Blindsight (3 page)

After a brief pantomime to get Marlene's attention, Laurie managed to get herself buzzed into the inner
area. She experienced a mild sense of relief when the closing door extinguished the babble of voices and the acrid cigarette smoke.
Pausing to glance into the drab room where family members were taken to identify the deceased, Laurie was mildly surprised to find it empty. With all the commotion in the outer area, she thought she'd see people in the ID room. Shrugging her shoulders, she proceeded into the ID office. The first person Laurie confronted was Vinnie Amendola, one of the mortuary techs. Oblivious to the pandemonium in the reception area, Vinnie was drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup and studying the sports pages of the
New York Post
. His feet were propped up on the edge of one of the gray metal desks. As usual before eight in the morning, Vinnie was the only person in the room. It was his job to make the coffee for the coffee pool. A large, commercial-style coffeemaker was in the ID office, a room that served a number of functions, including an informal morning congregation area. "What on earth is going on?" Laurie asked as she picked up the day's autopsy schedule. Even though she wasn't scheduled for any autopsies, she was always curious to see what cases had come in. Vinnie lowered his paper. "Trouble," he said. "What kind of trouble?" Laurie asked. Through the doorway leading to the communications room, she could see that the two day-shift secretaries were busy on their phones. The panels in front of them were blinking with waiting calls. Laurie poured herself a cup of coffee. "Another "preppy murder' case," Vinnie said. "A teenage girl apparently strangled by her boyfriend. Sex and drugs. You know rich kids. Happened over near the Tavern On The Green. With all the excitement that first case caused a couple of years ago, the media has been here from the moment the body was brought in."
Laurie clucked her tongue. "How awful for everyone. A life lost and a life ruined." She added sugar and a touch of cream to her coffee. "Who's handling it?" "Dr. Plodgett," Vinnie said. "He was called by the tour doctor and he had to go out to the scene. It was around three in the morning."
Laurie sighed. "Oh boy," she muttered. She felt sorry for Paul. Handling such a case would most likely be stressful for him because he was relatively inexperienced like herself. He'd been an associate medical examiner for just over a year. Laurie had been there for only four and a half months. "Where's Paul now? Up in his office?"
"Nope," Vinnie said. "He's in doing the autopsy." "Already?" Laurie questioned. "Why the rush?" "Beats me," Vinnie said. "But the guys going off the graveyard shift told me that Bingham came in around six. Paul must have called him."
"This case gets more intriguing by the minute," Laurie said. Dr. Harold Bingham, age fifty-eight, was the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City, a position that made him a powerful figure in the forensic world. "I think I'll duck into the pit and see what's happening."

"I'd be careful if I were you," Vinnie said, struggling to fold his paper. "I was thinking of going in there
myself, but the word is that Bingham is in a foul mood. Not that that's so out of the ordinary." Laurie nodded to Vinnie as she left the room. To avoid the mass of reporters in the reception area, she took the long route to the elevators, walking through Communications. The secretaries were too busy to say hello. Laurie waved to one of the two police detectives assigned to the medical examiner's office who was sitting in his cubbyhole office off the communications room. He, too, was on the phone. After going through another doorway, Laurie glanced into each of the forensic medical investigators' offices to say good morning, but no one was in yet. Reaching the main elevators, she pushed the up button and as usual had to wait while the aged machine slowly responded. Looking down the hall to her right, she could see the mass of reporters seething in the reception area. Laurie felt sorry for poor Marlene Wilson.
As she rode up to her office on the fifth floor, Laurie thought about the meaning of Bingham's early presence not only at the office but also in the autopsy room. Both occurrences were rare and they fanned her curiosity.
Since her office-mate, Dr. Riva Mehta, was not yet in, Laurie spent only minutes in her office. She locked her briefcase, purse, and lunch in her file cabinet, then changed into green scrub clothes. Since she wasn't going to do an autopsy herself, she didn't bother putting on her usual second layer of protective, impervious clothing.
Back in the elevator Laurie descended to the basement level, where the morgue was located. This was not a basement in the true sense because it was actually the street level from the building's Thirtieth Street side. A loading dock from Thirtieth Street was the route bodies arrived and left the morgue. In the locker room, which she rarely used as such, preferring to change in her office, Laurie got shoe covers, apron, mask, and hood. Thus dressed as if she were about to perform surgery, she pushed through the door into the autopsy room.
The "pit," as it was lovingly called, was a medium-sized room about fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. At one time it had been considered state of the art, but no longer. Like so many other city agencies, its much-needed upkeep and modernization had suffered from lack of funds. The eight stainless steel tables were old and stained from countless postmortems. Old-fashioned spring-loaded scales hung over each table. A series of sinks, countertops, X-ray view boxes, ancient glass-fronted cabinets, and exposed piping lined the walls. There were no windows. Only one table was in use: the second from the end, to Laurie's right. As the door closed behind Laurie all three gowned, masked, and hooded doctors grouped around the table raised their heads to stare at her for a moment before returning to their grisly task. Stretched out on the table was the ivory-colored, nude body of a teenage girl. She was illuminated by a single bank of blue-white fluorescent bulbs directly overhead. The lurid scene was made worse by the sucking noise of water swirling down a drain at the foot of the table.
Laurie felt a strong intuition she should turn around and leave, but she fought the feeling. Instead she advanced on the group. Knowing the people as well as she did, she recognized each despite their coverings, which included goggles as well as masks. Bingham was on the opposite side of the table, facing Laurie. He was a stocky man of short stature with thick features and a bulbous nose.

"Goddamn it, Paul!" Bingham snapped. "Is this the first time you've done a neck dissection? I've got a
news conference scheduled and you're mucking around like a first-year medical student. Give me that scalpel!" Bingham snatched the instrument from Paul's hand, then bent over the body. A ray of light glinted off the stainless steel cutting edge. Laurie stepped up to the table. She was to Paul's right. Sensing her presence, he turned his head, and for an instant their eyes met. Laurie could tell he was already distraught. She tried to project some support with her gaze, but Paul averted his head. Laurie glanced at the morgue tech who avoided looking her way. The atmosphere was explosive.
Lowering her eyes, Laurie watched what Bingham was doing. The patient's neck had been opened with a somewhat outdated incision that ran from the point of the chin to the top of the breastbone. The skin had been flayed and spread to the side like opening a high-necked blouse. Bingham was in the process of freeing the muscles from around the thyroid cartilage and the hyoid bone. Laurie could see evidence of premortal trauma with hemorrhage into the tissues. "What I still don't understand," Bingham snapped without looking up from his labors, "is why you didn't bag the hands at the scene? Could you please tell me that?" Laurie's eyes again met Paul's. She knew instantly that he had no excuse. She wished she could have helped him, but she didn't see how she could. Sharing her colleague's discomfort, Laurie stepped away from the table. Despite having made the effort to get dressed to observe, Laurie left the autopsy room. There was just too much tension to make it worth staying. She didn't want to make the situation any worse for Paul by giving Bingham more of an audience. Returning back upstairs after peeling off her outer layer of protective clothing, Laurie sat down at her desk and got to work. The first order of business was to complete what she could on the three autopsies that she'd done on Sunday. The first of the cases had been the twelve-year-old boy. The second case was clearly a heroin overdose, but she reviewed the facts. Drug paraphernalia had been found with the victim. The victim had been a known heroin addict. At autopsy his arms had showed multiple sites of intravenous injection, old and new. On his right upper arm he'd had a tattoo: "Born to Lose." Internally he'd shown the usual signs of asphyxial death with a frothy pulmonary edema. Despite the fact that laboratory and microscopic studies were still pending, Laurie felt comfortable with her conclusion that the cause of death was drug overdose and the manner of death was accidental. The third case was far from clear. A twenty-four-year-old woman flight attendant had been discovered at home in a bathrobe, having apparently collapsed in the hallway outside her bathroom. She'd been found by her roommate. She'd been healthy and had returned home from a trip to Los Angeles the previous day. She was not known to be a drug user. Laurie had done the autopsy but had found nothing. All her findings were completely normal. Concerned about the case, Laurie had one of the medical investigators locate the woman's gynecologist. Laurie had spoken with the man and had been assured the woman had been entirely healthy. He'd seen her last only months before.
Having had a similar case recently, Laurie had instructed the medical investigator to go to the woman's apartment and bring back any personal electrical appliances found in the woman's bathroom. Sitting on Laurie's desk was a cardboard box with a note from the medical investigator, saying that the enclosed was all she could find.
Using her thumbnail, Laurie broke through the tape sealing the box, lifted the flaps, and peered inside.

The box contained a blow dryer and an old metal curling iron. Laurie lifted both devices from the box
and laid them on her desk. From the lower right-hand drawer of the desk, Laurie lifted out an electrical testing device called a voltohmmeter.
Examining the blow dryer first, Laurie tested the electrical resistance between the prongs of the plug and the dryer itself. In both instances, the reading was infinite ohms or no current flow. Thinking that perhaps she was again on the wrong track, she tested the hair curler. To her surprise, the result was positive. Between one of the prongs and the casing of the curler, the voltohmmeter registered zero ohms, meaning free current flow.
Taking some basic tools from her desk, including a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, Laurie opened the hair curler and immediately found the frayed wire that was making contact with the device's metal casing. It was now clear to Laurie that the poor flight attendant was the victim of low voltage electrocution. As was often the case, the victim had been shocked but had had time to put the offending device away and walk from the room before succumbing to a fatal cardiac arrhythmia. The cause of death was electrocution and the manner of death accidental. With the hair curler "autopsied" on her desk, Laurie got out her camera and arranged the pieces to show the aberrant connection. Then she stood up to shoot directly down. As she peered through the viewfinder, Laurie felt pleased about the case. She couldn't suppress a modest smile, knowing how different her work was from what people surmised. She'd not only solved the mystery of the poor woman's untimely death, but had potentially saved someone else from the same fate as well. Before Laurie could take the photo of the curler, her phone rang. Because of the degree of her concentration, the ringing startled her. With thinly veiled irritation, she answered. It was the operator asking Laurie if she would mind taking a call from a doctor phoning from the Manhattan General Hospital. She added that he'd requested to talk with the chief. "Then why put him through to me?" Laurie demanded. "The chief is tied up in the autopsy room, and I can't find Dr. Washington. Someone said he's out talking with the reporters. So I just started ringing the other doctors' numbers. You were the first to answer."
"Put him on," Laurie said with resignation. She sank back into her desk chair. She was quite confident it would be a short conversation. If someone wanted to talk with the chief, they certainly would not be satisfied talking to the lowest person in the hierarchy. After the call had been put through, Laurie introduced herself. She emphasized that she was one of the associate medical examiners and not the chief. "I'm Dr. Murray," the caller said. "I'm a senior medical resident. I need to talk to someone about a drug overdose/toxicity DOA that came in this morning." "What is it that you'd like to know?" Laurie asked. Drug deaths were a daily phenomenon at the M.E. office. Her attention partially switched back to the hair curler. She had a better idea for the photograph. "The patient's name was Duncan Andrews," Dr. Murray said. "He was a thirty-five-year-old Caucasian male. He arrived with no cardiac activity, no spontaneous respiration, and with a core body temperature that we recorded at one hundred eight degrees."

"Uh huh," Laurie said equably. Holding the phone in the crook of her neck, she rearranged the pieces of
the hair curler.
"There was massive evidence of seizure activity," Dr. Murray said. "So we ran an EEG. It was flat. The lab reported a serum cocaine level of 20 micrograms per milliliter." "Wow!" Laurie said with a short laugh of amazement. Dr. Murray had caught her attention. "That's one hell of a high level. What was the route of administration, oral? Was he one of those "mules' who try to smuggle the stuff by swallowing condoms filled with cocaine?" "Hardly," Dr. Murray said with a short laugh of his own. "This guy was some kind of Wall Street whiz kid. No, it wasn't oral. It was IV."
Laurie swallowed as she struggled to keep old, unwanted memories submerged. Her throat had suddenly gone dry. "Was heroin involved as well?" she asked. In the sixties a mixture of heroin and cocaine called "speedball" had been popular. "No heroin," Dr. Murray said. "Only cocaine, but obviously a walloping dose. If his temperature was one hundred eight when we took it, God only knows how high it had been." "Well, it sounds pretty straightforward," Laurie said. "What's the question? If you're wondering if it's a medical examiner case, I can tell you that it is." "No, we know it is an M.E. case," Dr. Murray said. "That's not the problem. It's more complicated than that. The fellow was found by his girlfriend who came in with him. But then his family came in as well. And I have to tell you, his family is connected, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the nurses found that Mr. Duncan Andrews had an organ-donor card in his wallet, and they called the organ-donor coordinator. Without knowing that the case was an M.E. case, the organ-donor coordinator asked the family if they would permit harvesting the eyes since that was the only tissue besides bone that might still be usable. You understand that we don't pay much attention to organ-donor cards unless the family agrees. But this family agreed. They told us that they definitely wanted to respect the decedent's wishes. Personally, I think it has something to do with their wanting to believe their son died of natural causes. But, be that as it may, we wanted to check with you people as a matter of policy before we did anything."
"The family truly agreed?" Laurie asked. "I'm telling you, they were emphatic," Dr. Murray said. "According to the girlfriend, she and the decedent had talked about the problem of the lack of transplant organs on several occasions and had gone together to the Manhattan Organ Repository to sign up in response to the Repository's TV appeal last year."
"Mr. Duncan Andrews must have given himself some dose of cocaine," Laurie said. "Was there any suicide note?"
"No suicide note," Dr. Murray said. "Nor was the man depressed, at least according to the girlfriend." "This sounds like a rather unique circumstance," Laurie said. "I personally don't think honoring the family's request would affect the autopsy. But I'm not authorized to make such a policy decision. What I can do is find out for you from the powers-that-be and call you back immediately."