“Me too. Looks like our man got the bare minimum of cosmetic embalming—
just enough in the neck to keep his face presentable for the funeral. And the organs were already removed and bagged at that point, so they didn’t get any formalin at all.” She cut the zip tie at the neck of the bag. “Brace yourself—this is going to be pretty ripe.” Opening the bag wide, she revealed the contents to our eyes and our nostrils.
The lungs—or, rather, what had once been the lungs—were now a few handfuls of gelatinous gray goo. They had been sliced apart during the original autopsy, and the dissection and decay had combined to render them useless as any source of additional forensic information. “Shit,” she said. “And I mean that descriptively as well as editorially.” She tied the bag shut again and strode toward a stereomicroscope at a desk against one wall of the autopsy suite. “At least your girlfriend did me one favor before she stomped out of here. She got us the slides.” Jess switched on the light source and peered into the eyepieces.
“Come take a look.”
I took her place at the scope and leaned in, tweaking the focus a bit to compensate for my lack of reading glasses. The field of view was filled with lacy, delicate circles of pale pink; the insides of the circles were nearly opaque brown. “Tell me what I’m seeing.”
“Cross-section of the alveolar sacs from the lower right lobe of the lungs. Five microns thick—one two-hundredth of an inch. The water in the tissue has been replaced with paraffin.”
“So the pink circles?”
“The business part of the lungs—the sacs where air exchange takes place.”
“That was what I figured. And the brown?”
“Blood.”
“Perimortem?”
“Nope. Clotted. Definitely antemortem.”
“Any way to tell how long antemortem?”
“Top of the head, I’d guess two weeks,” she said. “I wish Dr. Hamilton had kept the save jar.”
“Save jar?”
“Yeah—a highly technical term for the jar where we packrat-type pathologists sometimes pickle bigger slices of organs in formalin. I’ve got thousands of
’em—I tend to keep mine for years, at least in forensic cases. But I think Hamilton incinerates the larger sections as soon as he finishes writing the report. Keeps the shelves clear, he told me once. Also makes it harder for somebody else to second-guess him, I’d say.”
“What would a bigger section tell you?”
“Maybe nothing, but maybe—if we got really lucky—it might have included traumatized tissue. Which might have lent credence to his stabbing theory—or might have shown what a completely idiotic idea that was.”
She leaned closer, practically inserting her head into the cavern that had once housed the rubbery heart and spongy lungs, and played her headlamp over the interior. “The soft tissues inside the body cavity show signs of advanced decomposition,” she dictated, “however, the parietal pleural membrane appears to be intact, showing no sign of a penetration wound on the posterior wall of the chest cavity.” She lifted her foot from the Dictaphone’s pedal. “You wanna help me roll him over?”
We rolled the corpse onto its stomach, or what was once its stomach, so she could examine the back. A ragged gash, roughly two inches long and an inch wide, punctuated the lower left side of the back, just above the hip. Jess teased it open with the tip of a probe. As she worked the probe around inside the wound, a muffled grating sound emerged from the corpse. “Hark,” she said, eyes dancing above her mask. “Do you hear what I hear?” I nodded. “Let’s see what we’ve found.”
Trading the probe for a scalpel, she cut gently at the top and bottom of the wound to widen it slightly, then inserted a small spreader to open it. Something glimmered dully deep within the rotting flesh. Reaching in with a pair of forceps, Jess grasped and pulled, wiggling gently to help tease the object from the tissue. “Come to Mama,” she murmured as she worked it free, then,
“Eureka.” It was a shard of glass, a quarter-inch thick and two inches long. The end she held in the forceps was perhaps an inch across; the piece tapered, over its two-inch length, to a wicked point. “That had to hurt,” she said.
“Meacham said that Ledbetter had collapsed onto a glass-topped coffee table. That’s got to be a piece of it. Could it have killed him?”
“Don’t see how—not right there. It’s completely lodged in the erector spinae—
the main group of muscles of the lower back—so even though it’s a bad puncture wound, it wouldn’t have severed any major blood vessels. Eventually he might have bled out or died of infection, but he didn’t. For all his sloppiness in this case, Dr. Hamilton did get the cause of death right: it was a pulmonary hemorrhage that killed him. What he got badly wrong were the cause and the timing of the hemorrhage. This glass was just icing on the cake. In fact, this guy might have already been dead, or close to it, when he hit the coffee table.”