Livia remembered a trip home during the summer of 2016, and Nicole’s startling jet-black hair and the heavy black eyeliner and black clothes. Livia had ignored it. Made a point of saying nothing about it, and was almost obnoxious with her feigned ignorance to her sister’s physical change. Tonight wasn’t the first time Livia wished she could go back and offer the help Nicole was so clearly begging for.
Livia held up Casey Delevan’s picture again. “Nicole ever say this guy would hurt her or anything like that?”
Jessica shook her head. “No. She barely talked about him at all.”
“You ever tell the police about him?”
“Yeah,” Jessica said. “When they interviewed me, I told them she was dating someone. But I never knew his name and I forgot about the picture until I went through some of my stuff this past summer and found it. Why? You think he had something to do with Nic disappearing?”
“I don’t know.” Livia stared at the photo, held it up. “Can I keep this?”
“I guess.” Jessica lifted her chin. “Do you know what happened to him?”
“Casey? Yeah. He jumped off Points Bridge and was found floating in the bay.”
CHAPTER 9
Trouble sleeping the night before, with thoughts of Nicole and Casey Delevan running through her mind, Livia was at work early on Friday morning. She finished paperwork in the fellows’ office until nine a.m., when she was due in the autopsy suite for morning rounds. In front of her locker she pulled the blue smock over her scrubs and stuffed her hair under a surgical cap. She entered the autopsy suite, dropped her surgical gloves and face shield onto the table, and walked over to the whiteboard where the day’s cases were labeled and assigned.
She saw her name scribbled in blue dry-erase:
The other fellows similarly had cases assigned to them, as did four of the attendings. She read through the list to see if anyone had a more interesting assignment. All the cases that morning looked mundane, except for Tim Schultz. He had a gunshot wound, and Livia was unhappy about it. She knew, however, with little sleep and her mind so firmly preoccupied with Nicole that today was not the right time to tackle a challenging case. Or even an interesting one. An elderly fall victim felt appropriate for her current mindset.
“You look like shit,” Jen Tilly, one of the other fellows, said as she walked up to the whiteboard.
“Thank you,” Livia said.
“Were you crying?” Jen asked.
“No. Just up all night.”
“What’s wrong?”
Livia lifted her chin when Dr. Colt strolled into the morgue. “Long story.”
Tim Schultz jogged through the door just after Dr. Colt and hustled past him to the dry-erase board. Dr. Colt, with his hands behind his back, walked to the board and scrutinized it as if he hadn’t written every word an hour earlier.
“Late for morning rounds, Dr. Schultz, and you don’t get a case for that day.”
“Yes, sir,” Tim said.
“Cutting it close, no?”
“Had a bathroom emergency.”
“Um-hmm,” Dr. Colt said, still reading the board, head back and peering through his cheaters. “There are certain things I don’t need to know about my fellows, Dr. Schultz. You’ve just touched on one of them.”
Dr. Colt walked to the whiteboard, picked up the eraser, and wiped clean the assignment next to Tim Schultz’s name. “That was a gunshot wound that might have been interesting, but I think I’ll give it to Dr. Baylor. An overdose came in overnight, and with your stomach already sour, Dr. Schultz, I think that’s a better assignment for you.”
Dr. Colt began writing on the whiteboard. Livia and Jen smiled while Tim turned his palms upward.
“Dr. Colt, my stomach feels just fine.”
“Not for long. The OD is a decomp found in the projects, suspected to be a week old, or more. The investigators should be wheeling him in soon.”
Tim looked over at Livia and Jen, who were doing their best not to laugh. He mouthed, without making a sound, I wasn’t late!
*
An hour into her autopsy of the elderly fall victim, Livia was struggling to get through the morning. She had completed the external examination to discover ecchymosis on this eighty-nine-year-old woman’s left side, from her rib cage to her shoulder to her skull. She noted and photographed a likely broken ulnar and radius on the left side. The internal examination was unremarkable, as she suspected it would be, and Livia started the process of weighing the organs. Today was the first time in her fellowship—the first time since her early days of path residency—when the smells and noises of the morgue bothered her.
Tim Schultz’s decomp arrived just as Livia was detaching the lower intestine from the rectum. As soon as the investigators unzipped the bag, the odor hit her as it wafted through the autopsy suite.
“Christ Almighty, Tim,” Livia said. “Turn on your overhead.”
Tim switched on his ventilation fan as the investigators positioned the body on his table and quickly fled the morgue.
A few minutes later he sliced open the abdomen, releasing the noxious fumes of intestinal rot. The odor hit everyone in the morgue, and a collective sigh came from each of the doctors.
“Seriously, Tim,” Livia said. “Turn up your fan.”
“It’s on high, Cutty. Since when did you become so odor intolerant?”
Livia tried to block the smell from her mind as she went back to work. The woman in front of her had been discovered yesterday afternoon by her son, who stopped by for his weekly visit and found her lying on the bathroom floor. What Livia needed from this portion of the exam was a time of death, which she calculated from the stomach contents. She noted lividity on the left side, which suggested the fall had likely rendered the victim unconscious since she hadn’t appeared to move after the incident. Specifically, she hadn’t rolled onto her back as many fall victims tend to do. Livia confirmed the fractured wristbones, and then moved to the skull, where she knew the full story would be told.
With the bone saw in her hands, she worked hard to ignore the mess that was unfolding on Tim Schultz’s table. It reminded her of her own decomp from last month, and she tried desperately to stop thinking about Nicole smiling happily in that photo. Livia tried not to think about Casey Delevan’s arm draped over her sister’s shoulder—the same arm she and Dr. Colt discovered to have suffered “shovel” wounds when someone dug him up. She tried not to think of the abrasions on his wrists and ankles from cinder blocks that pulled him to the bottom of Emerson Bay.
With all these thoughts coursing through her mind, Livia’s movements were sticky and fat. She moved the buzzing bone saw over her patient’s head and performed the ugliest craniotomy of her short career, forgetting to design the cut asymmetrically so the skullcap would fit back into place without sliding off. Family members were never happy to see their loved one with a deformed skull at the funeral, a lesson every first-year pathology resident learned.
“Shit,” Livia said to herself as she switched off the bone saw and watched the skullcap slide off the top of her patient’s head.