“Then what do we do?”
“We schedule our own autopsy, which’ll hopefully contradict the findings of their pathologist. Conflicting reports always confuse a jury. Besides that, the best thing we can do is wait. I know that makes you crazy, but there’s no reason to get excited until we know what they find.”
“What if they find something suspicious?” Kozlow asked.
“That depends,” Jared said. “If it’s a debatable issue, the pathologist we hire might be able to downplay it. But if they can link it directly to you, they may charge you with mur-”
“I told you, I don’t want this turning into a murder trial,” Rafferty interrupted.
“Well, sorry to disappoint you, but that’s out of my control at this point.”
When Sara and Fawcett were done scrubbing up, Fawcett handed her a piece of spearmint gum. “Chew this,” he said.
“Huh?” Sara said, taking the gum.
“You’re not supposed to bring in food or drink, but it’ll keep you from getting nauseous. The smell can turn stomachs.”
“I’ll be fine,” Sara said as she pocketed the gum and pulled her surgical mask in place. “I’ve been inside a mortuary before.”
Shrugging, Fawcett walked toward the autopsy room. The enormous, immaculately clean room was sectioned into eight individual working areas and contained eight autopsy tables. The metal tables had hundreds of small holes to drain internal fluids away from the body. At the moment, three other autopsies were taking place. When Fawcett opened the door to the room, the stench of decomposing bodies hit Sara like a freight train. As she frantically reached for the gum, she caught sight of Arnold Doniger’s unearthed remains. She saw the greenish hue that now colored his complexion. And the decomposition that had just started to eat away at his shoulders and the outside of his thighs. And the slippage of skin that made his face seem almost liquefied. Before she could even get the gum out of her pocket, Sara lurched forward and vomited into her surgical mask, causing a stream of discharge to run down the front of her hospital gown.
Fawcett immediately pulled Sara out of the room to avoid contaminating the area. Watching her clean up in a metal sink next to the autopsy room, he asked, “Would you like that piece of gum now?”
“I think so,” Sara said as she spit out the remainder of her breakfast. After rinsing her mouth and splashing some water on her face, she looked up at Fawcett.
“Ready to try again?” he asked, handing her a new surgical gown.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Fawcett took a quick scan of Doniger’s body, then stepped on the foot pedal that started his hands-free recorder. His voice became careful and meticulously measured. “There are embalming incisions in the left and right femoral triangle, as well as the left side of the neck. The embalmed body is a well-developed, well-nourished sixty-six-year-old white male measuring sixty-eight inches, and weighing one hundred and seventy-four pounds. He has brown hair and no discernible exterior injuries.” Opening Doniger’s eyes, Fawcett pulled out two plastic disks that looked like opaque contact lenses.
“What’re those?” Sara asked.
“Eye caps,” Fawcett said. “Mortician’s favorite trick. They’re lenses with ridged teeth on them – that’s what keeps your eyes closed. Permanently.”
“Nasty,” Sara said.
“But they work,” Fawcett replied. “I just hate having them in there. Personal taste.” He put the eye caps aside and picked up a scalpel. With a quick flourish, he sliced a large Y into Doniger’s chest. The incisions ran down from each shoulder, met at the center of his chest, then went down to the pelvis. “Chew,” Fawcett said when he noticed that Sara’s mouth wasn’t moving. “This is the worst of it.”
Following his directions, Sara frantically chomped on her gum. It still didn’t prepare her. Fawcett reached into the center of the Y and peeled Doniger’s skin away from his body, revealing darkened ribs and most of his internal organs. That’s when the sweet, alcoholic smell of the embalming fluid hit.
“You still there?” Fawcett asked.
“I… I think so,” Sara muttered. All she tried to think of was the freshness of her spearmint gum.
“Good – because I was lying. This is the worst part.” He put down his scalpel and picked up four-foot-long stainless steel cutting shears. “For a gardener, it cuts heavy branches; for me, it’s just as good on old bones.” He then went to work on Doniger’s ribs, cutting through the lowest ribs and working his way up. Each crack was like a wooden bat against a baseball. To clean it up, he drew the breastbone away from the heart, then pulled away five ribs that were lodged in the diaphragm.
“Spearmint gum, spearmint gum, spearmint gum,” Sara whispered to herself.
When the ribs were gone, Fawcett took a survey of the now easy-to-reach organs. “Nice,” he said, seeming pleased. “They didn’t trocar him much. Most of it’s intact.” Turning to Sara, he added, “What’d you say she fed him the night he died?”
“Apple juice and a granola bar. Why?”
Fawcett leaned into the open body, took his scalpel, and sliced around Doniger’s stomach. Satisfied with his cuts, he slid his hands under the organ, lifted the stomach, and put it into a nearby metal pan. He then looked back at Sara. “Because we’re going to peek inside and see for ourselves.”
Three and a half hours later, on the last piece of her second pack of gum, Sara left the autopsy room. She watched through the door as Fawcett pulled a sheet over the body, then made some final statements into his recorder. When Fawcett joined her, she could barely contain her excitement. “What’d you think?” she asked eagerly. “Is it a murder?”
“I can only give you facts – you draw your own conclusions.”
“That’s great, but I’ve spent the last three and a half hours listening to you talk about anterior chambers and aqueous equilibration. I need you to put it in plain English. Did Arnold Doniger die in a coma caused by his diabetes?”
“As near as I can tell, yes,” Fawcett said as they took off their gowns. Well accustomed to Conrad’s black-and-white approach to answering questions, Sara was frustrated by Fawcett’s conditional responses. “The relevant question now is: Was the death natural or was it caused by a third party?”
“I don’t understand,” she said as they headed back to his office.
“There’s enough information to support both – you just have to decide which scenario is more logical. According to the decedent’s wife, her husband was cranky, so she gave him some apple juice and a granola bar. When you’re a diabetic, the crankiness is caused by low blood sugar. To raise your blood sugar, you commonly have some form of caloric intake – an apple, a cookie, something like that. And if the food makes your blood sugar too high, you ordinarily take an insulin shot to lower it. At least, that’s generally the case.”
“So food brings your blood sugar up, and an insulin shot brings it down.”
“Correct,” Fawcett said as he stepped into his cluttered office and headed directly for the overcrowded bookshelf on the far wall. As he looked for a particular book, he continued, “And if you give yourself a shot when your blood sugar is low, the shot will bring it down even further and you’ll fall into a coma or have a stroke. Essentially, we know his blood sugar was low at the time of the shot, because it caused him to go into the coma. The trick is finding out what his blood-sugar level was hours before the shot.”
“How do we do that?”
“As I said, that’s the trick. Remember the Claus von Bülow case? Detecting blood sugar levels to prove a murder is a difficult game. It’s an almost undetectable crime.”
“What do you mean ‘almost’?” she asked, trying to drag concrete answers out of him.
“Ah, here we go.” Fawcett pulled a small white textbook from the shelf. As he scanned a few pages, he rubbed his right earlobe between two fingers. Eventually, he explained, “According to traditional practice, a few hours after someone dies, you can’t tell their blood-sugar level. It’s undiscernible in most of their body. But if you subscribe to some of the superior medical journals – which were recently sliced from our budget – you’d know that it’s still detectable in one place: the anterior chamber of the eye.”