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He turned to her. “They found the missing baker’s body on the beach,” he said, his voice clipped and strained. “Not how I want to start my day, viewing an autopsy.”
“You just got home,” she muttered into the pillow. “That’s getting old, by the way.”
“I’m sorry, Shelly. It’s the job. I got an hour of sleep. Big deal. By the way, did you go out tonight? Your car was hot when I walked by it.”
Rolling away from him, she didn’t answer right away. “It’s your imagination. I’ve been in bed since nine.”
He rubbed her back, trying not to breathe morning breath on her. Shelly Markham, ER nurse. He was as in love with her as he was able to be and had given her an engagement ring, a one-carat princess-cut diamond. The wedding date was set for next June.
Shelly’s parents were thrilled; her father was the head of pediatrics at Stony Brook. No expense would be spared for their only daughter.
Shelly was Alan’s first serious girlfriend. He’d had others, but no one he would consider marrying. They were usually his friends’ castoffs, or worse, their wives. Or wife. It had happened once. The thing that had propelled the relationship was the sex; Julie Hsu was crazy, and the craziness came out in the bedroom, and that had opened a can of worms. Alan hadn’t confessed this to Shelly, however.
He reached for the nightstand drawer and pulled it open, rummaging for an orange plastic pill bottle of Ativan. Just one tonight to take the edge off, or he’d never be able to stand there and watch. The fact that he was able to converse in a normal tone surprised him.
“Babe, you shouldn’t take those things and drive,” Shelly said, getting up on her elbow.
“I’m immune to them,” he mumbled.
After a quick shower, he dressed and got a reluctant kiss goodbye from Shelly. When he walked out to his car in the pitch-black, the unreality of the night hit him full force. How had he gotten to this place?
Autopsies were his least favorite aspect of detective work. The smells, the sounds of saws, craniotomes, and rib cutters. The body itself, organs and such being slapped into metal buckets, he’d thrown up during an autopsy in the past.
And always the smart-ass comment from the pathologist, a decent guy most of the time. “You gonna make it through this one, Stone?”
Once Alan was in the hospital, he stalled, going for coffee first. The smell of it was bad enough, old and acrid, but fortifying. He’d get through the next hour. He huddled in the corner, out of earshot of the sucking and gurgling, by the head and not the feet, not wanting to watch the pathologist cock up the leg of the decedent to swab her orifices for bodily fluids. Surely, in this instance, that was a waste of time; she’d been in the water for hours. Wouldn’t any DNA be washed away?
The pathologist’s girlfriend was in the room, sitting on a stool with full view of the body, and for some reason, that grated on Alan’s nerves. Was there no privacy for the dead? The girlfriend, Laura, was gorgeous and had a flawless figure. Alan had seen her in a bathing suit. Lily on the slab looked porcine, breasts hanging off to the sides, her belly sliced open, her chubby fingers curled, barely room for her arms on the table.
Will’s assistant handled those fingers, taking fingerprints for identification, drawing blood for toxicology, clipping fingernails for DNA. Those fingers had held on to Alan’s penis, had probed his body orifices. Closing his eyes, he mumbled a silent prayer that nothing of his would show up in the DNA analysis.
Alan took notes just to prove he’d attended the autopsy—the stippling around the gunshot wound, front to back with a downward angle. All that meant was that the gun had been angled downward toward the back of the victim’s head. The shooter had either been standing slightly above or was taller than the victim.
Estimated time of death was twenty-four hours earlier. She’d been in the water most of that time, but drowning wasn’t the cause of death. She didn’t have water in her lungs.
The buzz of the intercom got their attention.
“Dr. Peterson, positive identification by fingerprints.”
“Who is she?” he asked.
“Lily Porter.”
Will turned to look at Laura, who was sitting on a stool behind him.
“How sad,” she replied. “Her poor parents.”
“Is the bullet still inside her head?” Alan asked.
“There’s no exit wound, so yes, this is a penetrating wound,” Will answered, cradling Lily’s head with his hands, palpating her scalp. “I’ll do a craniotomy next.”
“That’s when I leave,” Alan replied. “Thank you, sir.”
“This is the best part. Don’t leave, Detective,” Will teased.
“Yeah, whatever.” He got out of there before the saw came out.
Following the path of the bullet, Will found the projectile near the base of the cranium.
