.

  “Any time,” Dante said, meaning every word. “Guzzanti, I’m going to see to this guy. If I’m not back soon, just carry on and we’ll meet back in your office.”

  “Okay.” Guzzanti looked up with a frown. “But you’re going to miss the autopsy.”

  “Can’t be helped.” Dante allowed his voice to deepen. “Officers are sworn to avenge the dead, but above all to protect the living. Much as I’d like to stay, I can’t. See you back in your office.”

  “In about an hour.” Guzzanti had already lost interest in him, curved over the cadaver, hands in the open
chest.

  Dante had one last look, enough to give him nightmares for a week, and staggered out with the diener.

  An hour and a half later, Nick and Guzzanti walked back into the pathologist’s office, where Dante had surreptitiously skimmed the spines of the magazines and books lining Guzzanti’s shelves. They were all in that unique place between horrifying and boring, causing Dante to marvel all over again at how the world was put together. Choosing to be a pathologist was an inexplicable to him as choosing not to live in Siena.

  “That was really cool, Dante.” Nick was looking more enthusiastic than he had all morning.

  “Glad we could arrange a little entertainment for you, Nick.”

  “Your cousin seems to have acquired quite a bit of anatomical knowledge, Dante.” Guzzanti patted Nick on the back.

  “That’s probably because he’s broken most of his bits of anatomy,” Dante replied. Nick’s injuries were family legend, though he always kept mum about them. Even this latest one—the career-ending one. Nick hadn’t said more than two sentences about it.

  Guzzanti hung up his white lab coat. “So how’s Barzi?”

  “Who?” Dante turned to him blankly.

  “The med student,” Guzzanti explained patiently. “The one who fainted.”

  “Oh, right. Well, if you’re going to faint, I guess a hospital is a pretty good place to do it in. Last I saw him, he was being fawned over by two very pretty nurses.”

  “They take his blood pressure at least?”

  “Among other things.” Dante smiled.

  One of the nurses had made a date with the student for a pizza at her house on Saturday night after he had spun a woeful tale of too many late nights up studying, with no one to cook for him.

  No one to cook for you was the Italian male equivalent of homelessness.