by Nancy Grace
Over the years, Emory had graduated from dissecting flies at play school to frogs in high school biology to exploring the pulmonary and cardiovascular systems of his own, individual, aged monkey in pre-med. Then . . . the ultimate . . . he was assigned an eighty-year-old male cadaver in med school. But it all paid off for Emory. He finally made it, landing here at murder central . . . the New York County Medical Examiner’s Office.
The diener, Jimmy the morgue assistant, hoisted the body onto the table, still shrouded in the white sheet, and unobtrusively left the autopsy room, waiting just outside the swinging doors until Emory called out for him. He was a tiny man who’d worked for New York County in the morgue for decades.
It always amazed Emory how Jimmy could single-handedly maneuver even the largest of the dead, some tipping the scales at nearly three hundred pounds, but he did it. It was all in the technique. Emory figured practice made perfect.
The sheet would have to be removed extremely carefully, just in case fibers or other evidence was still attached to the body. The majority of morgues, especially the older facilities, still sported the old porcelain or even marble tables. They were charming, true, in a nostalgic sort of way, but Emory much preferred working with the sleeker, modern versions.
And here in New York County, he had the top of the line. She was a beauty. The autopsy table itself was a waist-high, cold, spotless stainless steel fixture. Not a single scratch on her . . . yet.
She was also plumbed for running water, too. Nice.
Several faucets and spigots running along the width of the table facilitated rinsing away the copious amounts of blood released during the procedure. Blood flowed by the quart, depending on the mode of death, of course, down into long, slender receptacles unobtrusively located at the edges of the table.
This particular sweetie was basically a tray, slanted for drainage. And it had slightly raised edges, preventing blood and other bodily fluids from spilling onto the floor.
Without much preamble, Davis pulled his long, dark hair into a ponytail, secured a surgeon’s cap over it, and flicked on one of the intense overhead lights above the autopsy slab. Taking a cursory look up and down the body, he inhaled deeply through his nose, breathing in the heavy smell of the woman’s bloody leotard.
Emory Davis loved his job.
Cutting through the skimpy Danskin with a surgical knife, the autopsy began. He started speaking cordially but routinely into a handheld microphone, taping for the record the COD, formally pronouncing cause of death.
“Well-nourished Caucasian female, brunette, approximately thirty to thirty-five years of age, sixty-five inches in length.”
Hmm. No personal effects like a purse with a wallet and driver’s license inside to check the date of birth. He’d have to guesstimate the age. He was usually right-on with all of it at the first guess . . . age, weight, height.
He clicked off the recorder and pulled out his measuring tape. Just to double-check. He quickly extended the yellow ribbon from the top of her head, what was left of it, to the bottom of her heel.
His first guess was right. Five-five.
It was a little game he’d created all alone back in one of the morgues where he’d interned in med school. He guessed the exact length of corpses. It was amazing the acumen you could develop after years of dead bodies.
Well-nourished was a stretch. This girl needed to eat. “Well-nourished” was a term of art to indicate that starvation was not the cause of death and that the body was within the acceptable weight parameters for height. And those parameters were wide, indeed. Emory guessed this was just another anorexic New York woman who lived off drinking Perrier and picking at salads.
“Weight, one hundred pounds.” Davis continued speaking into the handheld mike, detailing the autopsy as he went along. The overhead hot light bored into the brick-brown blood caked around the victim’s neck.
He punched a button on the side of the autopsy table, rigged with automatic scales. The digital number shone dull red. Emory smiled. Dead on . . . again. A hundred pounds on the nose.
“Single shot to the head. Near-decapitation of victim suggests to this doctor subject is the victim of homicide.”
Of course it was homicide. He’d spent nearly six months in med school in a class titled Methods and Assessment of Homicide and Suicide. Statistically speaking, no way would a white female of this age, and judging by the expensive jewelry, this income bracket, shoot herself in the face.
Maybe it was vanity or just pure instinct, but rarely did women shoot themselves, much less in the head, in order to off themselves. They usually went the pill-overdose-mixed-with-booze route, maybe gas from the car or oven; and sometimes he’d get a jumper; but shooting to the head?
Nope. It was homicide for sure.
Plus, there was the obvious trajectory, the path of the bullet or bullets.
That spoke volumes.
Emory paused to whip out the Polaroid camera from the lower shelf of the metal side table again, taking close-ups of the head wound. He had to take photos, even if a jury wouldn’t be able to discern what they were seeing amid the bloody pink tissue in the Polaroid close-up.
Suddenly he stopped. There was something familiar about this autopsy. It was like déjà vu. He’d done it before.
Of course, he’d performed literally thousands of autopsies, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t the repetitive nature of the autopsy. He suddenly had the intense sensation he’d done this exact autopsy of this exact woman before. Since Emory believed in nothing other than that proven by science, he shook it off and continued narrating.
Practically poking his nose into the woman’s skull, he observed the gunshot wound had left her left temporal lobe totally exposed. Taking a close look, Emory continued narrating into the handheld.
“Bullet entry wound is through the deceased’s cranium, left temple entry, angle front to back, direction is left to right, at a mildly lowered angle, from up to down. Bullet exiting victim’s head just below and behind right ear.”
He went back to document details of the entry wound. Carefully looking at the bullet’s entry, Emory detected stippling, the gunshot residue, and markings on the skin. He spoke again into the handheld. “Stippling noted in and around the entry wound with maroon-tinted particles, likely part of the gunshot debris.” He continued to make his way along the bullet’s path.
Emory looked intensely, barely breathing. He delicately pulled away layers of brain matter as fine as tissue paper to precisely confirm the exact trajectory path, although a look at the outside of the head normally tells all. Based simply on bullet entry and exit wound locations, here, the entry wound was a huge, gaping hole, not a clean and tidy entry at all. Emory would have to burrow further into the head to get the exact angle. Details matter.
“Neither bullet nor bullet fragmentation is observed anywhere within the brain cavity or for that matter, within the entire cranium itself.”
Wait. Without moving his head or averting his gaze to look up, Emory reached above himself and pulled down the bright retractable light hanging over the table. It was hot to the touch, and getting hotter by the moment.
There it was. Deeply embedded in brain tissue, he saw it.
A tiny, tiny metallic fragment. It had clearly splintered off upon impact with the skull. Disturbing the least amount of tissue possible, Emory reached over to the steel surgical tray he’d placed directly at his right elbow to grab a pair of tweezers.
Carefully, carefully, barely breathing, with the thin pair of tweezers, he plucked the speck of metal from her brain. Placing it in a tiny Zip Lock bag designed specifically for this purpose, Emory finally exhaled deeply, and then inhaled. The surgical smell of the room, combined with the tiniest whiff signaling the inception of human decomposition, didn’t bother Emory in the least.
He did it. Many, if not most, doctors would have missed the fragment. It was extremely important, possibly crucial to the case.
If the fragment was not damaged bey
ond medical and forensic use, it could be analyzed at the crime lab. Actually, Emory could pretty much call the caliber of a sliver of fragment himself, but best to leave it to the experts in ballistics at the lab.
From the sliver, caliber could be determined and possibly traced to a specific handgun if that particular handgun’s tool markings were registered in the national database.
The database, The Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS), is a highly specialized computer program that compares markings on crime scene bullets to those in other cases. It accesses a database maintained by ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
IBIS would scan the bullet for markings, then run those markings against a database of known weapons to identify matches that police and crime technicians might never have identified. Who knew if there was enough bullet to get a match, but at least Emory had done his part.
Good thing he taped his narration before dedicating it to writing for the formal autopsy report. He rewound and played it back, listening to his own words. “Neither bullet nor bullet fragmentation is observed anywhere within the brain cavity or for that matter, within the entire cranium itself.”
Wrong! He re-narrated his discovery of the fragment sliver.
And to think, he actually got paid for this.
Incredible.
Just then, it hit him . . . the déjà vu . . . she was familiar all right. Emory looked at the toe tag. Holey moley.
This was Prentiss Love. He’d had a poster of her tacked up in his bedroom since he was twelve years old. Used to drive his mom crazy.
In retrospect, Emory realized it hadn’t been the poster girl, but instead it was the tacks he’d pushed into the wallpaper to secure the poster to the wall that bugged her.
His mom, God love her, had gone to great lengths to personally spend an entire weekend cutting, pasting, and hanging sports-themed wallpaper up on his walls, covered in footballs, baseballs, and basketballs. His mom had tried anything, especially encouraging sports of all types, to get him to think of something other than dissecting bugs and animals.
So when she saw the Prentiss Love poster, she was probably thrilled he was dreaming about a girl . . . any girl . . . any thing, actually, other than dead creatures he could dissect.
But she was proud when he walked across the stage to get that med school diploma and a handshake from the president of the university. They talked on the phone nearly every Sunday. But this time he’d have something to talk about she’d be interested in . . . not just more dead bodies and where he’d gone to dinner to tell her about.
Wow. Prentiss Love. They’d never believe this back home. Emory took another Polaroid just for good measure.
Chapter 21
RACING UPTOWN ON MADISON AVENUE, SOOKIE DOWNS NEARLY VOMITED in the back of the cab. She wasn’t used to this.
First of all, the cab stank. She couldn’t distinguish the exact origin of the stink. Pursing her lips instinctively downward while wrinkling her nose at the smell, she had several candidates from which to choose. There was the white gooey pool of liquid on the backseat’s floorboard beneath her feet. Sookie had no choice but to delicately levitate the black spiked heels of her Dior boots a few inches above the floor mat. She certainly did not want the smell to attach itself to her shoes.
Then there was the clear but extremely sticky substance on the seat on which she was sitting. Just because it was clear didn’t mean it didn’t smell. What was it? Some sort of soup? Chablis, perhaps? Spilled from a celebratory flute there in the back seat? Or was it just old urine? At least she hoped it was old. But did age matter? Was urine sticky? She paused to think. She’d never really changed her children’s diapers herself, so she didn’t know whether urine became gooey or sticky over time, left on a smooth plastic surface such as a dark blue car seat, unattended and unsanitized.
A strong possibility, obviously, was the previous passenger. He looked homeless, with a shock of dreads coming out from under a colorful Rasta hat. He very likely stank.
Sookie just couldn’t be sure. Didn’t Rastas refuse to bathe? Or was it washing their hair they hated? They certainly didn’t take care of their nails, from what she observed in the fleeting moment when they had exchanged looks, each sizing the other up, each looking disdainfully at the other.
Why did he look at her that way? He was the one that stank.
Sookie smelled delicately of perfume that sold for $250 an ounce. She better smell good.
Then there was the cab driver himself. He also looked to Sookie as if he stank. His hair was greasy, from what she could tell in the backseat, separated from the driver by a dingy, scratched-up plastic partition covered almost completely with directions, warnings, fare notices, and a taxi driver identification card bearing the driver’s name and photo.
He could be a terrorist. She couldn’t even mentally pronounce his last name. It was nothing but consonants. And it was probably fake.
Maybe Harry should do a show on terrorists.
No, the viewers would hate hearing about that again.
But they’d love a show on body odor. Hmm. Who could they book, other than stinky people? Doctors, specialists, victims of physical eccentricities that caused horrible smells through no fault of their own?
Anyway, she hoped the smell in the cab did not attach itself to her. That’s the last thing she needed. To absolutely reek in a meeting with Noel Fryer.
Noel was finally out of his bathroom and en route to his office. That’s what his personal assistant had whispered into the phone less than five minutes ago.
Sookie wanted desperately to lower the window. She was so tempted to punch the electric window button there on the door beside her. But A, she’d have to touch the button, and she knew it was a virtual colony of germs more likely at home floating in a petri dish under a microscope. And B, the breeze could ruin her hair.
She’d come this far and she wasn’t ruining her look now. Although vomit on the sides of her mouth would also destroy the look.
Sookie Downs lightly touched the window control, lowering the window only an inch or two so as not to get a direct breeze on her hair.
The cab suddenly took a violent left turn and there they were, in front of GNE.
Sookie handed the driver cash through a small, square slot in the cab’s plastic partition. Not waiting for change, she grabbed the paper receipt he handed out the window to her, for expenses of course, balanced herself on the Dior spikes, straightened her spine, and walked coolly toward the network’s giant, glass-front entrance.
A loud buzzing sound directly behind her made her turn back.
It was Fryer, for Pete’s sake. So much for the casual but dramatic entrance into his all-windowed corner office up on the thirty-first floor. Here he was in the flesh.
She hoped her coppery hair was perfection.
The irritating buzzing sound was coming from Fryer’s moped. Or whatever it was. A Vespa, he’d told her in the past. She’d acted like she knew what a Vespa was, exclaiming about his manly brilliance for purchasing it.
It sounded like “viper.” So this was it? It had to be. No, Fryer’s little motor scooter was in fact the Vespa he’d described. She would somehow work it into the conversation to look in the know.
Fryer dismounted the thing like it was a horse and he was in a Western. Sookie supposed that made him . . . who? John Wayne? Or did it make him James Dean in motorcycle motif? Or Marlon Brando, who also looked great on-screen on a motorcycle.
But they were all dead. She’d look old and dated if she compared him to them. Think! Damnit! Think of something brilliant to say! Brilliant . . . but light . . . . something witty . . .
He left the Vespa parked horizontally in the space between two cars as if he owned the street. Noel Fryer took off his helmet, balancing it briefly on the seat of the Vespa, brushing his hair to the side, what there was of it, and unwrapping the scarf around his neck. Reaching into his front pocket, he pulled out a black cashmere beret. He ha
d recently taken up wearing it around the office. While he unwrapped the scarf, he still left it hanging loose around his neck. He’d walk around the network like this all day, with the cashmere scarf hanging draped around his neck over his hand-tailored suit.
Who the hell did he think he was? Pavarotti?
Utterly ridiculous.
“Hello, you handsome man!”
Did she give it a touch too much verve?
“Hi, Sookie! I thought that was you when I pulled up. Glad you could make it into the city today.”
“Well, Noel, I’m here every day. You know, for the show.”
A chill went down her back. Did Noel know she actually never came in to the show? Why bother? She could think and direct just as well from her home out in the Hamptons. Her physicality had nothing to do with her talents. It was all in her head. Creative masterminds were all the same. They didn’t fit into the confines of a nine-to-five workaday setting like all the others did.
They both walked through the glass doors and headed toward the wide expanse of the security desk.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Fryer.” The security guard said it, barely looking up.
But, glancing over at Sookie, his face was blank. “Name and ID, please.”
“Why, I’m Sookie Downs.” How dare he ask for her ID. Didn’t he know who she was?
“Beg pardon?”
“I’m Sookie Downs.”
The guard registered not a hint of recognition.
“You know, Sookie Downs.” She said her name slowly and with emphasis as if he were deaf. “I’m the executive producer of The Harry Todd Show? Certainly you’ve heard of Harry Todd. The Harry Todd Show?”
“Not ringing a bell. Name and ID, please.”
This was not going as planned. Sookie fished around the bottom of her purse for her GNE ID pass. Certainly she’d brought it. Normally she was with Tony whenever she came in. He’d meet her at her limo and walk her in, already clearing her entrance with security.