08.20.08

Chapter 16

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:35 am by Administrator

Brian stepped out of his police car and walked into the County Medical Examiner’s office. He walked past the gift shop, one of the very few morgue gift shops in the country. There were black towels with outlines of bodies on them. Brian never understood that. He never understood what was supposed to be so clever about them. If anything, they underscored the public’s ignorance. Police don’t, and never have, drawn chalk-marked outlines around dead bodies. It doesn’t make sense. They take scores of photographs, they write notes, nowadays they make video recordings, use tape to pick up trace evidence and ever use special devices to capture and maintain odors from an area. But no chalk outlines. An office might draw a diagram and include a figure to show where a body was located. Such crude drawings must have been the confused origin of the myth.

Brian continued across the clean, shining linoleum and through the stainless steel doors that led to the morgue part of the morgue. He absent-mindedly batted away a fly. Several flies. Late summer at the morgue. Grown-up flies were annoying, baby ones could be horrifying. He’d seen maggots joyously jump a foot in the air off a dead body. He hoped it wasn’t going to see that again.

Coincidence. The pathologist was just finishing with Brian’s Jane Doe as he walked in. She’d already stitched up the Y-shaped incision in her chest. The black nylon thread stood out against the waxy blue-ish, yellow-ish white of her skin. Her face looked a little scrunched. He had made an incision along the back of her head, pulled the skin back and then opened the top of head so he could remove and weigh her brain. Her brain was in her chest cavity now. All standard procedure for an autopsy, and usually the most horrifying thing a human body is put through before it’s buried. But not in this case.

The pathologist smiled a hello at Brian and used her two hands to gently pull the body’s face up. The face arranged itself into something that seemed much more human. There was a trace, a vestige of the personality that once lived inside this body.

Brian didn’t need to glance at the pathologist’s gloves to remember not to offer a handshake. “Hi, Mary, how are you doing?”

“Things are great!” She beamed and made a motion with her hand almost as if to toss her hair back, but she stopped and it ended up just looking like a shy twitch. She didn’t know Brian was gay.

They chatted for a few minutes over the dead body, not really ignoring it.

“It’s nice to see you again,” Mary said without irony.

“I should come down here more often,” Brian said.

When Brian was finally able to extricate himself, he went out to the patrol car, started the engine and the air conditioner, and sat at the wheel reading the Medical Examiner’s report. Despite all the gross and severe damage to the body, the cause of death was a massive immune reaction caused by the a mismatched blood transfusion. The Jane Doe had been given a large transfusion of chimpanzee blood.

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