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Authors: Alane Ferguson

BOOK: The Angel of Death
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Moore frowned as if puzzled. “What on earth happened to this man?” He slipped on a pair of glasses, which magnified his eyes so that they were the size of silver dollars. Leaning so close Cameryn thought the tip of his nose might touch the corpse’s cheek, he said,
“I half-expected you were exaggerating, but . . .” He put a gloved finger on Mr. Oakes’s cheek and tugged. The bottom inner lid was a grayish brown, the color of dirty water, while the tiny, spidery veins looked like bits of black thread. “It appears the eyes actually burst in their sockets.”
“I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ben agreed softly.
Cameryn and her father moved closer, and Sheriff Jacobs and Justin crowded in, too. Although they remained in their street clothes, they were as close to the body as those dressed in scrubs. Their six heads practically touched as they huddled close, like beads on an abacus.
Justin’s hand drifted to his nose. “The smell’s worse now. What
is
that stench?”
“His body is beginning to break down,” Cameryn answered. “It’s the smell of decay.”
Dr. Moore shook his head. “No, Miss Mahoney, it’s not. I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve been around bodies in every stage of putrefaction, and this smell is clearly quite different.”
Cameryn blushed at her mistake, but no one seemed to pay it any mind.
Under the glow of the fluorescent lights, the sockets still gleamed, but the gel on the cheeks had dried and the cornea had withered like a dehydrated leaf. She registered her teacher’s near nakedness. He wore only boxer shorts, white with blue stripes, and for some reason the intimacy of knowing the kind of underwear her former teacher wore made her uncomfortable. She had to remind herself that he wasn’t really here. He was nothing more than a husk, as empty as a shell on the shore. But she couldn’t help feeling his vulnerability on this cold metal table, where dignity, like clothing, was stripped away one piece at a time.
Sheriff Jacobs scratched his neck. “So what’s the verdict, Doc? Do you think this is a homicide?”
“I couldn’t possibly make that determination yet,” Dr. Moore snapped. “The vitreous is dry,” he said, turning back to the remains. “Strange. Very, very strange. Let’s get some photographs. Miss Mahoney, you’re up.”
Cameryn snapped picture after picture while Ben took fingernail scrapings, everything done by the book. Eyebrow and head hairs were plucked and placed into tissue, then into coin envelopes, which were sealed, then signed. A twelve-inch Q-tip was slipped down Oakes’s throat, the contents smeared onto a slide. Finally, they rolled the body on one side, then the other, as Ben tugged the bag and sheet free. Her father shielded her view while Dr. Moore yanked off the boxer shorts, made more difficult due to the angle of the legs.
“It’s all right now,” he whispered into her hair. She saw that one of the men had draped a washcloth discreetly over her teacher’s groin. And then came the crunching sound, like knuckles being cracked, and she watched in horrified fascination as Ben pushed all his weight against her teacher’s stiff arms.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
“Gotta break rigor so we can cut him open,” he huffed.
“Man, he’s tight.” One by one, Ben worked on pushing the limbs down, each of which drifted back to position the minute he moved on. Finally, he said, “I think that’s as good as we’re gonna get him.”
The autopsy knife glittered in reply as Moore said, “Let’s see what’s inside.” His voice shifted suddenly, becoming more clinical, Cameryn suspected, for her benefit. “As you know, Miss Mahoney, we start with the classic ’Y’ incision.” With the razor-sharp blade he whipped the knife, starting from her teacher’s right shoulder and slicing to the small bump on the end of the rib cage. Next came the left shoulder. Moore cut to the rib cage and all the way down to the pubic bone as he flayed her teacher open. A smell rose from the insides, and Cameryn, her hand cupping her nose, was sorry she’d left the mask behind. Dr. Moore stopped, astonished.
His hands trembling, Dr. Moore said hoarsely, “Look at the flesh.”
Five heads craned in. Sheriff Jacobs and Justin pinched their noses, while Patrick and Ben kept their hands at their sides.
“What is it, Doc?” Sheriff Jacobs asked.
With the tip of his knife, Dr. Moore cut back the fat from the flesh. “My God,” he said. “This man was cooked alive! ”
Chapter Seven
FOR A MOMENT no one moved. Cameryn looked on, dazed, at the flesh exposed over the rib cage. It was dark brown at the top of the "Y” incision, less so at the groin. Dr. Moore retracted the skin at the top of the Y and folded the flesh up and over Brad Oakes’s face. The fat looked different, too: Instead of bright yellow, it had turned a sickly gray-brown.
“Look at the muscle here. Are you people sure he wasn’t in a fire?” Dr. Moore demanded.
“He wasn’t in any fire that we could see,” Patrick replied.
Sheriff Jacobs agreed. “I was in that room, Doc, and there wasn’t no fire in there. The bedding wasn’t singed in any way. Neither was the mattress or the nightstand or anything around the guy.”
“Besides, if he was in a fire, wouldn’t the skin itself be burned?” Cameryn asked.
“Normally, if there was sufficient heat to cook flesh, the answer would be ‘yes.’ But this case seems anything but normal. I suppose we’ll know more when we get inside the lungs to check for inhaled smoke.” Dr. Moore’s scalpel was poised in the air, like a conductor’s baton, winking in the light. His face was grim. “Let’s proceed,” he said.
With one hand Dr. Moore yanked back the flesh, and with the other he sliced beneath it, pulling skin and fat away from the rib cage with strong fingers as he made his way to the groin. As he folded the rubbery flesh toward the table and onto Mr. Oakes’s side, the bowels were exposed, shiny and dark. To Cameryn, it seemed as though the doctor were turning down a bed. Moore did this on the corpse’s other side as well. Now the ribs were fully exposed, like the slats on a blind. Dr. Moore pressed his thumb into the ribs and pushed in a hard line.
“These aren’t broken, but they feel strange to the touch. For lack of a better word, the ribs feel . . . dry.” Moore’s chin dipped, fattening his neck. “Miss Mahoney, you say you want to go into forensics. Run your fingers down the rib cage and tell me what you feel.”
Cameryn looked at him in disbelief. Eyes wide, nerves jangling, she looked at the exposed ribs, then back to Moore’s face, then back to the ribs once more.
“Just run your fingers over the breastbone, like this.” Once again Dr. Moore rubbed his thumb along the bones, which gave way beneath his touch. His eyes hardened as he asked, “Or are you too squeamish, Miss Mahoney?”
Her father was standing just beyond the autopsy table, and she could see him shake his head slowly, almost imperceptibly. He’d put on a mask, which had the effect of making the hairs of his eyebrows appear more like brush.
You don’t have to,
he said silently.
It’s not required.
Cameryn looked again at the exposed remains of her teacher. What her father didn’t understand was that she wanted to do this. To get this close to the source of life, even life that had been extinguished, fascinated more than repelled her. She took a quick gulp of air, then, moving close, she reverently placed her latexed hand against Brad Oakes’s ribs and ran the tips of her fingers lightly up and down. She felt the jut of each bone, like knuckles on a clenched fist.
“Push harder,” Dr. Moore barked. “You won’t hurt him.”
Her fingers weren’t as strong as the doctor’s, but she could feel the ribs give way as she pressed against the bone.
“I don’t know what I’m feeling for,” she said.
“True enough. But I want you to file this sensation away in your brain. These ribs are not normal. Step back.”
Cameryn did. She realized with a start that at the end of each finger, her gloves had turned a greasy brown.
Using the pruning shears, Dr. Moore snapped through bone, breathing more heavily as he strained against the breastbone. “Slightly osteoporotic,” he huffed. He removed the breast plate. Shaped like the T from a T-bone steak, the rib plate was set aside on a separate cart that held a small sink with water flowing through it. The water made a soft gurgling sound, like a garden fountain.
“I’m going in for the heart,” Dr. Moore said. His hands slipped beneath the remaining ribs so that only the area from the wrist up was visible. Through this opening he pulled the heart an inch above the ribs, still attached inside. It looked almost gray against his bright yellow gloves.
“Coronary artery, posterior descending,” he said, pinching the heart between his thumb and forefinger. “Anterior descending.” Squeezing harder, he suddenly stopped. “Something is definitely off here. The heart feels harder than normal.”
“Heart disease?” Patrick asked.
“No.” Moore sliced inside, cutting the heart free.
As he raised it up, his eyes widened and Ben said, “Oh my Lord.”
Alarmed, Cameryn asked, “What?” Neither one of them seemed to hear.
“Ben, give me the long knife,” Dr. Moore ordered.
Immediately Ben handed Dr. Moore a long-bladed instrument. With an expert motion, Dr. Moore flayed the heart open in his hand. And now her father went white as he whispered, “Good God.”
“Could one of you tell us laypeople what in the Sam Hill is so strange here?” Sheriff Jacobs demanded. Fists clenched, he rocked forward onto his toes. “What are you all worked up about?”
“The heart. Man, I’ve been around a lot of bizarre stuff,” Ben breathed, “but
this
. . .”
“This
what
?” Justin asked. He took a step closer, his dark eyebrows slanted in disbelief.
Dr. Moore cleared his throat. “For those of you unfamiliar with the normal insides of a human being, this heart has been cooked. All the way through. See here?” With the tip of his blade he flicked at a dark object that seemed to pull free from the heart itself. “That’s a clot. The clot is baked through.”
They were silent then. Only the water burbled in reply. The refrigerator hummed, the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, like night sounds outside her window. It was as if the room itself were holding its breath as everyone waited for Moore to speak again. But it was her father who broke the silence.
“How is that possible?” Patrick demanded.
Dr. Moore planted his legs a step apart, like fence posts, rooting his top-heavy body to the floor. “I don’t have an answer to that question, Coroner. Perhaps he was subjected to a fire elsewhere and was then moved.” Moore’s face had turned dark, angry, and Cameryn guessed it was because he didn’t like to not know the answers. The body was his domain, yet in this case he seemed to understand nothing. “He could have been moved,” Moore said again.
“But he was holding his sheet,” Cameryn protested.
“He died in that bed. He had the sheet clutched in his hand. How could someone pose a person like that?”
“That was only conjecture, Miss Mahoney. My job is to tell you what happened to the decedent medically.”
“So you’re saying it’s murder?” the sheriff asked. His glasses, reflecting light, obscured his eyes.
“At this point, any opinion would be premature,” said Moore. “You should know that.”
The answer did not seem good enough for Justin. He was pacing behind them, his boots clunking against tile, his head shaking back and forth as he spoke. “What I don’t get is how can there be a fire hot enough to cook someone, but not affect the skin? You’re the expert, Dr. Moore, but it seems like our vic’s outsides aren’t burned while his insides are. That’s backwards, right?”
“Yes, Deputy, that’s backwards. At this point, it appears this man died contrary to every single known burn case on record. But if it was a fire that killed him, there will be smoke in his lungs. I’ll be very interested to see what’s inside
them.
Let us proceed.”
Ben took the heart and weighed it. “Three hundred sixty grams,” he said as Patrick dutifully recorded the number on a form. “Normal weight,” Ben muttered. “That’s the only normal part in this whole thing.”
The heart was then dipped in the water and sectioned off for various tests, after which Ben placed it into a Hefty garbage bag with yellow drawstrings bright as ribbons. Cameryn knew that the Hefty bag, once filled with organs, would be deposited back into Mr. Oakes before he was sewed up again. There was nothing romantic in the way a body’s insides were transported to the funeral home.
Dr. Moore reached back into the chest and pulled back a lung, slicing it free from the trachea. He then carried it to a cart already laid out with a terry-cloth towel as Ben brought a tube that poured a small stream of water. Dampening the towel, Dr. Moore laid the lung against the wet surface. Then, picking up what looked to be a regular bread knife, he sliced the lung in two and flipped it open like a book, rubbing his hand over the exposed surface. The others crowded around to watch.
“No smoke,” Dr. Moore pronounced. “There is no evidence of smoke inhalation, which I would have expected to see if he died by fire, at least in the upper lung. I’ll have to run a slide to be sure, but to the naked eye the lungs look clean.” He pushed his finger into various points of the tissue, shaking his head in disbelief. “The upper lobe is hard, but the bottom is less so,” he said. “There is variegation in the color, too. Brown at the top, more red at the bottom.”

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