10

Because Dorothy had seen the body riddled with bullet holes at the crime scene, watched it pulled out on its slab from the meat locker drawer, she had a visceral aversion to seeing the corpse yet again. Sliced and diced and reassembled-a human jigsaw puzzle.

This boy had been her son’s age, his teammate. It hit way, way too damn close to home. She asked the pathologist to speak with Micky and her in his office rather than around the cold steel table.

John Change was a fifty-year-old Harvard-trained forensic pathologist, born and raised in Taiwan. When applying to school thirty-two years ago, he’d thought the odds for acceptance greater with an Anglo name. Hence the e added to his surname. A modification that formed the basis for Change’s entire comedy repertoire: “Change is good. Look at me.”

He was a Boston fixture, did well in the marathon, had maintained the same height and weight for twenty-five years. The only visible signs of aging were silver streaks threading his sleek black hair.

The ME lab and his office were located in the basement of the morgue on Albany, clean, frigid, windowless, filled with a harsh bright light the sun wouldn’t deem worthy of reproduction. The office was a spacious room, but Change had stuffed it with books, notebooks, magazines, and jars of tissue preserved in formaldehyde. Most of the specimens were teratomas, which, Dorothy had learned, were bizarre tumors that stemmed from undifferentiated cells. Change’s favorites contained hair, bone fragments, and teeth; if you looked at some of them in a certain light, they appeared to be grinning gargoyles. Standing amid the anomalies were snapshots of Change’s pretty wife and two bright-eyed children.

Dorothy had been the last one to arrive, but Micky told her that he had gotten there only a few minutes before. He was looking worn around the seams; the kind of drawn expression that comes from lots of stress, very little sleep, and no resolution in sight. He sat in one of two chairs opposite Change’s desk, drinking coffee out of a paper cup. She took it from him, sipped, made a face.

“This is awful.”

“You didn’t give me a chance to warn you. Sit down.”

Dorothy debated whether to hang up her coat, then nixed the idea. The ambient temperature was worse than a frozen food aisle.

McCain said, “Delveccio was released a few hours ago.”

“What was the bail?”

“Fifty thou.”

“Who posted?”

“Ducaine, like we guessed.”

“Where’s the doc?” Dorothy asked.

“Change is changing.” McCain smiled at his own wit.

“Actually, I’m here.” Change stepped inside and shut the door. He was wearing a suit and tie, but his pant legs were rolled up and his feet were encased in rubber-soled work shoes. “My good shoes are upstairs. Lizard. It’s a bitch to get the smell out. The leather absorbs the odors, and reptilian hides seem more porous, which is counterintuitive, no? Not that I smell anything anymore, but my wife sure does. It’s our anniversary tonight.”

“Happy anniversary,” McCain said.

“How many years?” Dorothy asked.

“Twenty-eight.”

“Long time.”

“Denise puts up with a lot,” said Change. “Long hours and I’m a ghoul. Still, she knows where I am and that my profession doesn’t lend itself to cheating.” He sat down and placed his folded hands on the desktop. “I expected to find something routine. Instead, I found something interesting. Julius Van Beest bled to death but not from the gunshot wounds. By my estimation, none of them were fatal.”

Change spread four Polaroids on his desktop. “These are the gunshot wounds: two that coalesced into each other and skimmed the right temple region, the two holes in the arm, and one through the shoulder. The last one had the highest probability of being fatal until I saw that the bullet went through muscle only.”

He laid out two more Polaroids, both of them gruesome. Dorothy drew her head back.

McCain screwed his lips up in disgust. “What’re we looking at, Doc?”

“The interior of Mr. Van Beest’s thoracic cage. This is what I saw when I opened him up. There’s nothing discernible anatomically because the entire region is swimming in blood.” Change looked up from the photographs. “After I cleaned up the area, I can say with authority that the boy died of a burst in the subclavian artery where it comes off the arch of the aorta. And by my estimation, the cause of the burst was an aneurysm, which is a fancy word for a weakness in the vessel wall. Because the wall is weak, it eventually forms an out-pouching-a sac, if you will. It’s like a balloon. And you know what happens when the balloon inflates. The walls get thinner and thinner until you blow too much air in and, bingo, it pops.”

The detectives were speechless. Finally, McCain said, “How’d that happen? The aneurysm?”

“Usually, it’s a preexisting condition. But I could postulate that the paramedics may have inadvertently brought about a vascular accident as they attempted CPR. A real Greek tragedy, when you think about it.”

Dorothy couldn’t draw words from her throat.

“From your point of view,” Change went on, “you need to keep in mind that you may not be able to charge your suspect with premeditated murder. Only attempted murder, because the gunshot wounds weren’t the direct cause of death.”

“But”-Dorothy cleared her throat-“why would the paramedics do CPR unless his heart had stopped?”

McCain picked up on her question. “There you go: Shock from being shot stopped his heart in the first place. So you could give us a direct link to Delveccio, right, Doc?”

“His heart had to have stopped,” Dorothy insisted.

“It’s a thought,” Change admitted. “Even so, the defense could argue that the gunshot wounds combined with a preexisting arterial defect might have been enough for a precipitous drop in blood pressure. He could’ve had a pulse, but a very faint one, and the EMTs missed it.”

“But still, there’s a direct link to the gunshot wounds.”

“Unfortunately, Detective Breton, that’s all theory. In a medicolegal context, the gunshot was not the cause of death. Mr. Van Beest expired due to a burst artery. And we have no way of knowing precisely when that occurred. The defense could even argue that the paramedics made it worse, that without their compressions the victim would’ve survived. Each downward motion against the sternum could have caused the wall to stretch wider and wider until it ripped open. The area is right below the clavicle near where the aorta splits into the carotid artery that feeds the head and the subclavian artery that feeds the upper body. These are major vessels that transport lots of blood.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said McCain.

“Perhaps, but it’s more than reasonable doubt.”

The room fell silent.

McCain cleared his throat. “The stress of getting shot had to make his heart beat faster, which would put stress on that sac, right?”

Change didn’t speak.

“Isn’t that so, Doc?”

Change picked up a pencil and waved it like a wand. “Yes, the sympathetic nervous system kicks in under stress. I’m sure at some point his heart was beating very rapidly.”

“So would that increase the likelihood of the aneurysm tearing open?”

“That’s more than speculative. I could surmise, but I wouldn’t know how fast his heart had been beating. The defense would seize on that. If I were Delveccio’s lawyer, I’d keep focusing on the compressions.”

Dorothy said, “There is no way the burst artery could have been caused by one of the gunshot wounds?”

Change shook his head. “No hole was found in the area.”

“What about a deflected bullet?”

“That’s not what happened, Detective.”

“Julius fell on his chest when he was shot,” Dorothy said. “Maybe the thump on his chest burst open the aneurysm.”

Change thought about that. “It’s a possibility. But then again, I heard he got hit pretty bad across his chest at last night’s game. The defense could argue that that was the triggering event.”