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Eve ground her teeth once. Scientists were so damned frustrating, she thought as she redirected her unit.
From the outside, the Lower Manhattan City Morgue resembled one of the beehive-structured office buildings that surrounded it. It blended, that had been the point of the redesign. Nobody liked to think of death, to have it spoil their appetite as they scooted out of work at lunchtime to grab a bite at a corner deli. Images of bodies tagged and bagged on refrigerated slabs tended to put you off your pasta salad.
Eve remembered the first time she’d stepped through the black steel doors in the rear of the building. She’d been a rookie in uniform shoulder to shoulder with two dozen other rookies in uniforms. Unlike several of her comrades, she’d seen death up close and personal before, but she’d never seen it displayed, dissected, analyzed.
There was a gallery above one of the autopsy labs and there students, rookies, and journalists or novelists with the proper credentials could witness firsthand the intricate workings of forensic pathology.
Individual monitors in each seat offered close-up views to those with the stomach for it.
Most of them didn’t come back for a return trip. Many who left were carried out.
Eve had walked out on her own steam, and she’d been back countless times since, but she never looked forward to the visits.
Her target this time wasn’t what was referred to as The Theater, but Lab C, where Morris conducted most of his work. Eve passed down the white tiled corridor with its pea green floors. She could smell death there. No matter what was used to eradicate it, the sulky stink of it slid through cracks, around doorways, and it tainted the air with the grinning reminder of mortality.
Medical science had eradicated plagues, a host of diseases and conditions, extending life expectancy to an average of one hundred fifty years. Cosmetic technology had insured that a human being could live attractively for his century and a half.
You could die without wrinkles, without age spots, without aches and pains and disintegrating bones. But you were still going to die sooner or later.
For many who came here, that day was sooner.
She stopped in front of the door at Lab C, held her badge up to the security camera, and gave her name and ID number to the speaker. Her palm print was analyzed and cleared. The door slid open.
It was a small room, windowless and depressing, lined with equipment, beeping with computers. Some of the tools ranged neat as a surgeon’s tray on the counters were barbaric enough to make the weak shudder. Saws, lasers, the glinting blades of scalpels, hoses.
In the center of the room was a table with gutters on the side to catch fluids and run them into sterilized, airtight containers for further analysis. On the table was Fitzhugh, his naked body bearing the scars of the recent insult of a standard Y cut.
Morris was sitting on a rolling stool in front of a monitor, face pushed close to the screen. He wore a white lab coat that fluttered to the floor. It was one of his few affectations, the coat that flapped and swirled like a highwayman’s cape whenever he walked down the corridors. His slicked-back hair was snugged into a long ponytail.
Eve knew, since he’d called her in directly rather than passing her off to one of his techs, that it was something unusual.
“Dr. Morris?”
“Hmm. Lieutenant,” he began without turning around. “Never seen anything like it. Not in thirty years of exploring the dead.” He swung around with a flutter of his lab coat. Beneath it he wore stovepipe pants and a T-shirt in loud, clashing colors. “You’re looking well, Lieutenant.”
He gave her one of his quick, charming smiles, and her lips curved up in response. “You’re looking pretty good, yourself. You lost the beard.”
He reached up, rubbed a hand over his stubbly chin. He’d sported a precise goatee until recently. “Didn’t suit me. But Christ, I hate to shave. How was the honeymoon?”
Automatically, she tucked her hands in her pockets. “It was good. I’ve got a pretty full plate right now, Morris. What do you have to show me you couldn’t show me on screen?”
“Some things take personal attention.” He rode his stool over to the autopsy table until he pulled up with a slight squeal of wheels at Fitzhugh’s head. “What do you see?”
She glanced down. “A dead guy.”
Morris nodded, as if pleased. “What we would call a normal, everyday dead guy who expired due to excessive blood loss, possibly self-inflicted.”
“Possibly?” She leaped on the word.
“F
rom the surface, suicide is the logical conclusion. There were no drugs in his system, very little alcohol, he shows no offensive nor defensive wounds or bruising, the blood settlement was consistent with his position in the tub, he did not drown, the angle of the wrist wounds . . .”
He bumped closer, picked up one of Fitzhugh’s limp, beautifully manicured hands where on the wrist the carved wounds resembled some intricate, ancient language. “They are also very consistent with self-infliction: a right-handed man, reclining slightly.” He demonstrated, holding an imaginary blade. “Very quick, very precise slashes to the wrist, severing the artery.”
Though she’d already studied the wounds herself, and photographs of them, she stepped closer, looked again. “Why couldn’t someone have come up from behind him, leaned over, slashed down at that same angle?”
“It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, but if that were the case, I’d expect to see some defensive wounds. If someone snuck into your bath and sliced your wrist, you’d be inclined to become annoyed, quarrelsome.” He beamed a smile. “I don’t think you’d just settle back in the tub and bleed to death.”
