The Bone Bed

thirteen

THE CFC’S SEVEN CORRIDORS ARE PAINTED WHITE, their recycled glass tiles glazed a grayish brown called truffle. Soft reflective LEDs create a soothing cloud of light, and acoustical drop ceilings conceal miles of wire while cameras and RFID trackers monitor the passage of all who come here, the living and the dead.

Our round headquarters was built by a bioresearch company that went bankrupt late in construction, and with rare exception the original design is ideal for what we do—in fact, a medical examiner’s dream. We can look out energy-efficient solar windows that no one can look in, and a high-performance HVAC controls the environment so precisely we have our own customized weather. Boilers remove moisture from the air before chillers cool it, preventing condensation and an inconvenient phenomenon known as indoor rain, while robots and HEPA filters suck in and scrub away pathogens, chemical vapors, and accompanying awful odors.

The CFC is cleaner than most healthcare clinics, the tissue recovery room I briskly walk past a hundred times more sterile than a hospital OR. Patients declared brain-dead can be transported here while still on life support, ensuring that eyes, organs, skin, and bones are harvested without wasteful delays, the dead helping the living and the living helping the dead. The progress I’ve witnessed in my profession isn’t the straight trajectory I once imagined but a circle like the corridor I follow, passing ID now, then ducking inside large-scale x-ray to see if my technician Anne is there.

Her chair is pushed back and turned around as if she just got up, and glowing on flat video screens are 3-D images of a head and thorax with bright white areas of fresh hemorrhage into brain tissue and lungs, and the brighter white of bones, of a basilar skull fracture that extends into the sinuses, and shattered scapulas, and ribs broken so badly they’re detached from chest walls. The blunt-force trauma case from this morning, Howard Roth; I read the information on his CT scans. A forty-two-year-old black male from Cambridge who allegedly fell down his basement stairs, his body discovered late yesterday afternoon.

I don’t have time for this.

But I can’t let it go, and I click through more images, viewing the body on different planes from the inside out, and the gray shades of organs and muscles are vivid white where there is bleeding and dark where air is trapped. Then brilliant starburst and streaking artifacts are at a high Hounsfield unit value of almost 4000. Dense metal, possibly lead. Most likely old bullet fragments in the soft tissue of the left hip, and more of them in his right posterior thigh. A possible roadmap of the life this man lived, but not what killed him, and the massive internal damage that did is grossly inconsistent with a tumble down the stairs.

A flail chest is more common in the crushing injuries I associate with people pinned under machines or run over by tractors or cars. Most people who fall on the back of their heads also don’t have a basilar fracture. They don’t have broken cranial bones at foramen magnum, the hole in the base of the skull. I click through more images from the whole-body scan, finding no fresh injuries to the arms, hands, pelvis, or lower extremities.

Beyond a leaded glass window, the silhouette of the large bore CT scanner is indistinctly white in the near dark, no one home, and I decide Anne probably stepped out for coffee or to use the ladies’ room. I jot her a note and place it on her keyboard, letting her know I plan to post the body from the Massachusetts Bay later in the day and will need to scan it first.

Should discuss Howard Roth, I add as a PS. Confusing loc of fxx/injuries & lack of them. Need complete history & scene details. Do not want him released yet. Thx.—KS.

I check the autopsy room next and find it quiet and shiny clean, the floor still damp from mopping, long rows of empty steel tables gleaming dully in natural light that filters in through the one-way glass of side windows and those facing the parking lot. Banks of high-intensity lamps in the thirty-two-foot ceiling are turned off, the observation windows in the upper walls opening onto teaching labs that are dim and empty.

Luke Zenner often lingers down here, enjoying the quiet to do paperwork, to check on pending projects, or to tidy up his station, number 2, right next to mine. But I don’t see him or anyone else, my five other pathologists and team of investigators probably in their offices or taking care of various appointments or out on calls.

I enter my iPhone’s password to send Luke a message and notice I have a new one from Benton.

We still on for 5 & you ok? Have seen the news.

I write him back that I will return directly to the CFC after court and probably work into the early evening. I can meet with him and the other agents as soon as I’m done with the post.

Will call when I get a breath, I text him. Dinner? If really late, take-out here while we meet?

My phone immediately chimes and he replies, Will pick up Armando’s.

I answer, Combos with xtra cheese, fresh tomato, peppers, onions. On 1 of them add spinach & artichoke hearts. Say they R for me. I tell him I look forward to seeing him.

It will feel reassuring when Benton appears, when the rest of this afternoon is behind me, and I glance at my watch. It’s twenty-eight minutes past one, and I text Luke about the Howard Roth case, letting him know we need to discuss it and not to release the body yet. I should be back in a few hours, I type, as I move on past the soiled room, the anteroom, the changing rooms and locker rooms, no sign of Luke or anyone, which is typical at this hour, unless we have an unusually heavy caseload.

Beyond anthropology the corridor bends around to the Bio4 containment lab, or what we informally refer to as decomp, reserved for suspected infectious or contaminated or badly decomposed bodies. Pushing a hands-free button that automatically opens a metal door, I walk into an air-locked vestibule and hang up my coat. Grabbing protective clothing off shelves, I push a second button that opens a second door and find Marino covered from the neck down in white Tyvek, checking his camera equipment.

The stretcher bearing the black pouch is parked next to one of three stainless-steel tables attached to wall sinks, and above them observation windows are dark. A clock mounted next to the walk-in cooler reminds me unpleasantly that it’s now one-thirty. I’m supposed to be in court in exactly half an hour, and I continue to hope, at this point rather ridiculously, that I’ll be canceled at the last minute. Or perhaps the trial is running behind schedule and the judge will understand that I am, too.

Was afraid you got lost,” Marino says, as he covers his bald head with a designer surgical cap, this one a medicine skull that he ties in back like a biker’s do-rag.

We’ve got a problem case maybe.”

Not another one.”

The man who supposedly fell down the stairs,” I explain. “It doesn’t look like a fall to me, unless he went off a ten-story building and hit a few things on the way down. Toby took that call, I believe?”

He went to the scene and said there was nothing to it.”

I lean against a counter and pull shoe covers over my wet boots.

Do you know the details?” I ask.

It’s Machado’s case.”

Did he attend the autopsy this morning?” I inquire.

The Portuguese Man of War is always there for gore. Said he was going to. I’ll check with him when I get a minute or drop by his house later and bang on the door.”

Marino and Detective Sil Machado live on the same block in their West Cambridge neighborhood and ride motorcycles together. They’re both into boxing and go to the same gym. It seems they’ve become close friends.

What Toby told me last night was pretty skimpy, not much known at the time,” Marino adds. “Victim’s a chronic alcoholic. Appears he opened the wrong door on his way to the bathroom and fell down the basement stairs.”

Hopefully Luke got a STAT alcohol. Have you talked to Bryce or heard from him?” I cover my hair with a surgical cap.

He left around eleven.” Marino is looking me up and down. “You should suit up before walking in here,” he says, as if I need him to remind me of protocols.

What do you mean left? Left where? Here?”

Apparently had to take his cat to the vet for what he claims is an emergency. He said he’d already let Steward know we’re just getting back from a scene. Apparently he’s cross-examining the witness who’s right before you and it’s going slow, and after that he’s going to ask for a break.” Marino picks up a six-inch plastic ruler and sticks a blank label on it. “But it’s not smart to assume you’ll be cut any slack for being late, not with that a*shole’s dream team.”

He means Channing Lott’s defense attorneys.

There’s no way around my being late,” I reply. “Dan needs to let the judge know that matters are slightly out of my control at the moment.”

If we drove there right now you’d make it.”

I imagine myself walking into the courtroom wearing wet boots and a drysuit liner so Channing Lott’s attorneys can have fun with me.

We got a case number?” Marino opens a drawer and finds several permanent markers.

I tell him what it is, and he writes it and the date on the ruler’s label as I unfold a disposable lab coat. It rustles as I put it on over my gray liner, which I wish I didn’t have to take off anytime soon. I’m still chilled, as if my blood is several degrees cooler than it should be.

What’s wrong with Bryce’s cat?” I ask. “Nothing serious, I hope.”

Onions from chili they had last night; that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, even though Bryce says they’re really careful when they cook with onions. Never drops nothing on the floor or leaves a dirty bowl the cat might get into, right? Ethan and him. Mr. Slob and Mr. Clean.”

I’m curious how you know what they had for dinner last night.” I pull examination gloves out of a box.

Bryce brought me some leftover chili this morning, and I ate it for breakfast and tasted onions. Soon as I heard about the cat I said bingo, now you know what’s wrong with it,” Marino says. “Of course, he thinks it’s some kind of flu bug it got from the groomer, vomiting and diarrhea.”

Ethan’s with him?”

Don’t get me started.” He bends down to open a cabinet and drags out a large plastic case. “Don’t ask me why it took the both of them to transport that fleabag what’s-its-name, Indy Anna? And they have to be together to rush it to the vet, it takes two of them?”

Clasps snap loudly as Marino opens the case and begins to remove a Xenon arc forensic light.

That’s not a very nice way to talk about the pet of someone who was thoughtful enough to bring you homemade chili at the crack of dawn. I’m not going to use the ALC.”

There’s not time for an alternate light source, and I wouldn’t use one in this case, not on the body, at any rate.

Well, Ethan could have just stuck it in one of those damn pet carriers and handled it himself.” Marino sets the forensic light on the counter and plugs it in anyway. “Half the time he works out of the house. What’s the big deal?”

Am I to infer you mentioned your theory about the cat getting hold of onions?” I label a rack of blood tubes that I may not need.

Yeah.”

Well, that certainly explains why they’re treating it like a big deal.” I lower a respirator particulate mask over my nose and mouth. “Eating onions or garlic can be toxic for dogs and cats, and most pet owners know that.”

Shit, it’s like talking to Darth Vader.” Marino stares at my mask. “Maybe you should wear that to court and see what happens.”

I’m sure if Bryce wasn’t overwhelmed and beside himself before you got involved, he is now.”

When’s he not overwhelmed and beside himself about something?” Marino continues in his same grumpy tone, but he doesn’t dislike Bryce nearly as much as he pretends.

It seems to be one of the favorite sports at the CFC for the two of them to go at each other unmercifully, and five minutes later they’re drinking coffee together or eating lunch, and at least once a month Marino is over at Bryce and Ethan’s house for dinner or a cookout.

He probably hasn’t seen the news Ron just mentioned or is even aware of it.” I unzip the first pouch. “Which is why we didn’t know about it, either.” I unzip the second one.