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“Yes. Not drained out. It welled out of the surface of the skin. ”
“But…how can that be? If the heart has stopped pumping…”
“Right, there’s not going to be any blood in the surface of the skin, especially on elevated sections of the body, no hydrostatic pressure in the veins. The place I made my incision was just below the navel, just off center of the big Y-incision I made during the previous night’s autopsy. ”
“And blood came out. ”
“A lot of it. ”
“That isn’t possible,” Ferro said, shaking his head.
“No,” said Weinstock, “it isn’t. Nor is the fact that when I cut through the sutures holding my autopsy incision together the wound itself had nearly sealed itself shut. It was sealed enough to become watertight, so to speak. I reopened the incision, and saw something else that defied all logic or explanation. ”
“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this,” murmured LaMastra.
“In an autopsy we cut away a section of the rib cage and then remove each of the internal organs, weigh them, do some tests on them to determine the presence of toxins, trauma, that sort of thing. After we’re finished, we pack them in a plastic bag and more or less just cram them back into the body cavity, lay the cut-away sections of rib on top of them, and just sew the whole mess together so that the body is as intact as it needs to be when it sent to the mortuary for funeral preparation. There’s no reason to arrange the internal organs in any kind of order, especially since they’d each been severed from the connective tissue that had held them in place. When I’d done my autopsy on Jimmy Castle, I’d done just that. I’d been pretty thorough about it since I was on the hunt for the blood that I never found. So his internal organs should have been a jumble of dead tissue inside the body cavity. ”
LaMastra was looking green; Ferro unwrapped a stick of gum and chewed it slowly, the muscles in the corners of his jaw flexing.
“That morning, when I reopened Castle’s body, the internal organs—each and every goddamned one of them—was in the right place. ”
Ferro’s face was a stone. LaMastra looked like he’d just taken a mouthful of sour milk.
“It was as if I’d never performed that autopsy. Only the presence of the Y-incision showed that I had even opened the body. Plus, the body—every vein, every artery, every organ—was gorged with blood. Not just filled, but filled nearly to bursting. ”
LaMastra was slowly shaking his head. He really did not want to hear this.
“I assume,” said Ferro dryly, “that you did some kind of examination on the blood? Typed it, that sort of thing?”
“Of course. I had to try and determine what had happened. I mean, here was a corpse I know damn well was dead. A corpse I had autopsied in the presence of a registered nurse, and now it was as fresh as if it had died just that moment. ”
“It was actually dead, I trust?”
“I checked all the vitals again and again. Castle was dead, no doubt about it. His BP was zero, which doesn’t explain how the blood remained in the veins or had the pressure to bleed out. ” Strain was making Weinstock’s voice hoarse. “Castle was your basic O-positive type, but the blood in his veins was a soup. Mostly O-positive, but a bunch of other types mixed in. ”
“I don’t want to know this,” LaMastra said to the ceiling.
Ferro glanced at Val and Crow, who sat on the doctor’s couch, holding hands, saying nothing. To Weinstock he said, “Is that what’s on the tape? Your examination of the body?”
“No. ”
“Then why are we watching a video of an empty morgue? How is this going to corroborate what you’re trying to tell us?”
“Frank, Vince, try to put yourselves in my shoes for a minute. Imagine how I felt during all this. I was shocked and scared and I didn’t know where to turn. I had to sit down and think about it for a while. While I was trying to work it out, I just happened to catch sight of the security camera and suddenly I realized that whatever had happened to the two bodies must have occurred the previous night, after Barney and I had left. Understand, I was still at this point trying to convince myself that somehow someone had come in and tampered somehow with the bodies, filling the bodies with a mixture of blood for some reason, maybe a prank, maybe some kind of weird fraternity stunt. I don’t know what I believed at the time, but I knew that the event had to have been recorded on the cameras. So I called security and got the tape. ”
“How do we know this is the legitimate tape?” asked LaMastra.
“The ID number is hologram-stamped into the case, the case itself is sealed with a tamperproof label that changes color if the seals are broken, and the time signature on the tape itself cannot in any way be altered. ”
Ferro said, “We can check on that. ”
“By all means check. Double-check. But for right now, just watch the tape. ” Weinstock raised the remote and pointed its electric eye at the VCR. “Nothing happens for the first forty minutes, so I’ll have to fast-forward. It’ll take some time, so bear with me. ”
“Why not stop it and fast-forward?” asked LaMastra irritably. “It’s faster that way. ”
“No,” said Ferro, “I see what he’s doing. Fast-forwarding visually will show us the continuity, will show that there are no breaks where other footage could have been spliced in. ”
“Plus, you can see the timer in the corner. It’s progressing normally, and you can see that even when I fast-forward. ”
