Final Disposition (30 page)

      “Did you say Detective Sergeant Cellars is
your
patient?”  Sutta seemed to find the entire situation both difficult to comprehend and incredibly amusing.

      “I
was
her patient,” Cellars corrected.  “I managed to get myself … released from the clinic last night.  Now we’re just friends … uh, good friends,” he amended further when he caught Marcini’s cocked head and questioning glare.

      “But you said you had to kill this woman … to save his life?” Sutta was looking back and forth between Marcini and Allesandra now.

      “That’s right.”

      Sutta seemed to suddenly realize something very pertinent to the conversation.

      “Hey, wait a minute,” he said, looking around the autopsy room, “where are this woman’s clothes?”

      “Uh, we don’t know … we couldn’t find anything in the apartment that she might have been wearing,” Cellars replied.

      Sutta turned to stare at Marcini.

      “Is he saying this woman suddenly showed up
in
your apartment, buck naked?”

      “That’s right … and what the hell difference does that make?” Marcini demanded.  “I was naked, too, when the bitch cold-cocked me with that wine bottle.”

      “And you —?”  Sutta turned to Cellars, who quickly held his hands up — palms out — as if to suggest he knew or was admitting to nothing.

      “He was bare-ass naked, too,” Marcini muttered.  “Don’t let him try to bullshit you into thinking he was just an innocent bystander to all of this.”

      Sutta cocked his head and stared at Cellars.

      “What can I tell you,” Cellars shrugged.  “We weren’t expecting company.”

      “’We’ being —?”

      “Lisa and I — her,” Cellars said, pointing at Marcini.

      “And this very attractive young woman just shows up — stark naked — from where … outer space, or under the bed?” Sutta asked sarcastically, gesturing with his head down at Allesandra.

      “I have no idea where she came from, or how she got into Lisa’s apartment, which — as far as I know — was securely locked at the time,” Cellars said.  “That’s one of the reasons I brought her here … to find that out.”

      “You’re expecting
me
to tell you where she came from, or how she got into that apartment?  How am I supposed to do that,” Sutta demanded.  “I don’t even know who the hell she is.”

      “She called herself Allesandra, right before Lisa tasered her,” Cellars said; “and you can start by telling us where she couldn’t possibly have come from, then we’ll work our way from there.”

CHAPTER 21

      “This is complete bullshit, Cellars,” Dr. Elliott Sutta said to the room at large as he finished distributing an assortment of autopsy tools — dissecting knife, scalpel, rib cutters, forceps and cranium saw — on the sink counter next to the autopsy table that Allesandra’s body was lying on, and was in the process of attaching a new blade to the scalpel that he would use to make the ‘Y’ cut from shoulders to top-of-sternum and then down to the belly-button.  “Complete, absolute and total bullshit.”

      No answer.

      “I thought you were off-the-wall nuts before, but this is taking things to a whole new level,” the supervising pathologist went on as if he hadn’t expected an answer.  “Do you really expect me to believe that this is the same creature you were ranting about last week; that
extraterrestrial
creature named Allesandra who could — supposedly — change her shape at will?”

      Still no answer.

      “Hell, if I could figure out how she did that —” Sutta started in again when he heard Lisa Marcini mutter something.

      “What was that?” Sutta asked, looking over his shoulder at the dark-haired neuro-psychiatrist who was standing next to Cellars at a long counter on the opposite side of the Autopsy Center from the cutting tables.

      “I said I don’t think I should be in here while you’re doing this,” Marcini answered glumly.

      “Well, don’t feel too badly about it.  You’d be surprised at how many medical personnel find it unpleasant to observe an —” the supervising pathologist started so say, but Marcini interrupted.

      “No, you don’t understand, Dr. Sutta, it’s not the sight of you cutting her open that bothers me.  I’m fine with all that.  In fact, the way I feel about her right now, I really wouldn’t mind helping out with that cranium saw, just so I can see for myself.”

      “See for yourself?”

      “I have a professional reason for wanting to take a close look inside that skull,” Marcini responded.  “But, professionally speaking, I’m pretty much the last person who should be standing beside you when you open her up … apart from my ‘good friend’ here, of course,” she added with a distinct edge to her voice, “but he’s a whole separate issue.”

      “That he is,” Sutta agreed.

      “It’s the potential conflict-of-interest situation that I’m concerned about,” Marcini went on.  “I’m clearly emotionally involved in this entire situation; and I’ve already admitted to killing her … in front of a State
and
a County law enforcement official, as you may recall?”

      “She has a point,” Sutta said to Cellars, who had been busy attaching a strobe to one of Sutta’s very expensive digital cameras.

      Cellars looked down at the camera in his hands, over at the horizontally displayed body of Allesandra, and then finally at Lisa Marcini.

      ”You really don’t want to be here for this?” he asked, cocking his head curiously.

      It looked for a moment like Lisa Marcini was going to take a swing at Cellars — a possibility that Sutta seemed to be observing with great amusement — but all she did was shake her head and walk over to the autopsy table.

      “Here,” she said as she gently placed her Mini Stun Baton® and the now-capped five-cc syringe on the stainless steel sink counter next to the glistening cranium saw, “if Colin’s paranoia has any basis of reality, you just might need these.”

      Sutta cocked one bushy eyebrow as he considered the Taser® and syringe for a moment, but then decided to stay quiet.

      “I need to get out of here, I really do,” she said, meeting Sutta’s gaze for a long and serious moment before turning away and walking back to the table where Cellars was still standing, looking amused.

      “You and I will talk later,” she said, her voice and eyes glistening with an edge that Cellars couldn’t quite interpret.  “But if you don’t document every single detail of this autopsy with at least five hundred high res photos, you’re going to be the next stiff who gets opened up on one of these tables,
capische
?”

      Cellars grinned.  “Understood.  I’ll shoot everything that even looks like a body part … but don’t forget, you’re going to have to negotiate with the good doctor here to get your own set of those photos,” he reminded.

      “We’ll talk,” Sutta promised, nodding his head at Marcini as he pressed his right foot down a blue-marked petal under the autopsy table and then leaned his head forward in the direction of an overhead-mounted microphone.

      “Bucky,” he said, his voice echoing throughout the Morgue complex, “please report to the Autopsy Center immediately.”  Then he released the pedal.

      “Can’t let you go wandering all around the complex by yourself and getting lost,” Sutta said, turning to Marcini.  “Lord knows what would happen then.”

      “I understand completely,” Marcini said, glaring over at Cellars.  “Believe me, I do.”

      “Uh, Doctor Sutta?”  It was Nick Grange’s tired voice booming over the intercom.

      “Yes, Nick?” Sutta said, pressing the pedal again.

      “Uh, Bucky went out to the airport with the truck to pick up a special delivery shipment.  Said she’d be back in an hour or so.  Is there anything I can do to help?”

      Sutta started to say something but Cellars interrupted.  “That’s okay, doc, everything’s ready to go here with the camera, so I can take her over to your break room.”

      “Do you even know where our break room is?” Sutta asked.

      Cellars blinked.  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.  Why do I know that?”

      “I have no idea how your mind works, Cellars,” the supervising pathologist muttered, “and I’m not sure that I ever want to know.”

      “I’m not sure I want to know either, doc,” Cellars said as he smiled at Marcini and made an open-handed gesture toward the exit doors leading out to the public receiving and administrative areas of the Morgue building.  “But, in the meantime, don’t start anything without me.  I’ll be right back.”

*     *     *

      Lisa Marcini led the way out of the Autopsy Center, immediately followed by Cellars.

      “Okay,” he said as they walked side-by-side through the prep room and out into a long pale-green-tiled hallway, “I thought that went pretty well … all things considered.”

      “Really?” Lisa Marcini said skeptically.  “Why would you think that?”

      “Well, for a start, he didn’t throw a shit-fit and call the cops right off the bat.”

      Lisa Marcini stopped in mid-step and grabbed Cellars’ arm.

      “Did you actually think he might do that?” she demanded, her eyes flashing dangerously.  “Call the cops?”

      “I honestly didn’t know,” he confessed.  “That’s just what I probably would have done in his place.  I was counting on — oh shit, that’s right, I forgot the damned thing.”

      “What?”

      “The break room is the first door to your right,” Cellars said.  “They’ve got some nice comfortable chairs, a TV and a decently stocked refrigerator.”  He pointed down the hallway.  “Kick back and relax.  I’ll meet you back there when we’re done.”

*     *     *

      Cellars hurried out the double stainless steel receiving doors of the Morgue, started to jog across the parking lot to where he’d parked the SUV, and then realized that the sky had darkened considerably in the relatively short time they’d been inside.

      
Uh oh, storm’s going to start getting bad again.  Time is it?

      He remembered then that he didn’t have a watch.

      
Where’s that j-Connector?  Oh, yeah, right.

      He’d transferred all of the materials from his jacket pocket into one of several small bags he’d found in the back of the SUV, and then put the bag in the left rear corner storage compartment … the same place he’d put the brightly wrapped package for safe-keeping before he and Marcini and the attendant Nick had labored to get Allesandra’s sheet-wrapped body out of the SUV.

      Hurrying around to the back of the SUV, Cellars unlocked and then pulled open the real doors, retrieved the j-Connector and the package, and was starting to shut the doors when he saw a white envelope that appeared to have been partially wedged under a long canvas bag labeled ‘TENT.’  The outside of the envelope read ‘EQUIPMENT INVENTORY.’

      Curious, Cellars slipped the j-Connector into his jacket pocket, set the package down, tore open the envelope, and started to quickly scan the two page list.  He was halfway through the second page when the description of the contents of Pelican case #27 caught his eye.

      “Really?” he said, cocking his head as he read the description carefully.

      Then he smiled as he set the list down and began looking for a black plastic Pelican™ case marked ‘#27’.

*     *     *

      “Come on, Cellars, hurry it up.  I’m not going stand around here all day,” Sutta muttered as he checked the clock on the wall for the third time in the last three minutes.

      One minute later, the impatient supervising pathologist said “To hell with it, I’ve got other things to do today,” walked over to the table where Cellars had left the camera, picked it up, and walked back to the autopsy table with a purposeful look in his eyes.

      Long experienced in the protocols, it took Sutta only a couple of minutes to take a full series of right-angled shots  of Allesandra’s body — overall, medium-ranged, and a few close ups of the head — before he carefully set the camera down.

      Then, after unlocking the autopsy table from its sink counter, he quickly rolled the table into the adjoining x-ray room, slid Allesandra’s body across and onto the x-ray platform, confirmed that the four square Digital Imaging Plates were locked in place beneath the platform’s x-ray-transparent surface and connected to the digital feed cables, then stepped behind the lead shied and quickly exposed the four plates — one at a time — by remotely re-adjusting the position of the ceiling-mounted x-ray tube down the long axis of Allesandra’s body.

      Two minutes later, after confirming that all four quadrant x-ray images of Allesandra’s body had been properly exposed and captured into the computer’s memory, Sutta rolled the table back into the Autopsy Center, re-attached it to the stainless steel sink counter, carefully removed the diamond necklace and earrings and set them aside, and reached for the scalpel.

      “Okay, let’s get this scalp peeled back first,” he mumbled to himself absentmindedly.  “Then, if he doesn’t get his butt back in here, I’m going to —”

      At that moment, Allesandra’s deep purplish eyes snapped open.

      “What the HELL!” Sutta gasped, his eyes widening in shock.

      Then he staggered backwards — away from the table — his eyes widening even further and his mouth dropping open as Allesandra sat upright on the table, brought her long bare legs over the rounded edge, and then stared at Sutta as if he was a delectable piece of dessert.

      Before he even realized what he was doing, Sutta lunged over to the autopsy sink, grabbed for the Mini Stun Baton® and the five-cc syringe, ripped the needle cap off with his teeth, and then extended the Taser® device out in his left hand while holding the syringe up in his right as though he was going to use it as a stabbing weapon.

      In one smooth motion, Allesandra slid off the table, stood upright, stared at the crackling Taser® in Sutta’s hand for a brief moment, shifted her gaze to Sutta’s still horrified eyes, then turned and walked across the room and out the double doors leading to the receiving area.