Rogue Wave (8 page)

The morgue was a gray stone building in a low-rent, low-safety area, a place where the elderly and the poor slide into death. The lot behind it was nearly empty. She pressed the bell at the back door and waited.

The night guard was a stranger to her. “I’m Dr. O’Shaughnessy,” she said. “Will you tell Dr. Rosten I’m here?”

The guard raised an eyebrow. “Just a minute.”

Kiernan glanced down at her jeans and black Shaker-knit sweater. Lots of places, she wouldn’t have looked like a doctor, she thought, but in San Francisco—well, she just might be overdressed.

But not for this night. The Pacific wind chilled her neck, ruffled her short hair and made her sorry she’d left her jacket in the Jeep.

It had been in this parking lot that she’d first noticed Marc Rosten; he’d been grabbing the lapels of a Mercedes owner who’d stolen “his” parking space, a guy half a foot and fifty pounds bigger than he was. Rain dripped from the ends of his curly hair, his eyes seemed huge and fierce behind his rain-splattered glasses. He’d looked like a madman. Clearly the owner of the Mercedes agreed, as he backed out of the spot and watched Rosten pull his battered Nash Rambler in. Rosten had turned to her, grinned, and said, “We got to keep these rich bastards in their place, right? Or at least until we become rich bastards ourselves.” They’d been in the internship program just two days. Later they decided she was the only other intern who would have shared that opinion. Had he instinctively known that, as he had insisted, or didn’t he care? Marc Rosten had never been without do-or-die opinions, without ebullient enthusiasms, always eager to talk over his cases, to try everything for every patient, to be three places at once. After the Rambler died, also in this parking lot, he rode a ten-speed and made it to the lot faster than she did driving. Hospital administrators hated him, patients adored him, and other interns kept a wary distance away.

Yet in the dark of that turret room on the top floor of his brother’s Victorian house, all the energy had been focused, calm, patient. The thin, fierce lips had been surprisingly soft and giving. And his hands, with their long tapered surgeon’s fingers, stroked so lightly that it nearly drove her out of her skin. They were hands that were wasted on the dead.

That year had been the most exhausting of her life, when thirty-six-hour shifts were the norm, when the two-month rotations moved from O.B.-Gyn to Surgery, to Neurology, to Ophthalmology/Otolaryngology to Pathology. The life-and-death scene on each new ward called for knowledge she didn’t yet have, intuition for which she had no basis, and an alertness so long gone she could barely remember what it felt like. She should have spent every one of her free moments sleeping. But she’d spent them in that turret room with Rosten. Moments so intense that now, twelve years later, if she closed her eyes she could trace his whole body by touch. She could still recall the alkaline smell of his sweat, feel his thick wet curls, see those dark eyes staring down, demanding, celebrating, an inch from her own.

She could see just as clearly the front porch of his house, the pale blue paint merging with the thick fog, as she stood there waiting for him to come down. The door to the lower flat had opened. “Gone,” Marc’s brother had said. “His residency in Boston came through. He left this morning.”

She had blocked out the scene that followed. She could only recall that blue paint and the distant sound of shouting that she realized, now, must have been her own. And she remembered quite clearly the next frantic week before her own residency began, calling every medical school in the East, rage growing with each call. At first she’d expected to get Rosten on the phone and hear his apology. As the week progressed, she’d readied herself to fly East and demand an explanation. She had never reached him at all.

That was twelve years ago.

The door to the Bryant Street building opened. She realized she hadn’t heard the footsteps coming toward her. She hurried through into the wood-paneled lobby, then stopped, and looked at him.

Marc Rosten was still as magnetic as ever. The streaks of gray merely made his hair seem blacker. There were lines now around his eyes and mouth, but they lent a new and appealing steadiness to his features. He hadn’t changed, and yet was entirely different.

“You remember where the morgue is?” he said, turning and moving quickly down the hall. His eyes still had that burning intensity. For the first moments of any meeting they had always focused exclusively on her, “sucking you into me” he had said. Now he didn’t look at her directly. He spoke with a tight control that was the antithesis of the Rosten who had flung covers, sheets, and pillows in all directions as he made love.

The hallway was icy, the hum of the air-movement system was louder than the refrigerators would be in the morgue. She followed him into the elevator and rode down in silence. He could have commented that she hadn’t left him much choice when she’d said he owed her, but apparently he wasn’t going to deal with that one. And her first loyalty, she reminded herself, was to the case, not to old grievances.

She stepped out into the basement. The sharp smell of Clorox struck her. The first time she had come into an autopsy room she had expected it to reek of formaldehyde like the anatomy labs in college. She’d been surprised when the dominant smell was ammonia.

This autopsy room was just as she recalled it, a large rectangle with five porcelain tables surrounded by troughs. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find a body on one of the tables, the water running pink in the troughs, and a pathologist speaking into his microphone as he removed the heart for examination or sectioned the liver. The dead don’t choose their hour of death; pathologists don’t choose their hour of call. There had been weeks when the autopsy room was never empty. Now the room was silent and dark, and as Marc turned on the fluorescent lights one after another, they seemed to highlight the anonymity of death. And the immediacy of life. Or perhaps it was Marc himself who did both.

“Number eight,” Rosten snapped, without looking at her or stopping to check the register. He yanked open the metal door with the same angry tug he’d used on the Mercedes owner’s lapels. He hooked the chains around the slab, wheeled the corpse over by the autopsy tables. Then he waited, arms crossed, eyes at half-mast. He wasn’t tapping his foot or looking at his watch; he didn’t have to.

Who are you to be angry at
me?
Kiernan clenched her teeth to keep from blurting it out. She looked at the body on the slab.

Carlos Delaney was past the aid of Clorox and cold. The time he’d spent in the Pacific had turned his skin a sickly white. She knew that if she were to take his hand, the skin would slough off like a stretched-out rubber glove. But there wasn’t enough skin to come off. The crabs had seen to that. They’d eaten through to the plates of the skull. The ears were almost gone, as was the tissue above them, and the lips and cheeks. There were thick purplish rings around his eyes.

“Not too palatable,” Rosten muttered.

Glancing over, she could see him tightening his shoulders, forcing himself to keep looking at the partially decomposed corpse. After all these years, Marc Rosten still had not come to terms with his profession. “Crabs waste no time,” he said. “Guy falls into the sea and it’s Thanksgiving for them.” He turned away from the body. “Crabs eat us just like we eat them, take the easy parts first—hands, feet, ears, eyes, whatever they can get their choppers into. Us, we can’t be bothered with the hard stuff, the meat under the shell. Not unless we’re hungry enough.”

“Is that part of your opening remarks to new students?” she asked, fighting to keep her voice from betraying her anger. She would
not
allow him to condescend. Taking a deep breath, she looked back at Delaney, noting that there was no telltale discoloration that would have been caused by the blood settling in the dead body. “No specifically localized lividity,” she said. “You figure he was batted around in the water for a while after death?”

Rosten nodded abruptly.

“How long was he in the water? Five or six days at least, from the look of him.”

“Five,” he admitted. “The activity of the crabs and bottom feeders tells us he spent about a couple of days down there.”

Kiernan stared at the white skin of Delaney’s midsection. The waist was the most likely spot to find lividity, but there wasn’t any. She looked back at Delaney’s face. “How’d you ID him? Teeth?”

“Couldn’t find a match. Not every sailor or deckhand elects to spend his free time at the dentist’s.”

Another time she might have laughed. Now she simply asked, “So how?”

“The eyes!” There was a fleck of excitement and pride in his voice.

Kiernan nodded, feeling the pull of his enthusiasm, remembering how easy it had been to be caught up in it.

“Damned good thing he had the goggles on. Eyeballs are the first things crabs go for.”

“Also the first thing to decompose. You were lucky.”

Rosten nodded sharply. “They were in reasonably good shape. But, I started to wonder, just why would a deckhand be wearing tinted goggles at night?”

“To keep the spray from the storm out of his eyes?”

“Tinted
goggles. Except for the mast light it was pitch black out there.”

“Very odd. What did you find in the eyes?”

“Premortem damage to the foveal cones and the choroid layer of the eye.”

“So the insult to the eyes, or the disease, happened while he was still alive,” Kiernan said, giving up any effort to restrain her excitement. That same rush of the chase they’d shared here before. She pushed the memory away, and tried to call up a picture of the eyeball. It was not an organ usually sectioned in an autopsy. It galled her to have to say, “The sclera covers the outside of the eyeball. Beneath that is the choroid, which is heavily pigmented, right?”

Rosten nodded, the barest hint of a smile curling his lips.

“And internal to that is the retina, and the foveal cones in the retina are sensitive to color and provide visual acuity, right?” she went on.

“Right. So we checked with local ophthalmologists and found one who had seen a man fitting Delaney’s description. He mentioned that Delaney had listed a broken femur on his history form. He recalled Delaney said he’d been treated at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland before. I checked there and matched my femur to their X-ray!” He smiled with satisfaction.

The same smile. The smile that had misled her. This is not a contest, she cautioned herself, this is my only chance to find out about Delaney. “What about cause of death?”

“Asphyxiation,” he said. “Blood chloride levels unequal in both sides of the heart. There was aspirate material in the heart, stomach and microscopic flora in the lungs.” His smile had faded but there was a look of confidence about him, “the witness-stand look” they’d called it in med school: that expression of pleasant forbearance that said to juries, “Rest assured, I am the expert.”

“So Delaney took in a lot of seawater. What about a secondary cause? Did you find ecchymosis around the eyes?” she asked, wondering about telltale broken blood vessels.

“Not enough to say he was strangled first.”

“The damage to the foveal cones and the choroid layer? Just how bad was it?”

Rosten flinched. The expert witness was piqued at being asked a question he’d hoped to avoid. Kiernan fought back a smile. So much for keeping it merely an interview. The old competitiveness was too ingrained. Rosten could, of course, stop answering her questions, but she was willing to bet he wouldn’t. Too much like throwing in the towel.

He didn’t. “All the foveal cones had been compromised. That fitted with the ophthalmologist’s report. The choroid was ninety percent dysfunctional too.”

“Did the ophthalmologist say what had caused that? Heredity? There are no signs of albinism.”

“The ophthalmologist guessed scotoma, but couldn’t say what disease caused it. He did say it wouldn’t be something communicable.”

She wasn’t surprised that had been Rosten’s first concern. One of the goals of the coroner’s department was to spot a contagious disease before a second body came in with it. “So Carlos Delaney had poor color vision and little acuity, right?” That would explain the tinted goggles, Kiernan thought, but not why he was wearing them at night. Maybe he hadn’t been able to take them off? If Robin Matucci had tied him up earlier … She’d need to think about that later.

Kiernan realized she’d reached the limit of Rosten’s knowledge of eyes. She stared again at Delaney’s disfigured face, trying to refocus herself, then asked, “What did toxicology show?”

“Point two three alcohol in the bloodstream.

“Point two three! Serious drinking.”

“Right.”

“So we can assume maybe six, seven ounces?”

“The level in the stomach was noticeably higher than in the liver.”

Kiernan nodded slowly. “He did his drinking so close to his death that the alcohol didn’t metabolize. Was he an alcoholic?”

Rosten wagged a finger just above Delaney’s liver. His hand looked brown against the white of the corpse. The familiarity of the movement suggested a bond between him and the deceased. Or did it indicate possession?
His
case.

“Well, now, that’s an interesting question. There was some fibrosis in the liver, nothing significant, but enough to make me wonder, so I checked the striated muscles.” He paused.

She could tell he was waiting for her to ask what he found, but she couldn’t bring herself to cheerlead. She waited.

Finally, he said, “Rhabdomyolysis.”

She nodded, impressed. Finding that microscopic change, the distortion of the fibers of the skeletal muscles, was good work indeed. “So signs of heavy alcohol consumption, but not necessarily recently.” She wondered if Delaney’s brain had shrunk away from the skull, leaving excessive liquid, as was the case with many long-time alcoholics. “Given the length of exposure he’d been subjected to, I suppose there was no way to check for wet brain?”

Marc’s hand stopped midair. “The tissue was like tapioca; nothing was firm enough to section.”

“Did you preserve it? You can section it after it firms up in the formalin.” She could hear the sharp edge to her voice.