Skin Privilege

by Karin Slaughter

  Sara zoomed the camera in close to see if there were any minute ridge marks the Elawah sheriff's department had missed. Her eyes blurred as the handle came into sharp detail, and she glanced away for a second to clear her vision.

  'Wait a minute,' she said to no one in particular. In looking away, she had seen something else. Three small, round bruises were on the back of the dead man's arm. Someone very strong had grabbed Gibson hard enough to leave a mark. Sara could tell from the color that the bruise had happened immediately prior to Gibson's death.

  She pressed the ruler underneath the bruises and took photos from several angles. Then, just to make sure, she went back over the body inch by inch, searching for other marks she might have missed.

  Satisfied that she'd done all she could, Sara removed her gloves and reviewed her notes, making sure that she could read her writing and that nothing could be misinterpreted. From the moment Sara entered an autopsy suite, she always kept it in the back of her mind that everything she did would eventually be reviewed at trial. On the heels of the malpractice deposition, she felt doubly paranoid.

  She kept coming back to the knife, not because it was Lena 's – a fact that she blatantly left out of her notes – but because the wound still troubled her.

  Sara took off her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes. Unlike the day before, the adjacent garage was in full swing, air compressors buzzing on and off, exhaust fumes seeping into the morgue. She wasn't happy that the garage odors were so overwhelming, not just because it was giving her a headache but because an autopsy was more than about what you saw. Certain smells from the body could point to anything from diabetes to poisoning.

  Sara slipped on her safety goggles and a fresh pair of latex gloves as she walked to the table in the middle of the room. Using a large bore needle, she took central blood and urine samples and labeled them accordingly. With her foot, she pushed over a small step stool so that she would have enough height to stand over the body. Once she was in place, Sara braced her right hand against Gibson's back and wrapped her left around the handle of the knife. She was about to pull out the knife when someone knocked on the door.

  'Hello?' a man asked, walking into the room without being invited. He saw Sara, hand still on the knife, and gave a low whistle. 'Hope you're taking that out and not putting it in.'

  Sara dropped her hands. 'Can I help you?'

  The man gave a quick, ferret-like smile that showed a straight line of small, square teeth. He held out his hand, then thought better of it. 'Fred Bart,' he said. 'You've been doing my job.'

  Sara got down off the step stool. She was at least a foot taller than the man, and there was something about him that instantly rubbed her the wrong way. Still, she apologized, T'm sorry. I was asked by the sheriff to-'

  He barked a loud laugh. 'Just pulling your leg, sweetheart. Don't worry about it.'

  Growing up in the South, Sara had often been called sweetheart or darlin' or even baby. Her grandfather called her princess and the mailman called her peanut, but somehow they managed to do it in an endearing rather than derogatory way; she even signed Christmas and birthday cards to them using the familiar names. That being said, there was a fine line between the kind of men who could get away with this sort of thing and the kind who could not. Fred Bart, with his cheap, too-tight suit and mirror-finish loafers, fell squarely into the latter category.

  'Nice to meet you,' Sara told him, making an effort to be polite. 'I was in the process of…' She let her voice trail off as Bart picked up her notes. 'I'm not finished with those.'

  'That's okay, darlin'. I think I can figure them out.' He started reading, and Sara fought the urge to rip the pages from his hands. Instead, she put her hands on her hips and waited, focusing a laser beam of hate at the top of his balding head. The remaining tufts of hair over his ears had an unnatural appearance, and after a long period of study, she decided he was an advocate of Grecian formula.

  Bart was at least a decade older than Sara if not more, the kind of guy who never forgave the world for the fact that he'd started losing his hair in his twenties. She got the feeling he was the type who blamed other people for a lot of things he found wrong with himself. She glanced down at his hands, checking for a wedding ring, glad to find at least there wasn't a woman out there who was having to put up with the busybody know-it-all.

  When he was finally finished checking her notes, he gave her a quick smile and dropped the pages back where he'd found them. She expected at least a snarky comment about her penmanship, but all he said was, 'Need help with any of this?'

  'I think I can handle it.'

  Bart took a pair of gloves out of the box. He slipped them on as he said, 'I can at least help you with getting that knife out. Don't know if you've ever run into anything like this, but they tend to stick the longer you wait.'

  'I can manage, thank you,' Sara told him, unable to find a way to tell the dentist she knew what she was doing without tearing his head from his neck and tossing it out the window like a soccer ball.

  'No problem at all,' he answered, standing on the stool Sara had just vacated. He put both hands on the knife, then gave her a questioning look. When she did not move, he told her, 'Can't do this without you holding him down, sweetheart.'

  She was suddenly aware of the fact that she was standing with her hands on her hips and her mouth pursed, looking exactly like the stereotype of a man-hating feminist bitch that Fred Bart probably kept in his mind to explain why his excessive charms didn't work on a woman.

  Sara pressed her hands against the corpse's back and Bart pulled the knife. She noticed how easily the flesh relinquished the blade.

  Apparently, Bart noticed, too. 'Not so bad,' he said, dropping the knife onto the tray beside the body. 'Find any fingerprints?'

  'You'd have to ask the sheriff. I'm just doing the procedure.'

  'Might want to take your own,' he suggested, snapping off the latex gloves. 'In my experience, little buddy Jake ain't exactly up on his forensic techniques.' He tossed the gloves into the wastecan and took out a pack of cigarettes.

  'I'd prefer you didn't smoke in here.'

  He put the cigarette in his mouth, let it dangle as he talked. 'You one of those smoking Nazis?'

  Sara wondered at his word choice considering the red swastika on the victim's arm. 'I would just prefer you didn't smoke,' she replied evenly.

  He flashed another smile, made a show of taking the cigarette out of his mouth and putting it back in the pack – just for her. 'So, what'd you find? Anything interesting?'

  Sara picked up the camera to document the wound. 'Not yet.'

  'You're a pediatrician, right?'

  'That's right.' She felt the need to add, 'I'm also a medical examiner.'

  'Didn't think people could afford to be doctors anymore.' Bart gave a dry laugh, and Sara didn't know if she was just being sensitive or if the man knew about the malpractice suit. He would've had to do some digging to find that out; she was probably just being paranoid. After what she'd been through over the last few days, Sara figured she had an excuse.

  Bart walked around the body, stopped at the tattoo. 'Figures,' he said. 'I got one of these bastards here last month. Took out a telephone pole out on Highway 16. Sideswiped a family in a minivan while he was at it.' He glanced up quickly. 'Family made it. Just bumps and bruises.'

  Sara realized she might be able to get some information from him if she tread carefully. 'Are skinheads a problem around here?'

  Bart shrugged. 'Meth's the big problem, and skinheads come with it. Good luck for me, though.' Sara must have looked confused, because he clarified, 'I'm a dentist. I thought for sure Jake would've told you that.' He crossed his arms, the shoulders of his cheap suit riding up to his ears. 'Ten years ago, I'd be lucky if I got one root canal a month. Now, I do two, maybe three, a week. Get them from all over the county, sometimes into the next. Crowns, bridges, veneers. It's boom-time.'

  Sara had seen what meth could do to a person's mouth. M
ost heavy users lost their teeth within the first year.

  'Big business,' Bart said. 'But I'd trade it all in if I never had to see another kid hooked on that shit.' His face reddened. 'Sorry for my language, ma'am.'

  Sara didn't know if it was his apology or his obvious concern, but she felt herself not hating him so much.

  Bart said, 'Let me help you turn the body.'

  Sara was still reluctant to accept his offer, but she had to admit she wasn't relishing maneuvering Gibson over on the table. She took a few more photographs, then waited for Bart to glove up again. He took the head and shoulders and Sara took the feet. It gave her some amount of pleasure to watch the dentist struggle under the weight as they rolled Gibson onto his back. It also gave her pause, because if the two of them were having trouble just flipping the body on the table, it must have taken some pretty strong men to toss him through a window.

  She said, 'Big guy, huh?'

  Bart shrugged his shoulders, but she could see a bead of sweat roll down his cheek. 'I've seen worse.'

  'I can imagine.'

  She saw his eyes flash as he registered the comment, probably wondering if she was being condescending. Sara kept him wondering, all but batting her eyelashes when she said, 'Thanks so much for lending me some of your muscle.'

  Instinctively, he reached for his cigarettes, then stopped himself. 'I see you figured out Bertha.' He pointed to the X-rays. 'I keep asking the county to replace that thing and they keep telling me no.'

  'It serves its purpose,' Sara allowed. If you watched enough television, you would assume that all police departments were at the cutting edge of forensic technology. In reality, no lab in the country could afford the billions of dollars of equipment you saw being used on an average Thursday night drama. What little equipment the state had was in high demand, and sometimes it took up to a year to get an analysis back.

  Bart was still studying Boyd Gibson's X-rays. He gave a low whistle. 'Not much of a childhood.' He traced a faint line along the clavicle. 'Nasty break.'

  'Did you know him?'

  Bart turned around, and for the first time since he'd come into the room, he seemed to be really looking at her. 'Yeah,' he said, his tone filled with sadness. 'His mama used to bring him in. She was always torn up.' He indicated his face, and Sara realized he was indicating abuse. 'Never saw it in Boyd or his brother – he's got an older brother -but I called the sheriff plenty of times about Ella. That was her name.' He turned his back to Sara as he looked at the films again, or maybe he just didn't want her to see him upset. 'She was a great lady. Quiet, respectful, good cook. Everything you'd want in a wife. I guess some men can't be happy with that. Grover sure as hell wasn't.'

  Sara waited to make sure he was finished speaking before asking, 'What did the sheriff do when you reported it?'

  'This was back when Al was in charge,' Bart said, turning back around. 'Al was a good man, but you couldn't press charges back then without the wife on board to testify, and Ella wasn't going to say a word against Grover. Not that she had any love left for him, but she knew what he would do to the boys, and it wasn't like she could go out and get a job to support all of them.'

  'Is she still with him?'

  'No,' he said, looking down at his feet. 'Cancer took her when Boyd was about ten, maybe eleven. I didn't see him much after that. Grover wasn't gonna waste his drinking money on having their teeth cleaned.' He pointed to the corpse. 'Course, I've seen him plenty lately.'

  'How's that?'

  Bart directed his gaze toward Gibson's forearms, where track marks scarred the flesh. They were fairly healed, at least four to six months old. Gibson was also heavy, and meth users tended to be extremely thin.

  She said, 'He doesn't look as if he's been using lately.'

  'Yeah, he got cleaned up for a while.' Bart shrugged. 'Lots of 'em clean up for a month, sometimes a year. Then something happens and they're back on the needle quick as you please.'

  'Is that what happened to Boyd?'

  Bart didn't exactly answer her question. 'He came in about six weeks ago. He didn't have the money for the work, but I set up a payment schedule for him. He was in awful pain. His whole mouth was infected. Would've lost the rest of his teeth if I hadn't done something.'

  'I saw the bridge,' Sara said, indicating the dental film. She hadn't yet examined Gibson's mouth.

  Bart looked at the X-ray. 'Not as bad as it could've been.' He gave a quick smile. 'You must see that kind of thing a lot more than me.'

  'What's that?'

  'Indigents,' He pronounced the word sharply, but Sara could not tell if she was meant to infer derision or pity. 'They come in and you know they can't afford it but you can't turn them away because that's not why you went to school.'

  Sara nodded and shrugged at the same time, not knowing what else to say. She was hardly going to have a protracted discussion about the dismal state of healthcare with this man.

  'Well.' Bart glanced at his watch as if he had just remembered an appointment. 'Anyway, I just wanted to drop by and make sure you were making yourself at home. Let me know if you need anything, all right?'

  'Thank you,' Sara said, and she really meant it until he flashed one of his ferret smiles.

  'You take care now, darlin'. Wouldn't want you to get mixed up in any of this.'

  She felt her own smile tighten on her face. 'Thank you,' she repeated, but Fred Bart had already left.

  Sara looked back at the dead man lying on the table as if he might offer some wry comment about what had just happened. Of course he did not. Sara took off her gloves as she walked back over to her notes. She found the right page and recorded that Fred Bart had assisted with the removal of the knife. She also noted that the knife had easily slipped from the wound. Bart was right about one thing; usually the blades stuck, whether from dried blood or tissue that stiffened around the metal.

  She pushed this to the back of her mind as she continued the external examination, photographing the healed scars that indicated needle use, making note of a few scratches on the front of the shin. Gibson's mouth was already open and the bridge spanning the gap where his front teeth should have been popped out easily. Though she didn't want to, Sara had to admit that Bart did good work. The gums were almost completely healed and there didn't seem to be any indication that the bridge had fit awkwardly.

  Sara checked the time, wondering what was taking Jeffrey and Jake Valentine so long. They were supposed to bring Boyd Gibson's father in to identify the body but that had been a good two hours ago. Technically, Jake had already positively identified Boyd Gibson, but she knew from experience that the family generally needed to see the victim in order to get some closure.

  She called Jeffrey's cell phone but he didn't pick up. She left a message for him, but after twenty minutes passed without him returning her call, she decided to go ahead with the internal examination. She could always cover the body when Gibson's father arrived to spare him the more graphic aspects of his son's death.

  She regloved and returned to the table, where she picked up a scalpel and began the Y-incision. Because there was a Dictaphone over the autopsy table that she used back in Grant, Sara could not stop her mind from doing a running narration of every movement she made, so that when she opened the rib cage or examined the pleura, she heard a little voice in her head echoing the motions.

  She followed the penetration path of the stab wound to the heart, finding just as she'd predicted. The blade had pierced the left posterior thoracic wall and exited the anterior, causing almost immediate death. She stopped here, making some more notes, taking photographs and measuring the blade's path, then doing her own drawing of exactly what she'd found.

  Even without the stab wound, the heart was in bad shape. Enlarged from the extra weight on Gibson's frame, the major arteries were already showing signs of disease. Had the knife not killed him, his bad health habits would have ensured he didn't live into a comfortable old age.

  Though she had obvious cause
of death, Sara continued the autopsy in minute detail, carefully weighing and dissecting the organs, taking tissue samples. Boyd Gibson's last meal had been similar to the one Jeffrey and Sara had shared: pizza. He preferred pepperoni from the looks of it, but he'd chosen to eat a healthy salad to balance it out. Maybe he had smoked while he ate. Judging from the coloring and the enlarged air spaces in his lungs, Gibson had been a heavy smoker. Considering this, Sara thought it odd that he hadn't had cigarettes in his pockets.

  She made a note of this, took more photographs and did so many drawings that her hand cramped. Unfortunately, her devotion to detail was only punishing herself. By the time the clock hands ticked past noon, her feet were killing her and her back felt as if it had been bent into a shepherd's hook.

  And, honestly, Sara had never been an artist. Her drawings looked like the class project of a psychopathic kindergartener.

  She covered the body and sat down, every vertebrae in her neck popping as she looked up at the ceiling in hopes of counteracting the fact that she had been looking straight down for the last two hours. She was just starting to let herself worry about Jeffrey when she heard a car pull up outside.

  Jake Valentine opened the door, knocking at the same time. 'Sorry we're late,' he told her, a sloppy grin on his face. He had a piece of toilet tissue shoved up his nose. The bridge was swollen, the fingertips of a bruise spreading under his left eye.

  Sara stood in alarm. 'Where's Jeffrey?'

  Before she had finished the question, he came in behind Valentine, shutting the door.

  'Slight altercation,' Jeffrey explained. He shared the same sloppy grin as the sheriff, as if they'd just had a great deal of fun together.

  'What kind of altercation?' Sara felt like she was talking to two naughty children, and Jeffrey's burst of laughter did nothing to disabuse her of the notion.

  Valentine laughed, too, though she could tell from the tears in his eyes that it hurt to do so. He told her, 'Grover wasn't exactly happy to see me.'

  Jeffrey explained, 'He punched Jake in the face as soon as he opened the door.'