I wondered if he was doing more than merely accepting the risk; was he actuallyseeking the risk, intentionally exposing himself to a potentially deadly infection?
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not trying to commit suicide by sepsis.” After a pause he added, “Shall we continue?” This time it was a request, not a question. “I don’t think we need to Roke out the abdomen, though. Let’s look at the neck now, instead.”
I laid the chest flap back down into position. With the chest plate and organs now gone, the flap drooped deeply into the chest cavity.
The Crossville surgeon had made a two-inch cut in the neck, which he’d tied off with about fifteen stitches, around which the skin puckered. The thin black threads, whose clipped ends bristled stiffly at each stitch, reminded me of the legs of ticks, and I shivered at the image of ticks burrowing into the woman’s neck. Odd: I wasn’t at all squeamish about swarms of maggots, but ticks were different, scarier bugs altogether.
The blade sliced easily through the sutures and down through the incision, whose edges had barely begun to adhere to one another. I halfway expected yet another gush of pale fluid as I cut, but there was none. What emerged instead—and what I’d not expected—was the stench of human decomposition. The woman on the autopsy table had been dead for only two days and had been in the cooler that whole time, but if I’d been guessing from the condition of her neck, I’d have guessed that her corpse had been ripening at the Body Farm for a week or more. The tissue was spongy and mottled, riddled with gray and black patches of decay.
“Ack,” said Miranda.
“Interesting,” said Garcia. He leaned closer and inhaled sharply. “I suspect that localized necrosis began long before she went into toxic shock. Probably immediately after the surgery.”
“So the surgery itself was probably the source of the infection,” I surmised.
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On the person you ask. If you ask me, I say yes. If you ask the neurosurgeon, he says the procedure went flawlessly and the patient’s death was an unrelated event, a freak coincidence.”
“Well, duh,” Miranda scoffed. “He’s terrified that the woman’s husband is going to sue him, right? Our friend Grease could probably get thirty or forty million for the guy, right Dr. B.?”
I nodded.
Above his mask, through the face shield, I saw Garcia’s brows furrow. “Even if the surgery opened the door to the infection, it might be impossible to pinpoint the source. It could be improperly sterilized instruments, contaminated saline, strep or staph bacteria floating around in the hospital’s ventilation ducts. But let’s take some samples of tissue from the neck. If we can identify the bacterium that’s responsible, we have a better chance of finding the source.” We took tissue samples from the neck’s tissues, including bone—slivers that required the Stryker saw to cut. Finally I took a sample of fluid, inserting a syringe between the third and fourth vertebrae to draw fluid from the spinal canal. Garcia leaned down to take another look at the fused section of spine, with its dully gleaming bracket of titanium and the small block of added bone.
“Do you want it?” he asked.
“Want what? The orthopedic hardware?”
“The entire cervical spine. Would it be useful as a teaching specimen, once you’ve cleaned off the soft tissue?”