As Garcia gripped the scalpel and prepared to make the Y-shaped incision that would open the chest and abdominal cavities, I turned to Emert. “You okay? You ready for this?”
“Ready,” he said, but he didn’t say it like he meant it. When Garcia used the chest spreader to cut the ribs from the sternum, I heard the detective grunt slightly as each rib gave way with a crunch. It was when Garcia cut open the abdominal cavity and prepared to “run the gut,” as pathologists call it, that things took an interesting turn. Two of them, actually.
Running the gut involves removing and dissecting the stomach and intestines—slicing them open to examine the contents and the linings. I had mentioned the diarrhea to Garcia, he had merely nodded, but I knew he’d be paying particular attention to the gastrointestinal tract. As anyone who’s ever thrown up or had a bowel movement knows, the contents of the digestive tract are not the most appetizing features of the human species. In fact, although the decomposing bodies at the Body Farm tended to smell bad, especially in the heat of summer, they were practically fragrant compared to the odor released when a pathologist was running the gut.
But Novak’s gut was different. It began to leak in Garcia’s hands as soon as he began lifting it from the abdominal cavity. The first smell to hit was the stench of vomit and gastric juice, which began oozing from the stomach. I don’t have a keen sense of smell, which is fortunate, given my line of work, but the smell of stomach contents is tough even for me to take. Then the intestines began to tear in his hands, overlaying the smell of vomit with the stench of feces. There was another layer of odor, too, which I recognized as the smell of decomposition. Leonard Novak, I realized, had died from the inside out. “Jesús, María, José,” breathed Garcia in Spanish, with more of an accent than I’d ever heard from him. “Miranda, help me with this.” Miranda rushed to his side, and together, their four hands cupped beneath the organs, they eased the dead man’s entrails into the sink.
The sight and the smell were enough to challenge even the most stoic of people.
And Detective Emert was not the most stoic of people. Just over my shoulder I heard a groaning, retching sound. That was followed, with unfortunate and unavoidable swiftness, by a gurgling noise, and then the splash of vomit cascading over my right shoulder and arm.
“Thank you so much,” Miranda said. “It was seeming a little too pleasant in here to suit me.”
I helped Emert out of the room, mopped up his mess, and found a clean pair of scrubs for me. When I got back into the suite, Garcia was puzzling over the gut, going through it with scissors and forceps. “Hmm,” he said, at regular intervals. After a half dozen or so “hmm’s,” it seemed worth asking what he meant.
So I asked. “What do you mean, ‘hmm’?”
“I’m seeing a lot of blood and necrosis in the gut,” he said. I nodded. Necrosis—dead tissue—fit with the smell of decomp I had noticed. “There’s some in the stomach, but a lot more in the intestines. Almost like the GI tract has been burned.”
“How? Poison? Acid?”
Garcia shook his head and studied the inside of a loop of intestine. “That’s the thing,” he said. “While you were out of the room, I checked the mouth and esophagus. Both of those are normal. If the guy had drunk enough acid to do this, they’d be damaged, too.”
Then he said one more “hmm,” this one deeper in pitch—more in the vein of an “aha” than a “what the hell?”
“Find something?” It was Miranda who asked the question I had been on the verge of asking, too.
“Maybe,” he said. “Not sure.” He plucked a bit of something from the sink with the forceps and set it in the gloved palm of his left hand. He laid the forceps aside and rolled the object around with his right index finger, then picked it up and studied it. It was small and cylindrical—maybe a quarter inch long and an eighth inch in diameter, rounded on one end, roughly flat on the other. It was about the size of a dried black bean, or—a more familiar comparison to me—a maggot that had hatched from a blowfly egg four or five days before. I thought I saw the dull glint of metal where Garcia had rubbed the surface clean.
“Miranda, did you X-ray the body before you took the clothes off?”
“I did,” she said, “but either the machine’s on the fritz or we got a bad batch of film. All of them came out fogged.”