by Robin Cook
The “pit,” as it was lovingly called, was a medium-sized room about fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. At one time it had been considered state of the art, but no longer. Like so many other city agencies, its much-needed upkeep and modernization had suffered from lack of funds. The eight stainless steel tables were old and stained from countless postmortems. Old-fashioned spring-loaded scales hung over each table. A series of sinks, countertops, X-ray view boxes, ancient glass-fronted cabinets, and exposed piping lined the walls. There were no windows.
Only one table was in use: the second from the end, to Laurie’s right. As the door closed behind Laurie all three gowned, masked, and hooded doctors grouped around the table raised their heads to stare at her for a moment before returning to their grisly task. Stretched out on the table was the ivory-colored, nude body of a teenage girl. She was illuminated by a single bank of blue-white fluorescent bulbs directly overhead. The lurid scene was made worse by the sucking noise of water swirling down a drain at the foot of the table.
Laurie felt a strong intuition she should turn around and leave, but she fought the feeling. Instead she advanced on the group. Knowing the people as well as she did, she recognized each despite their coverings, which included goggles as well as masks. Bingham was on the opposite side of the table, facing Laurie. He was a stocky man of short stature with thick features and a bulbous nose.
“Goddamn it, Paul!” Bingham snapped. “Is this the first time you’ve done a neck dissection? I’ve got a news conference scheduled and you’re mucking around like a first-year medical student. Give me that scalpel!” Bingham snatched the instrument from Paul’s hand, then bent over the body. A ray of light glinted off the stainless steel cutting edge.
Laurie stepped up to the table. She was to Paul’s right. Sensing her presence, he turned his head, and for an instant their eyes met. Laurie could tell he was already distraught. She tried to project some support with her gaze, but Paul averted his head. Laurie glanced at the morgue tech who avoided looking her way. The atmosphere was explosive.
Lowering her eyes, Laurie watched what Bingham was doing. The patient’s neck had been opened with a somewhat outdated incision that ran from the point of the chin to the top of the breastbone. The skin had been flayed and spread to the side like opening a high-necked blouse. Bingham was in the process of freeing the muscles from around the thyroid cartilage and the hyoid bone. Laurie could see evidence of premortal trauma with hemorrhage into the tissues.
“What I still don’t understand,” Bingham snapped without looking up from his labors, “is why you didn’t bag the hands at the scene? Could you please tell me that?”
Laurie’s eyes again met Paul’s. She knew instantly that he had no excuse. She wished she could have helped him, but she didn’t see how she could. Sharing her colleague’s discomfort, Laurie stepped away from the table. Despite having made the effort to get dressed to observe, Laurie left the autopsy room. There was just too much tension to make it worth staying. She didn’t want to make the situation any worse for Paul by giving Bingham more of an audience.
Returning back upstairs after peeling off her outer layer of protective clothing, Laurie sat down at her desk and got to work. The first order of business was to complete what she could on the three autopsies that she’d done on Sunday. The first of the cases had been the twelve-year-old boy. The second case was clearly a heroin overdose, but she reviewed the facts. Drug paraphernalia had been found with the victim. The victim had been a known heroin addict. At autopsy his arms had showed multiple sites of intravenous injection, old and new. On his right upper arm he’d had a tattoo: “Born to Lose.” Internally he’d shown the usual signs of asphyxial death with a frothy pulmonary edema. Despite the fact that laboratory and microscopic studies were still pending, Laurie felt comfortable with her conclusion that the cause of death was drug overdose and the manner of death was accidental.
The third case was far from clear. A twenty-four-year-old woman flight attendant had been discovered at home in a bathrobe, having apparently collapsed in the hallway outside her bathroom. She’d been found by her roommate. She’d been healthy and had returned home from a trip to Los Angeles the previous day. She was not known to be a drug user.
Laurie had done the autopsy but had found nothing. All her findings were completely normal. Concerned about the case, Laurie had one of the medical investigators locate the woman’s gynecologist. Laurie had spoken with the man and had been assured the woman had been entirely healthy. He’d seen her last only months before.
Having had a similar case recently, Laurie had instructed the medical investigator to go to the woman’s apartment and bring back any personal electrical appliances found in the woman’s bathroom. Sitting on Laurie’s desk was a cardboard box with a note from the medical investigator, saying that the enclosed was all she could find.
Using her thumbnail, Laurie broke through the tape sealing the box, lifted the flaps, and peered inside. The box contained a blow dryer and an old metal curling iron. Laurie lifted both devices from the box and laid them on her desk. From the lower right-hand drawer of the desk, Laurie lifted out an electrical testing device called a voltohmmeter.
Examining the blow dryer first, Laurie tested the electrical resistance between the prongs of the plug and the dryer itself. In both instances, the reading was infinite ohms or no current flow. Thinking that perhaps she was again on the wrong track, she tested the hair curler. To her surprise, the result was positive. Between one of the prongs and the casing of the curler, the voltohmmeter registered zero ohms, meaning free current flow.
Taking some basic tools from her desk, including a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, Laurie opened the hair curler and immediately found the frayed wire that was making contact with the device’s metal casing. It was now clear to Laurie that the poor flight attendant was the victim of low voltage electrocution. As was often the case, the victim had been shocked but had had time to put the offending device away and walk from the room before succumbing to a fatal cardiac arrhythmia. The cause of death was electrocution and the manner of death accidental.
With the hair curler “autopsied” on her desk, Laurie got out her camera and arranged the pieces to show the aberrant connection. Then she stood up to shoot directly down. As she peered through the viewfinder, Laurie felt pleased about the case. She couldn’t suppress a modest smile, knowing how different her work was from what people surmised. She’d not only solved the mystery of the poor woman’s untimely death, but had potentially saved someone else from the same fate as well.
Before Laurie could take the photo of the curler, her phone rang. Because of the degree of her concentration, the ringing startled her. With thinly veiled irritation, she answered. It was the operator asking Laurie if she would mind taking a call from a doctor phoning from the Manhattan General Hospital. She added that he’d requested to talk with the chief.
“Then why put him through to me?” Laurie demanded.
“The chief is tied up in the autopsy room, and I can’t find Dr. Washington. Someone said he’s out talking with the reporters. So I just started ringing the other doctors’ numbers. You were the first to answer.”
“Put him on,” Laurie said with resignation. She sank back into her desk chair. She was quite confident it would be a short conversation. If someone wanted to talk with the chief, they certainly would not be satisfied talking to the lowest person in the hierarchy.
After the call had been put through, Laurie introduced herself. She emphasized that she was one of the associate medical examiners and not the chief.
“I’m Dr. Murray,” the caller said. “I’m a senior medical resident. I need to talk to someone about a drug overdose/toxicity DOA that came in this morning.”
“What is it that you’d like to know?” Laurie asked. Drug deaths were a daily phenomenon at the M.E. office. Her attention partially switched back to the hair curler. She had a better idea for the photograph.
“The patient’s n
ame was Duncan Andrews,” Dr. Murray said. “He was a thirty-five-year-old Caucasian male. He arrived with no cardiac activity, no spontaneous respiration, and with a core body temperature that we recorded at one hundred eight degrees.”
“Uh huh,” Laurie said equably. Holding the phone in the crook of her neck, she rearranged the pieces of the hair curler.
“There was massive evidence of seizure activity,” Dr. Murray said. “So we ran an EEG. It was flat. The lab reported a serum cocaine level of 20 micrograms per milliliter.”
“Wow!” Laurie said with a short laugh of amazement. Dr. Murray had caught her attention. “That’s one hell of a high level. What was the route of administration, oral? Was he one of those “mules’ who try to smuggle the stuff by swallowing condoms filled with cocaine?”
“Hardly,” Dr. Murray said with a short laugh of his own. “This guy was some kind of Wall Street whiz kid. No, it wasn’t oral. It was IV.”
Laurie swallowed as she struggled to keep old, unwanted memories submerged. Her throat had suddenly gone dry. “Was heroin involved as well?” she asked. In the sixties a mixture of heroin and cocaine called “speedball” had been popular.
“No heroin,” Dr. Murray said. “Only cocaine, but obviously a walloping dose. If his temperature was one hundred eight when we took it, God only knows how high it had been.”
“Well, it sounds pretty straightforward,” Laurie said. “What’s the question? If you’re wondering if it’s a medical examiner case, I can tell you that it is.”
“No, we know it is an M.E. case,” Dr. Murray said. “That’s not the problem. It’s more complicated than that. The fellow was found by his girlfriend who came in with him. But then his family came in as well. And I have to tell you, his family is connected, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the nurses found that Mr. Duncan Andrews had an organ-donor card in his wallet, and they called the organ-donor coordinator. Without knowing that the case was an M.E. case, the organ-donor coordinator asked the family if they would permit harvesting the eyes since that was the only tissue besides bone that might still be usable. You understand that we don’t pay much attention to organ-donor cards unless the family agrees. But this family agreed. They told us that they definitely wanted to respect the decedent’s wishes. Personally, I think it has something to do with their wanting to believe their son died of natural causes. But, be that as it may, we wanted to check with you people as a matter of policy before we did anything.”
“The family truly agreed?” Laurie asked.
“I’m telling you, they were emphatic,” Dr. Murray said. “According to the girlfriend, she and the decedent had talked about the problem of the lack of transplant organs on several occasions and had gone together to the Manhattan Organ Repository to sign up in response to the Repository’s TV appeal last year.”
“Mr. Duncan Andrews must have given himself some dose of cocaine,” Laurie said. “Was there any suicide note?”
“No suicide note,” Dr. Murray said. “Nor was the man depressed, at least according to the girlfriend.”
“This sounds like a rather unique circumstance,” Laurie said. “I personally don’t think honoring the family’s request would affect the autopsy. But I’m not authorized to make such a policy decision. What I can do is find out for you from the powers-that-be and call you back immediately.”
“I’d appreciate it,” Dr. Murray said. “If we’re going to do something, we have to do it sooner rather than later.”
Laurie hung up the phone, and with a degree of reluctance, left her disassembled hair curler, and returned to the morgue. Without donning the usual layers, she stuck her head through the door. Immediately she could see that Bingham had departed.
“The chief left you to carry on by yourself?” Laurie called out to Paul.
Paul turned to face her. “Thank God for small favors,” Paul said, his voice slightly muffled by his mask. “Luckily he had to get upstairs to the news conference he’s scheduled. I suppose he thinks I’m capable of sewing up the body.”
“Come on, Paul,” Laurie said by way of encouragement. “Remember Bingham treats everyone like an incompetent at the autopsy table.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” Paul said without conviction.
Laurie let the door close. She used the stairs at the far end of the morgue to go up to the first floor. There was no sense waiting for the elevator for a single flight.
The first-floor corridor was crowded with media people, and it was all Laurie could do to get to the double doors leading into the conference room. Over the heads of the reporters she could see Bingham’s shiny bald pate reflecting the harsh lighting set up for the TV cameras. He was taking questions from the floor and perspiring copiously. Laurie knew instantly that there was no way she’d be able to discuss Manhattan General’s problem with him.
Standing on her toes, Laurie scanned the crowded room for Dr. Calvin Washington, the Deputy Chief Medical Examiner. As a six-foot-seven, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound black man, he was usually easy to pick out of a crowd. Laurie finally spotted him standing near the door that led from the conference room into the chief’s office.
By going out into the main reception area, then cutting through the chief’s office, Laurie was able to approach Calvin from behind. When she reached him, she hesitated. Dr. Washington had a stormy temperament. Between his physique and his moods, he intimidated most people, including Laurie.
Marshaling her courage, Laurie tapped him on the arm. Immediately he spun around. His dark eyes swept over Laurie. He was not happy, that much was apparent.
“What is it?” he asked in a forced whisper.
“Could I speak to you for a moment?” Laurie asked. “There’s a question of policy regarding a case over at Manhattan General.”
After a glance back at his perspiring boss, Calvin nodded. He stepped beyond Laurie and closed the door to the conference room. He shook his head. “This “preppy murder II’ is going sour already. God, I hate the media. They’re not after the “truth,’ whatever that is. They’re nothing but a bunch of gossip hounds, and poor Harold is trying to justify why the hands weren’t bagged at the murder site. What a circus!”
“Why weren’t the hands bagged?” Laurie asked.
“Because the tour doctor didn’t think about it,” Calvin said disgusted. “And by the time Plodgett got there the body was already in the van.”
“How come the tour doctor allowed the body to be moved before Paul got there?” Laurie asked.
“How should I know!” Calvin exploded. “The whole case is a mess. One screw-up after another.”
Laurie cringed. “I hate to bring this up, but I noticed another potential problem downstairs.”
“Oh, and what was that?” Calvin demanded.
“What I imagine were the victim’s clothes were in a plastic bag on one of the countertops.”
“Damn!” Calvin snapped. He stepped over to Bingham’s phone and punched the extension in the “pit.” As soon as the phone was answered he shouted that someone would be on the autopsy table himself if the preppy murder II victim’s clothes were in a plastic bag.
Without waiting for an answer, Calvin slammed the receiver down onto the cradle. Then he glared at Laurie as if the messenger were responsible for the bad news.
“I can’t imagine a fungus would have destroyed any evidence so quickly,” Laurie offered.
“That’s not entirely the point,” Calvin snapped. “We’re not out in the boondocks someplace. Screw-ups like this are not to be tolerated, especially not under this glare of publicity. It seems as if this whole case is jinxed. Anyway, what’s the problem at Manhattan General?”
Laurie told Calvin about Duncan Andrews as succinctly as possible and about the attending physician’s request. She emphasized that it was the family’s wishes to respect the deceased’s desire to be a donor.
“If we had a decent medical examiner law in this state this wouldn’t even come up,” Calvin growled. “I think we sho
uld honor the family’s request. Tell the doctor that in this kind of circumstances he should take the eyes but photograph them prior to doing so. Also he should take vitreous samples from inside the eyes for Toxicology.”
“I’ll let him know immediately,” Laurie said. “Thanks.”
Calvin waved absently. He was already reopening the door to the conference room.
Laurie cut back through the chief’s secretarial area and got Marlene to buzz her through the door into the main hall. She had to weave her way among the media people, stepping over cables powering the TV lights. Bingham’s news conference was still in progress. Laurie pressed the up button on the elevator.
“Ahhhh!” Laurie squealed in response to a deliberate jab in the ribs. Laurie swung around to chastise whoever had poked her. She expected to see a colleague, but it wasn’t. Before her stood a stranger in his early thirties. He had on a trench coat that was open down the front; his tie was loosened at his collar. On his face was a childlike grin.
“Laurie?” he said.
Laurie suddenly recognized him. It was Bob Talbot, a reporter for the Daily News whom Laurie had known since college. She’d not seen him for some time, and out of context it had taken a moment to recognize him. Despite her irritation, she smiled.
“Where have you been?” Bob demanded. “I haven’t seen you for ages.”
“I guess I’ve been a bit asocial of late,” Laurie admitted. “Lots of work, plus I’ve started studying for my forensic boards.”
“You know the expression about all work and no play,” Bob said.
Laurie nodded and tried to smile. The elevator arrived. Laurie stepped in and held the door open with her hand.
“What do you think of this new “preppy murder’?” Bob asked. “It sure is causing a fuss.”
“It’s bound to,” Laurie said. “It’s made-to-order tabloid material. Besides, it seems that we’ve already messed up. I suppose it’s reminiscent of what happened with the first case. A little too reminiscent for my colleagues.”