Dead in the Water Page 5

  “We’ll talk about it later,” I say, knowing once my sister has made up her mind, she’s nothing if not determined. It’s a family trait. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Happy to do it.”

  After saying good-bye, I make one final call to my office. I expect our receptionist, Cass, to answer again, but instead I get Laura Kingston, one of our lab techs. She’s a relatively new addition to our staff, someone who came on during my pregnancy. She and our other lab tech, Arnie Toffer, have an on-again, off-again relationship that is making Arnie crazy . . . or rather crazier. Arnie is both paranoid and a fervent conspiracy theorist, traits that apparently carry over into his personal life. The latest machination he’s been spouting off about has something to do with a top secret group of scientists somehow using the Hadron Collider to hijack the missing Malaysia flight so they can send all the passengers and crew to Mars to establish a colony there.

  I think Laura likes Arnie a lot, but she also works with the police department, splitting her time between the two entities as a way of meeting budgets. And Jonas Kriedeman, her other coworker, has shown an interest in her as well. Whenever Arnie gets too clingy and needy, Laura gives him the brush-off and starts spending time with Jonas.

  As far as I’m concerned, both men have the patience of a saint to spend any amount of time with Laura. She’s a nice person and very good at her job, but she has no off button when it comes to talking. She spews words the way a volcano spews lava—an often rambling, yet amazingly coherent, stream of every thought that goes through her head.

  “Hey, Laura, it’s Mattie.” Before she has a chance to start talking, I quickly add, “I have a body I’m bringing in. Do we know yet who our covering ME is going to be?”

  “Yep, it’s Doc Morton . . . Otto Morton. He arrived about twenty minutes ago. I was showing him around. Do you know him? He’s been doing this stuff for years now, like thirty-some. He was one of the first ME’s in Madison. A super nice guy and very smart. Remember that case of the coed who was found dead a couple of years ago, the one they thought—”

  “Laura! Please!” I’ve learned that the only way to stop Laura’s verbal stream of consciousness is to yell at her. Fortunately, she responds well. She may be annoying at times, but at least she’s self-aware when it comes to her faults. “I don’t have much time. Would you please let Dr. Morton know to expect me in a half hour or so?”

  “Sorry,” she says in a sheepish tone. I wonder if Dr. Morton is with her at this moment, and if he is, what he thinks of her verbal diarrhea. “I’ll tell him. See you soon.”

  I don’t bother to say good-bye, knowing even that could lead to another bout of loquaciousness. Instead, I simply disconnect the call. Rude, perhaps, but like Patrick said earlier, life is too short. It certainly was for Carolyn Abernathy.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Johnson twins arrive in good time, and to their credit their cute little noses don’t register so much as a wrinkle as they set about helping me with my task. Half an hour later, we have Carolyn Abernathy’s body bagged, and we have stripped out of our protective gear and bagged that, too.

  On the way out of the house, I stop and tell Hurley I’ll see him later, either at the morgue or at home. “If I don’t see you at the morgue, I’ll pick Matthew up when I’m done,” I tell him. “Hal is supposed to be back after five, so I don’t think I’ll have to stay on duty any later than that.”

  “I’m not sure when I’ll be home. Depends on what you find during the autopsy. And by the way, we found no medications anywhere in the house except for a generic bottle of acetaminophen that’s nearly full.”

  That makes me frown. The likelihood that Carolyn had some sort of disease or disorder that led to her death has just diminished considerably.

  “What do you want to do about dinner?” Hurley asks.

  I make a face. “Hard for me to think about food at the moment.” The smells are stuck inside my nostrils, tiny molecules of stench I know from past experience will linger for hours, even after I’ve showered several times. “I’ll think of something,” I tell him. I always seem to find the time, energy, and stamina to eat regardless of how nasty life gets.

  With the household details taken care of, I head outside and watch as the Johnson twins load the body cart into their hearse. It makes for an interesting scene given that my day-to-day car is also a hearse, bought three years ago when my other car was totaled. It was the only car I could afford at the time, since I was only months out from abandoning my marriage and all the comforts that went with it. And my car, like most everything else from that marriage, was in David’s name. I’ve since managed to improve my bank account substantially, thanks to work, a tidy divorce settlement, and sharing household costs with Hurley (though feeding and clothing two kids has certainly put several significant dents in our checkbooks).

  Once the body is loaded, I get behind the wheel of my hearse and follow the Johnson sisters to the morgue. We’ve done this two-hearse caravan a number of times and it always seems to cause a few traffic snafus as people try to figure out if we’re part of a funeral procession. We pull into the underground garage area five minutes and several curious looks later, and by the time I’m out of my car and to the elevator, the girls have the body out and are mere steps behind me. On the main level, they wheel the cart into our intake area, where they then help me slide the body bag onto one of our morgue carts. After signing some paperwork, their job is done, and with a somewhat inappropriately cheerful “See you later,” they depart.

  I weigh the body on a special scale that automatically deducts the weight of the cart, enter info into a computer to create a record for the remains, and then wheel the body into the X-ray room and shoot pics of it from head to toe. From there, I wheel our victim, still inside the body bag, into the morgue. A man I presume is Dr. Morton is there waiting for me, seated at a small table near the entrance.

  He looks to be around Izzy’s age, in his early to mid-fifties, but then I remember Laura telling me he has been doing this work for thirty years and realize he’s probably in his sixties. He’s a big man, standing around six-two and weighing between two-fifty and three hundred pounds. With his white hair, white beard, lively blue eyes, and rosy red cheeks, he looks like a scrub-suited Santa Claus.

  “You must be Mattie Winston,” he says, getting up and extending his hand. “I’m Otto Morton.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I say, “but I’m going to pass on the handshake for now.” I hold up my gloved hands.

  “Right,” he says with a grim nod. It doesn’t take him long to get the gist of what sort of autopsy we’ll be doing. Seconds after we’ve finished the introductions, he wrinkles his nose and says, “Guess I better get out the Vicks.”

  Vicks VapoRub is sometimes used by morgue workers and police alike to help deal with the nasty odors that sometimes accompany the job. A small dab in the little cleft beneath the nose, topped off with a mask, is supposed to help abolish the smells. I tried it once, but found the combination of the menthol and decomp smells worse than decomp alone. Not everyone uses the stuff, and its use is considered among the cops to be a sign of weakness and a reason for some lighthearted ribbing from one’s coworkers that typically includes a word synonymous with “kitty.” Most cops don’t “Vape” more than once, deciding the smell is easier to deal with than the ribbing and loss of prestige. I’m surprised Otto uses it. Not many people I’ve encountered who do this line of work do. The smells are something you get used to, horrible as they can be.

  While Otto goes off to get suited up, I wheel Carolyn’s cart over and park it alongside the autopsy table. Then I head for the locker room and don my own gear. By the time I get back to the suite, Otto is there, wearing his biohazard apparatus and eyeing the body bag with a contemplative expression. The exhaust fans are on and running full blast.

  “Tell me what we have,” Otto says.

  “Assuming it’s the resident of the house we were in, it’s a deceased female, age twenty-e
ight, whose last-known proof of life was Friday morning. There is significant decomposition with bloating and slippage—the house didn’t have the air-conditioning on—and insect activity. Though oddly, a lot of the insects near the body were dead. I’ve sent them to Arnie to analyze. Her fingertips seem to have more tissue loss than the rest of the body. From what I observed, there are no outward, obvious signs of trauma, so at this point I’m leaning toward a poison of some sort as a cause of death, though I suppose an aneurysm or lethal arrhythmia is also an option. Based on what I saw at the scene, I think she was standing at the sink, washing dishes, and felt ill. Then she went over and sat down at the table, where she then either died or passed out, falling to the floor.”

  Otto nods, with his eyebrows knitted in contemplation. “Help me move her over?”

  I do so, and then wheel the morgue cart away. “I’m going to go get the X-rays. I’ll be right back.”

  Otto nods again; then after taking in a deep breath, he unzips the body bag.

  Over the next hour and a half, we examine the body, but it’s slow going. The skin is loose and falls away easily, the organs are misshapen and partly dissolved, and there are insects present, all of which contribute to making the job difficult and disgusting. I leave the majority of the initial slicing and dicing to Otto while I busy myself collecting more maggots and flies, dropping them into containers for Arnie.

  “Too bad my nephew isn’t here,” I say before realizing how crazy that sounds. I hold up a maggot between my forceps and explain further. “My nephew, Ethan, is a bug fanatic. He has a collection of bugs at home that would impress any entomologist. He’d be in seventh heaven doing what I’m doing right now. Well, if he could do it without the corpse,” I amend. “Although, I don’t know that the body would bother him. He’s kind of a . . . different kid.”

  Otto chuckles. “Yeah, there’s one of them kids in almost every family.”

  As we continue, Otto helps make the grim process a bit less onerous. From the professional and methodical way he handles his scalpel and the other tools of the trade, he clearly knows what he’s doing. And as we work, each body part we come to seems to trigger a relevant anecdote about some mysterious or puzzling case he’s had in the past. Doing an autopsy with him is like attending a class, except more entertaining. I know this because I’ve attended a lot of classes over the past year and a half in an effort to learn more about forensic science and crime scene investigation. Most of them were great, but a few classes were so boring they could’ve been listed on a death certificate as a cause of death.

  Hurley shows up about an hour into our process. After introductions he informs us he has spoken to several neighbors, and one was able to tell Hurley what dentist Carolyn used. The dental records and X-rays arrive shortly thereafter, and by the time we have finished our autopsy, we know for sure the body is that of Carolyn Abernathy.

  “I’ve located the next of kin,” Hurley says. “There’s the sister in Ohio, and her parents live in Minnesota. I’ll get some guys there to do the notifications right away.”

  It’s always a bit of a relief when family members live far enough away that we don’t have to do the notification ourselves. It’s the most dreaded and difficult part of the job.

  “Have you got a cause of death for me?” Hurley asks.

  Otto stands back with his messy hands laced together and resting on his ample belly. “I do not,” he says with a frown. “There’s no evidence of any trauma, and I don’t see any pathological processes going on. At this point, we’re going to have to wait on the toxicology reports to come back.”

  “Damn,” Hurley mutters. “I was hoping this case would be an easy wrap-up. I guess I’ll get some guys to help me pound the pavement some more and see what we can find out about her.”

  “Did you find any evidence of drug use in her house?” Otto asks.

  “None,” Hurley says. “The diciest behavior we know of is a new boyfriend she sometimes let stay over. Her neighbors say she was a quiet, studious young lady. No wild parties, and she was home every night.”

  “Nursing school will do that to you,” I tell the men. “It sucks all the party right out of you, at least until graduation. Then it’s no-holds-barred.”

  Hurley shoots me a curious look. “I sense a story in there somewhere.”

  I shrug and give him my best Mona Lisa smile. “Some secrets need to stay secret,” I say.

  “Even after we’re married?”

  “Yes, even then.”

  Otto has watched this exchange with curiosity. “You two are an item?” he says.

  “We’re something,” I tell him, giving Hurley a wink.

  “When’s the big day?” Otto asks.

  “That’s a bit up in the air,” I say with a grimace. “Our first date has come and gone. We need to find a place to have it and, so far, I’m O for three on site reservations.”

  “Well, I might be able to help you out with that, depending on how many people you have coming. I live on Lake Mendota in Madison, and if you want, you can use my backyard. You could do fifty people comfortably, seventy-five if you want to be a little cozy, and the lake makes a nice backdrop. We have an under-the-deck patio area, too, in case it rains.”

  “Wow, Otto, that’s very generous of you,” I say. “Thank you.”

  Hurley frowns. “We’re not going to have fifty people, are we?”

  “Not if I can help it,” I say. “I think we’re around twenty with family and close friends.”

  “Well, you let me know,” Otto says. “My wife loves to entertain. She’d jump at the chance to host a reception for you.”

  “But she doesn’t even know us,” I say, worried Otto may be volunteering his wife for something he—and she—will later regret.

  “And you don’t know my wife. She lives for that kind of stuff. She ran a party-organizing and catering business for a few years, but it grew so fast it got overwhelming. She sold it for a nice little profit and nowadays she does the occasional side job, picking and choosing what she wants. Weddings were always her favorite thing to do.”

  “We’ll let you know,” I say. I’m leery of the offer, both because of the distance and the fact that we just met Otto and I wouldn’t know his wife if she was standing right next to me, but I’m not going to say no until I know if we have another venue lined up. A bird in the hand, and all that.

  Hurley says, “Thanks, Dr. Morton. I’d shake your hand, but under the circumstances . . .”

  “Yeah,” Otto says with a smile, looking down at his mucky, gloved hands. “Another time, perhaps.”

  I glance at my watch and see it’s just past three-thirty. “I’ll finish this up if you want, Otto. Izzy taught me how to suture and he lets me close most of the time. This one will be good practice for me. A bit of a challenge, I imagine.”

  “That would be great,” he says. “Don’t worry about the aesthetics. Use big sutures and find the most intact skin you can. It will help if you wire the rib cage together.”

  I nod, eyeing Carolyn’s body dubiously. Intact skin is in short supply. “When I’m done with this, I’m going to call it a day, if that’s okay. Hal Dawson is our other morgue assistant. He should be back in town by five and he’s on call tonight if anything comes up.”

  “Got it,” Otto says. “I’m going to do some paperwork and then call it a night as well. I’m staying at the Sorenson Motel if anyone needs me. The girl at the front desk has my cell number.”

  With that, Otto strips off his gloves and carefully removes the large protective gown he was wearing. Then he washes his hands and removes his mask. “Have a great evening, you two,” he says over his shoulder as he leaves.

  Hurley eyes Carolyn Abernathy’s body with distaste. “I’d say you have your work cut out for you.”

  “Yeah,” I say with a sigh. Then I give him a sly smile. “Was that autopsy humor you just threw out there? You know, work cut out for me?”

  “I do like to cut to the heart of the matt
er,” he says, winking.

  “Ah, very clever. I should have this sewn up in an hour or so.” This is what passes for witty repartee when you’re part of a couple that deals with death on a regular basis. “When I’m done, I’m going to shower at least twice, and then go pick up Matthew and check on Izzy. What time do you think you’ll be home?”

  “Sevenish?” he says, and I know it’s an estimate. By now, we’re both used to odd hours and having to drop everything at a moment’s notice when we’re on call. We’ve adapted. Fortunately, both my sister and Izzy’s partner, Dom, are flexible when it comes to being available for last-minute babysitting. I use Emily, too, at times, but more often than not these days, she’s out doing something with her friends.

  “I’ll order a pizza,” I say to Hurley. “I’ll plan on having it delivered around seven, but if you’re held up, you can always nuke it later.”

  “Sounds good. Pepperoni, sausage, and mushroom?”

  “Works for me, but Emily doesn’t like mushrooms, remember?”

  “Right. How about onion then?”

  “That will work. See you later.”

  He blows me a kiss, not wanting to get any closer to me than he has to. I make kissing sounds back at him. So goes the romance in our lives on many a day.

  As soon as Hurley is gone, so are any thoughts of romance I might have had. It takes me a little over an hour and a half to put Humpty Dumpty Abernathy back together again. There will be no open coffin for Carolyn; that’s a given.

  I pulled up her DMV photo when I checked her into the morgue, and there were several photos in the house of her and others—presumably family members. Carolyn Abernathy was a pretty girl with a longish brown bob, bright blue eyes, and deep dimples in both of her cheeks. Seeing what she looks like now and knowing what she looked like before leaves me feeling sad and angry—sad that this beautiful young woman had to be seen by anyone looking like this, and angry she died so young. And since it appears that her death might have been caused by someone else, my anger will soon turn to dogged determination. There aren’t many avenues for positive intrinsic feedback in this line of work, but seeing justice done is one of them.