Morgue Drawer Four (19 page)

The afternoon was shitty enough, but the night bored me to death. I was wallowing in infinite self-pity, which reached a climax at the darkest hour of the night, around five in the morning. But if I was ever going to be redeemed from my unusual undead existence, then my murder was going to have to be solved; this was one thing I was totally sure of. So I had to swallow my resentment, my personal disappointments, and my self-pity and get Martin to keep going. I thought any hope of this seemed fairly gloomy after the disastrous events of the previous day, but I had to at least try. I waited for him at the Institute with the utmost impatience.

The look on his face shocked me deeply, and it actually should have forewarned me of what other nasty things the day had in store for us, but my mind was on other things. That may have had to do with the fact that a new body had been delivered shortly before Martin’s arrival.

Normally the transport casket is brought into the autopsy section, and then two assistants grasp the body, say “one, two, heave,” and lift the corpse onto one of the stainless-steel surfaces at the Institute.

Not so in this case. The transport casket arrived, and I hung back a bit as usual since even now looking at the faces of these dead people still depressed me. The assistants then opened the casket, caught their breaths, and then agreed on the sequence: “top first.” They didn’t even count down, instead saying only “heave ho,” and, presto, the torso was neatly unloaded down to the bottom rib on the rib cage, along with the head and arms. The hip and right leg came next, followed by the left leg last.

Of course a corpse doesn’t care how many pieces it gets delivered in, but this sight seriously shocked me, so I didn’t think to look at the face on the body until much later. Otherwise I would already have been completely beside myself in distress when Martin finally arrived.

He really looked like shit, too; there was no other way to say it. Bloodshot eyes, the bruise on his cheek had morphed into various darker shades of purple and yellowish green, and for the first time since I’d known him his hair wasn’t properly combed. His part was totally crooked. I was dismayed.

“Good morning, Martin,” I said.

Martin winced, but didn’t reply. He went into the break room, poured himself a coffee (!), sat down at his desk, and pulled the cord to his old dictation headset out of the computer. He flung the thing, cord and all, into the drawer, and put on his stylish new headset.

“If you dictate even one single letter into my computer, I will never utter another word to you again, I will bring in an exorcist, and I will spread the most nightmarish gay-sex stories about you,” he whispered, noiselessly.

Uh-oh, his tone had clearly sharpened—and yet, he was talking to me again. Sometimes you have to delight in the little things.

“I will be so good you’ll wonder what happened to your old friend Pascha,” I replied. A snort was his only response.

“Did you talk to Birgit?” I asked.

“That is none of your business,” Martin replied.

Well, it looked like the two of us were in for some fun and games today.

Martin went back to work on the interrupted report from yesterday, and I left him in peace. Completely. I didn’t talk to him, didn’t try to establish contact with him on an emotional level, nothing. I remained downright unseen and unnoticeable. But I was quite near him, watching him. And what I saw worried me. Martin dictated a lot of sentences twice, and others ended abruptly in the middle, although they actually weren’t complete sentences at all. He took fairly long pauses to stare out into space or sharpen a pencil down to half its length. He listened to his phone ring for a full minute without really perceiving it, and when colleagues asked him a question or simply wished him a good morning he wouldn’t respond until they had repeated themselves for the third time. People were gossiping in the hallway and in the break room, and once again it was all about Martin.

The phone rang again around nine thirty and startled Martin out of his thoughts, so he answered immediately and let his boss talk him into autopsying the
ménage-à-trois
that just came in. We went downstairs.

Even though I still kept a certain distance during autopsies, I really don’t feel that uneasy anymore, like I did the first few times. After all, these are dead human beings we’re talking about, not zombies, aliens, or slimy critters. Just dead people. Which is why, as I’ve come to understand in the meantime, forensic pathologists can still pursue their work without losing it, mentally or emotionally. They are investigating human beings who are dead. And interestingly enough, this is how they help these people or their friends and families, although of course they can’t bring them back to life again. But they’re helping by determining the reason for the death.

In lots of cases it’s about life insurance payouts, but more and more frequently it’s about medical malpractice lawsuits, or it’s about the issue of murder versus not murder.

In the present case all this wasn’t so terribly difficult, because whenever you get a person delivered in three parts, the cause of death is relatively clear. However, that’s not how forensic pathologists work—we’ve covered that before. Even when a puzzle like this is lying on the table in front of them, the pathologists always start their exam, and subsequent report, with the clothing, then the scalp including hair, facial skin and facial hair (that is, eyebrows, eyelashes), the fold behind the ear, and things like that. One might think it’s excessive to cover such aspects in the case of a torso with the heart dangling out of it from below, a little to the side, but in the present case this assumption would have been rash and incompetent: behind the man’s left ear there were dermal abrasions and pressure sores that he had sustained shortly before his death. Presumably a blow from a sap, a kind of homemade weapon, usually a sock filled with sand or lead pellets. So it was possible that the man hadn’t thrown himself in front of the regional express train at all but may have been pushed. Another option: he may actually have already been dead before the locomotive’s high-quality, German-engineered steel wheels worked their charcuterie.

Of course Martin and his colleague determined all of this totally dispassionately, as usual, but I felt both proud of Martin, who might be solving a brazen murder here disguised as an accident or suicide, and sorry for the dead guy, since I personally thought this kind of serious bodily injury leading to death was almost like being murdered twice. So I looked compassionately into the man’s face—and let loose a shriek.

The incision that Martin had just initiated from the throat to the sternum zigzagged. Martin’s colleague looked at him with a furrowed brow.

“What is it?” Martin asked me silently. “Are you trying to short-circuit every last one of my nerves?”

“I know that guy,” I said in a trembling voice. “I saw him here in the building yesterday. And I recognized him from somewhere, too.”

“Recognized, how?” Martin asked in return as his scalpel hovered over the corpse. “Well, who is he then?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

Martin moaned so loudly that the expression on his colleague’s face turned to one of deep, deep concern.

“If you recognized him, then surely you must know who he is,” Martin said.

Martin was right, but not entirely. I racked my brain and, since my thoughts in this case understandably somehow always returned to public transportation, I eventually arrived at the answer:

“I saw him the day I was pushed from the bridge,” I said.

“Really?” The question sounded like Martin couldn’t decide between incredulity and excitement.

“Yes,” I confirmed. “Quite sure.”

I very clearly remember that I had seen the tall, dark-haired and dark-complexioned man somewhere after that, too, but I couldn’t remember where right now. It would come to me. Now the main thing was to determine the man’s identity. And since we knew the guy had been here in the building the day before, we had a high-caliber clue.

“What’s wrong, Martin?” his colleague asked, now growing a bit impatient. “Shall we continue?”

“Yes. Uh, no. Well, soon,” Martin stammered. “This man has something to do with the Lerchenberg case. You remember, the guy who fell from the bridge…And this man was here in the building yesterday.”

Martin set his scalpel down on the corpse, peeled his gloves off, and charged out the door.

“Martin,” his colleague called after him in shock. “Come back!”

I didn’t really understand the fuss, but in the meantime I’ve learned that you really never, ever interrupt an autopsy. And if you do, then you have to specify a reason for the interruption in your Dictaphone comments, and then you remove and store the body properly and clean the autopsy room and yourself.

Martin apparently forgot all of that, racing through the building as though a snake had bitten him.

“Who was the tall, dark-haired man who was in the building yesterday?” he asked, bursting into the administrative office.

The secretary looked up from her papers, stared in horror at Martin’s blood-flecked scrubs, and didn’t say anything at all for a moment.

“Please, the man is downstairs,” Martin explained, slightly winded. “Dead.”

“What?” It sounded more like a shriek of terror than a question.

“The man who was here at the desk yesterday. I saw him in the hallway here,” Martin stammered.

“And he’s dead?” the secretary asked with tears in her eyes. “That poor man.”

“Who is he?” Martin yelled at her.

The door to the director’s office opened, and Martin’s boss stepped out into his secretary’s office. “What is going on here?” he asked, looking with shock at the scene unfolding before him. An unkempt Martin in a splattered surgical gown and a crying secretary staring at each other as though he had threatened her or suggested something lurid.

“Step into my office—” his boss said, and then paused. “Did you come directly from the autopsy room?”

Martin nodded.

“Then please go and take off your gown first and wash your hands—if you haven’t done so already.”

“But…” Martin began.

At that moment his colleague from downstairs joined them in the secretary’s office.

“What the hell is going on?” the man asked. “Are we interrupting the autopsy officially now, or are you coming back downstairs?”

The boss’s eyes narrowed into slits, and he looked at Martin with growing irritation. Then he turned to Martin’s colleague.

“The autopsy is being interrupted,” he said. “Please follow the applicable protocol.”

The colleague disappeared, Martin trudged back downstairs after him, grumbling, threw his gown into the laundry bin, scrubbed his hands, and went back up to his boss’s office.

“What on earth is wrong with you?” the boss asked.

“The dead man we were autopsying downstairs was here in this building yesterday,” Martin said, returning to a somewhat steady voice. “I wanted to know what he was doing here and who he is.”

“That is not something a professional interrupts an autopsy for,” his boss said sternly, the way bosses can get when their employees fuck up.

“In addition, that body is linked to another murder,” Martin added defiantly.

“Which murder?”

“Sascha Lerchenberg.”

“If I recall correctly, that was not a murder,” the boss said.

“Yes, it was. Sascha was pushed,” Martin explained. “And shortly before his death, and possibly even after it, he saw that man who is lying downstairs on the table.”

“What do you mean, ‘and possibly even after it’?” his boss repeated.

Martin realized his error. “Well, you know,” he mumbled. “When someone dies and his spirit floats up over the body…”

His boss nodded. “You’re referring to reports of near-death experiences,” the boss coaxed.

Martin nodded.

“But the people who have those are not really dead,” the boss said. “They have been to the threshold of death, but they come back to life and can talk about the experience afterward.”

Martin nodded.

“But Lerchenberg is dead, isn’t he?”

Martin nodded again, although no longer quite as convincingly.

“When would he have been able to make such a statement?” the boss asked. He was wording his questions very carefully.

I could sense the conflicted feelings in Martin. He knew that he could not explain the way things really were to his boss. So he was searching for an explanation that his boss would accept, but he just couldn’t find one. His spirit was depleted, exhausted, and he didn’t have any creativity left to invent anything. He capitulated.

“He only just now remembered seeing this man again,” Martin said. “When he saw the body on the autopsy table.”

“About whom are we speaking?” the boss asked.

“Sascha Lerchenberg,” Martin mumbled. “Incidentally he goes by ‘Pascha.’ Although his body is dead, his ghost is buzzing around here in the Institute.”

It was dead quiet in the room for rather a long time.

“I hereby approve the leave of absence that you are applying for right now. At least through the end of the week.”

“But…” Martin’s objection was only mild.

“No buts,” his boss made clear. “If you want to extend your leave on Monday, then that will also be approved. But on condition that you go and visit the Counseling Services Unit.”

Martin nodded.

“I’ll get the paperwork ready. Please stop back by here on your way home and sign it,” his boss said, standing up. He patted Martin on the shoulder. “Get yourself a little rest,” he said, sounding friendly but concerned. “Get a few good nights’ sleep, take some walks, go out to dinner with someone.”

Martin nodded.

“And please take only the most important things with you from your office.”

We crept back to Martin’s desk. Martin collapsed into his chair, put the cordless headset back on, and stared into space for a moment. Then he lapsed back into a frenzy of activity, waking his computer back up with a voice command, accessing the internal forensics database, and printing the photo of the dead man that he had taken at the start of the autopsy and saved nice and proper under—for want of the actual name—the ID number along with the date and time. Then he opened his dictation program. But before he could get blabbing, Katrin burst into his office saying, “Have you heard? That good-looking guy from yesterday who came in wanting to arrange international transportation to bring his sister’s body back home? Now he’s dead, too. Run over by a train.”