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Wandering back to her array of tools, Minka selects a plastic shield that works a lot like a welder’s helmet might. She sets it on her head, but leaves the plastic up to expose her face. Then she grabs a small, silver knife that glints under the overhead lights.
“I’ll begin with the Y. Would you like to excuse yourself, Detective Malone? There would be no shame in it. Few could watch an autopsy without losing their stomachs.”
Instead of taking her bait, I smile and move to Thomas’ opposite side. “Teach me, Doctor Mayet. I know during the typical course of an autopsy, you remove organs for weighing and testing.”
“That’s correct.” Flipping her shield down, Minka leans across the body and starts her cut. “Sometimes, we take and weigh the entire organ. Other times, we only shave parts away for testing.”
“What about eyes?” I lean closer, and grin when her head snaps up. “Do you take eyeballs for testing, seeing as they’re an organ?”
She stares for a moment. Penetrating. Challenging.
Point taken, she looks down again and continues. “That’s an interesting question, Detective. The answer, of course, is case dependent.” Stopping in the middle of Thomas’ chest, she lifts her scalpel and moves to his opposite side so she can make the next cut. “I’ve removed eyes over the years. Typically for research or testing.” Grinning, she asks, “Have you been witness to a similar situation?”
“Mm.” I nibble on my bottom lip and watch as she picks up an instrument that looks a lot like tweezers.But pokier.“I’ve witnessed all sorts of things over the course of my life. Why are you opening his chest when we know he died by bleeding from his wrist?”
“Because I want to know what was happening beneath the surface. We’ll send urine, blood, and stomach contents to the tox lab to determine if he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol upon death. His kidneys, lungs, and heart will also be tested.”
Finishing the Y, she sets down her tools. Already, blood coats the glinting steel and works its way along the side of her gloved hand. Turning to her tray, Minka selects something that, to my untrained eye, looks like it belongs to the bolt cutter family.
“Rib shears,” she says, as though reading my mind. She opens them up to create a type of X. “Curved blade goes under the patient’s ribs. Hooks in. Then,” she closes them again with asnap, “cuts through the bone.”
She’s trying to freak me out. Attempting to make me sick and force me home to rest, perhaps. But instead of looking like a pussy, I clamp my lips shut and meet her stare. “Proceed.”
“Alright.” With a nonchalant shrug, and a little handiwork as she peels back the flaps of skin covering Thomas’ chest, she brings the shears down and hooks the bottommost rib. With one last glance for me, she pushes her weight into her work and starts the first cut.
Thepopof bone is enough to make my toes curl. The crackle of steel crushing through a rib makes me stop and take a fresh look at the woman I married.
She works with strength, her hands flexing around the steel while her shoulders bulge from the effort. She makes the first cut, and the rib cage releases, as though the organs inside were too inflamed to be held in.
“It doesn’t take a microscope for me to see other markers from smoking on this body.”
“Hmm?” Swallowing down the bile that tests me, I move closer and lean over Thomas. “What do you mean?”
“Looks like he was dying anyway.” She moves to the next rib. “Lungs are destroyed. Cancerous cells eating him away faster than any treatment could possibly hope to counteract.”
Pop! She makes it through the next bone.
“He had to have known he was dying, Malone. No one gets this far along without feeling it.”
“Nothing is mentioned in his notes.” Frowning, I find a sick fascination in the way Minka’s plastic guard fogs up from her quick breath. She’s not just a nerdy doctor who rolls around on a wheelie chair all day; she gets inside another human body and dissects it the way we did a frog in eighth-grade Biology.
“He might’ve been one of those proud types.” She grunts and slices through another rib. “Refused medical care. Invincible until he wasn’t. It’s a solid reason to commit suicide, in the end.”
“He’d prefer to die on his own terms,” I murmur in agreement. “Quicker this way. To slit his wrist and lose all that blood… it would’ve been like falling asleep.”
“Easy and relatively pain-free.” Moving further up his chest, Minka makes each snip as though the crunch and crackle doesn’t make her stomach turn. “He’s been living with this for a couple of months now. I can’t say when he knew for sure, but he would’ve felt unwell.”
“Maybe this was the way it was going all along,” I ponder. “Could be total coincidence and have absolutely nothing to do with Holly Wade’s case.”
“It’s entirely possible.”
Finishing on Thomas’ right side, Minka moves to the left and works through each bone with intensity and fierce concentration. Her cheeks grow pink from physical exertion, and her shoulders grow stronger, the way someone’s would after a session in the gym.
When she’s done and the whole front of the cage rests untethered from the surrounding bone, she sets the shears aside and swaps them for a fresh knife. Digging her hands into Thomas’ open belly, she slices muscle away from bone the way I’ve seen my brothers gut slain animals after hunting for sport.
“The rib shield.” Finally, she lifts the whole structure and sets it aside with careful hands. “Self-explanatory name.” Turning back, she peeks inside the hole that’s left. “No excess fluid. Now prepare yourself.”
“What?” My heart thuds when she picks up her knife again. “What am I preparing for?”
