CHAPTER
TWELVE

Washington, D.C.
Dr. Samantha Owens

It was a morgue. That’s about as much as Sam could say about the OCME. It wasn’t shiny and flashy like her office back home, with its beveled skylights, pristine, landscaped acreage and views of downtown Nashville. This morgue was old and dingy, housed in the basement of a redbrick building that had been a part of D.C. General Hospital for years. And, strangely, only a few blocks from where Donovan had been killed.

She was met at the front desk by an extremely tall man with a hitch in his gait. She figured he had some sort of osteoarthritis or a minor congenital dysplasia, something that could be fixed by a total hip arthroplasty, or perhaps even the lesser hemiarthroplasty if one had the time and inclination to be off your feet and away from work for a while. This man didn’t strike her as the sitting-around type.

“Dr. Owens, I presume? I am Amado Nocek, assistant chief medical examiner. It is truly my pleasure to meet you.”

“And you, as well. Italian?” she asked.

His face lit up, making his homeliness more appealing. “Hungarian on my paternal side, Italian on my maternal. You have a good ear for languages, I presume?”

Sam smiled and shook his hand. “Not really. I knew an Amado once. He was from Naples.”

“A beautiful area. The land of the Sirens.” He put a large, bony hand to his chest. “‘Winged maidens, virgin daughters of Gaia, the Seirenes, may you come to my mourning with Libyan flute or pipe or lyre, tears to match my plaintive woes; grief for grief and mournful chant for chant, may Persephone send choirs of death in harmony with my lamentation, so that she may receive as thanks from me, in addition to my tears, a paean for the departed dead beneath her gloomy roof.’”

Sam looked at him in surprise. “Euripides?”

Nocek gave her a wide smile. “Very good, Dr. Owens. Most around here would not understand such things.”

“We read Helen in school. She was always a favorite of mine.”

“As she is of mine. Her words are fitting, I think, for a day like today.” He gestured to a door and she followed him through, the familiar scents of cold and chemicals and death meeting her. She immediately relaxed. Home. She felt more at home among complete strangers dead than she did in her own house.

Nocek began to gather familiar blue-and-white garb. “Why do you wish to repeat the postmortem examination on this particular shooting victim, may I ask?”

“You may. The victim’s mother is a personal friend. She isn’t convinced the shooting was random.”

He glanced at her, as if assessing how proper it was for her to be the one running this secondary protocol, but instead of saying anything, smiled sadly. “Ah. If only that were the case. We try to find understanding in that which is not understandable. It is human nature.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Well, then. We have prepared the body for your arrival. Will you require assistance? I personally would be happy to lend my expertise.”

“Thank you. I would like a second set of eyes. Did you do the initial post?” Sam asked, setting her purse down on the counter. She washed her hands—one Mississippi, two—trying hard not to count aloud, then dried off and took the proffered gear from Nocek’s bony grip. Booties, mask, hair cover, gloves. She got the pieces in place quickly, actions born of repetition.

She hated every minute of this.

“It was not my day to work. I will not be influenced by the previous autopsy.”

“Excellent.” Sam would be. She’d see the incisions, the already dissected organs in their plastic shroud, the crusted blood that dried upon contact with the air. She’d look at the body of a homicide victim, and do everything in her power not to see Donovan. Her Donovan.

She took a deep breath, ignored the interested look Nocek gave her and nodded briskly. “I’m ready when you are.”

Nocek was already dressed for the autopsy suite: he simply slipped a new mask around his neck and pulled gloves from the box above the stainless-steel sink. Without speaking, he held the door for her.

Blessed Mary, full of grace. Give me strength.

She bit her tongue to contravene the overwhelming compulsion to get her hands under running water.

The body was on the first table, nearest the door. There was a buzz of activity—unlike the Nashville office, D.C. didn’t have the luxury of finishing up the day’s four or five posts at noon. There were so many more deaths, so many more murders, that the machine churned all day long and well into the night.

The staff was more extensive, as well. Nocek murmured names to her as they passed, each person finding a reason to swing by and see the pathologist who’d been called in to question, or affirm, their work.

Sam nodded and half smiled a few times, but her mind was captivated by Donovan.

The moment she saw him, she had to force back the tears that sprang into her eyes. He was so … dead. She saw death on a daily basis, but this, this ripped out her heart.

She swallowed, surprised to feel her stomach roiling.

She shouldn’t have come. She didn’t want her last memory of him to be this. This abomination of him. Of them. He wasn’t supposed to die like this.

Breathe, Sam. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three …

She shut her eyes. Disassociated. She could do this. She owed it to him.

Her heart rate dropped, and her clinical mind took over at last. She looked on Donovan as objectively as she could.

It was him, and yet it wasn’t. Her Donovan had never looked so slack, so pale and insubstantial. Her Donovan didn’t have wide black stitches holding his tender flesh together, one on each side of his chest, another above his groin, tied in the middle, nor the quickly apparent scars on his torso and arms. Shiny, knotted, tightly stretched flesh. Burns. No one told her he’d been burned in Iraq. Or shot, for that matter.

Damn Eleanor. Glossing over the truth. As if Sam wouldn’t have been able to handle the news.

Damn her eyes. And damn Donovan, too.

She resisted the urge to brush his hair back from his blanched forehead. He had a bit less of it now, a slightly receding hairline that she was sad to see. When they’d sewed him up they’d gotten it slightly crooked. Only she would notice it, though. Or maybe Susan.

Nocek was looking at her strangely, his insect head tilted to one side as he tried to decide what was wrong with the situation.

She swallowed and met his eyes.

“Shall we?”

Nocek nodded. He stepped to the body and cut the twine that held Donovan’s Y-incision together. Snip. Snip. Snip. The fancy stitching that closed the flesh entirely would be done by the undertaker after the embalming. For their purposes in the M.E.’s office, to send the body to the funeral home, they simply threaded the needle through in the three places: midsternum right and left, plus a stitch from the bottom of the incision, spots that pulled the flayed flesh back together, then tied the twine in a knot. Brutal and utilitarian. The first time Sam had seen it done she watched in horror, sure the twine would tear and the skin would fly back open, but flesh was surprisingly tough and the method quite effective.

The field was quickly revealed, and Nocek pulled the slimy plastic bag that contained the victim’s organs from the abdominal cavity.

The victim. Good girl, Sam. Maintain your distance. Do not personalize this.

Nocek gestured to the bag. “Do you wish to redissect? I can do it if you’d like to observe instead.”

“No, that’s all right. I’d like to get my hands on everything, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. I will read to you the measurements that were taken as we go through the organs.”

Sam ignored the little voice screaming in the back of her head and settled into work, the routine. A secondary postmortem was not easy. Decomposition had begun in earnest. And without seeing the organs in situ, having the standard reference points to go on, it was slow, sloggy work. The previous M.E. had been good, though; the remaining organ sections were large enough to work with, hadn’t been chopped into little pieces. Sam had been at this a long time; once she started, she found everything she needed without too much trouble.

His liver wasn’t enlarged. His heart looked beautiful, with only the barest minimum of cholesterol plaque lining the valves. She sectioned off a fresh piece of lung from the upper lobe, cut it into a triangle—a trick she’d been taught to keep the upper and lower lobes identifiable after they were placed in the formalin-filled organ container. Upper lobes were triangles, lowers were squares. If she needed to pull the jar from evidence to take a second look at the organs from her own posts, she could easily identify which was which. Donovan’s lungs were hard to cut, much tougher than what was normal.

“What is this?” she asked, under her breath. The bronchioles were covered in scar tissue, developed foreign-body granulomas.

“Sand,” Nocek said. “From the multiple military engagements in the desert. All of the soldiers we are unfortunate enough to see have this in their bronchial trees, deep in the tissue. They breathe it in and it settles. They practically drown in sand over there.”

Nausea hit in the pit of her stomach again, hard and sudden, and she felt the edges of her world crumbling.

Don’t do it, Sam. Don’t even think about it.

She imagined herself at the sink. The washing was the only solution.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.

“Dr. Owens, are you feeling all right? You’ve lost your color.”

She opened her eyes. Got her breathing under control.

Normal. Nominal.

“Yes, I’m fine. Forgive me. I didn’t eat breakfast.”

She refocused on the section in front of her.

This is Donovan, Sam. Donovan. Not Simon. Don’t do this now. Not now.

Sam swallowed down the rising bile and used the back end of her scalpel to scrape away some of the grit.

“I’ve …” Her voice was weak, broken. She coughed, cleared her throat. “I’ve seen this before. We get soldiers from time to time, as well. Usually 101st Airborne. But …”

“What is the matter, Dr. Owens?”

“Call me Sam, please.” She used her gloved finger to roll some of the granulomas. “I meant this. This looks like a more recent irritant. He’s been back over three years. This has been caused by a recent inhalation. But how can that be?”

She had Nocek’s interest now. Both lungs were put on the dissection board. They each took a side and began to cut. A few moments later, he held a sliver of tissue up to the light, turning it to and fro.

“You are correct, Doctor … excuse me. Sam. There is old scar tissue from the sand, but there is also newer, fresher areas of irritation, in the air sacs. See here, in the central tracheobronchial tree? It’s barely visible, but it’s there.”

“Yes. I see it.”

He moved to Donovan’s head, took up a small swab, directed it up the left nostril. He pulled it back and examined it. “And a minuscule amount here, in the maxillary sinus cavity. And more irritation to the trachea. This is certainly a more recent occurrence.”

He snapped the swab into a tube, then laid his long-boned fingers across his chest. “We must have these tested immediately. The presence of the penetrating gunshot wound may have misguided our initial examination. As head of the department, I take full responsibility.”

Nocek looked pained. Sam felt bad for him. It was an easy miss.

“Well, I appreciate that, but before we go jumping to conclusions, let’s finish and see if there’s anything else left to find.”