length of the white ceiling. Eleven steel tables are parked by wall-mounted steel sinks, each with a foot-operated faucet control, a high-pressure
spray hose, a commercial disposal, a specimen rinse basket, and a sharps container. The stations I carefully researched and had installed are
mini-modular operating theaters with down-draft ventilation systems that exchange air every five minutes, and there are computers, fume hoods,
carts of surgical instruments, halogen lights on flexible arms, dissecting surfaces with cutting boards, containers of formalin with spigots, and testtube
racks and plastic jars for histology and toxicology.
My station, the chief’s station, is the first one, and it occurs to me that someone has been using it, and then I feel ridiculous for thinking it. Of
course people would have been using it while I’ve been gone. Of course Fielding probably did. It doesn’t matter, and why should I care? I tell myself
as I notice that the surgical instruments on the cart aren’t neatly lined up the way I would leave them. They are haphazardly placed on a large white
polyethylene dissecting board as if someone rinsed them and didn’t do it thoroughly. I grab a pair of latex gloves out of a box and pull them on
because I don’t want to touch anything with my bare hands.
Normally, I don’t worry about it, not as much as I should, I suppose, because I come from an old school of forensic pathologists who were
stoical and battle-scarred and took perverse pride in not being afraid of or repulsed by anything. Not maggots or purge fluid or putrefying flesh that
is bloated and turning green and slipping, not even AIDS, at least not the worries we have now when we live with phobias and federal regulations
about absolutely everything. I remember when I walked around without protective clothing on, smoking, drinking coffee, and touching dead patients
as any doctor would, my bare skin against theirs as I examined a wound or looked at a contusion or took a measurement. But I was never sloppy
with my work station or my surgical instruments. I was never careless.
I would never return so much as a teasing needle to a surgical cart without first washing it with hot, soapy water, and the drumming of hot water
into deep metal sinks was a pervasive sound in the morgues of my past. As far back as my Richmond days—even earlier, when I was just starting
at Walter Reed—I knew about DNA and that it was about to be admissible in court and become the forensic gold standard, and from that point
forward, everything we did at crime scenes and in the autopsy suite and in the labs would be questioned on the witness stand. Contamination was
about to become the ultimate nemesis, and although we don’t make a routine of autoclaving our surgical instruments at the CFC, we certainly don’t
give them a cursory splash under the faucet and then toss them onto a cutting board that isn’t clean, either.
I pick up an eighteen-inch dissecting knife and notice a trace of dried blood in the scored stainless-steel handle and that the steel blade is
scratched and pitted along the edge and spotted instead of razor-sharp and as bright as polished silver. I notice blood in the serrated blade of a
bone saw and dried bloodstains on a spool of waxed five-cord thread and on a double-curved needle. I pick up forceps, scissors, rib shears, a
chisel, a flexible probe, and am dismayed by the poor condition everything is in.
I will send Anne a message to hose down my station and wash all of its instruments before we autopsy the man from Norton’s Woods. I will
have this entire goddamn autopsy room cleaned from the ceiling to the floor. I will have all of its systems inspected before my first week home has
passed, I decide, as I pull on a fresh pair of gloves and walk to a countertop where a large roll of white paper—what we call butcher paper—is
attached to a wall-mounted dispenser. Paper makes a loud ripping sound as I tear off a section and cover an autopsy table midway down the room,
a table that looks cleaner than mine.
I cover my AFME field clothes with a disposable gown, not bothering with the long ties in back, then return to my messy station. Against the wall
is a large white polypropylene drying cabinet on hard rubber casters with a double clear acrylic door, which I unlock by entering a code in a digital
keypad. Hanging inside are a sage-green nylon jacket with a black fleece collar, a blue denim shirt, black cargo pants, and a pair of boxer briefs,
each on its own stainless-steel hanger, and on the tray at the bottom are a pair of scuffed brown leather boots, and next to them, a pair of gray wool
socks. I recognize some of the clothing from the video clips I saw, and it gives me an unsettled feeling to look at it now. The cabinet’s centrifugal fan
and HEPA exhaust filters make their low whirring sound as I look at the boots and the socks by picking them up one by one, finding nothing
remarkable. The boxer briefs are white cotton with a crossover fly and elastic waistband, and I note nothing unusual, no stains or defects.
Spreading the coat open on the butcher paper-covered table, I slip my hands into the pockets, making sure nothing has been left in them, and I
collect a clothing diagram and a clipboard and begin to make notes. The collar is a deep-pile synthetic fur and covered with dirt and sand and
pieces of dry brown leaves that adhered to it when the man collapsed to the ground, and the heavy knit cuffs are dirty, too. The sage nylon shell is a
very tough material, which appears to be tear-resistant and waterproof with a black fiberfill insulation, none of it easily penetrable unless the blade
was strong and very sharp. I find no evidence of blood inside the liner of the coat, not even around the small slit in the back of it, but the areas of the
outer shell, the shoulders, the sleeves, the back, are blackened and stiff with blood that collected in the bottom of the body pouch after the man was
zipped inside it and then was transported to the CFC.
I don’t know how long he might have bled out while he was inside the bag and then the cooler, but he didn’t bleed from his wound. When I
spread open the denim shirt, long-sleeved, a men’s size small, that still smells faintly of a cologne or an after-shave, I find only a spot of dark blood
that has dried stiffly around the slit made by the blade. What Marino and Anne have reported seems to be accurate, that the man began bleeding
from his nose and mouth while he was fully clothed inside the body bag, his head turned to the side, probably the same side it was turned to when I
examined him in the x-ray room a little while ago. Blood must have dripped steadily from his face and into the bag, pooling in it and leaking from it,
and I can see that easily when I look at it next, an adult-size cadaver pouch, typical of ones used by removal services, black with a nylon zipper. On
the sides are webbing handles attached with rivets, and that’s often where the problem with leakage occurs, assuming the bag is intact with no
tears or flaws in the heat-sealed seams. Blood seeps through rivets, especially if the pouch is really cheap, and this one is about twenty-five dollars’
worth of heavy-duty PVC, likely purchased by the case.
As I imagine what I just saw on the CT scan and realize how quickly the damage occurred in what clearly was a blitz attack, the bleeding
makes no sense at all. It makes even less sense than it did when Marino first told me about it in Dover. The massive destruction to the man’s
internal organs would have resulted in pulmonary hemorrhage that would have caused blood to drain out of the nose and mouth. But it should have
happened almost instantly. I don’t understand why he didn’t bleed at the scene. When the paramedics were working to resuscitate him, he should
have been bleeding from his face, and this would have been a clear indication that he hadn’t dropped dead from an arrhythmia.
As I leave the autopsy room to go upstairs, I envision the video clips again and remember my wondering about his black gloves and why he put
them on when he entered the park. Where are they? I haven’t seen a pair of gloves. They weren’t in the evidence locker or in the drying cabinet, and
I checked the pockets of the coat and didn’t find them. Based on what I saw in the recordings covertly made by the man’s headphones, he had the
gloves on when he died, and I envision what I saw on Lucy’s iPad when I was riding in the van to the Civil Air Terminal. A black-gloved hand entered
the frame as if the man was swatting at something and there was a jostling sound as his hand hit the headphones while his voice blurted out, “What
the…? Hey… !” Then bare trees rushing up and around, then chipped bits of slate looming large on the ground and the thud of him hitting, and then
the hem of a long, black coat flapping past. Then silence, then the voices of people surrounding him and exclaiming that he wasn’t breathing.
The x-ray room door is closed when I get to it, and I check inside, but everyone is gone, the control room empty and quiet, the CT scanner
glowing white in the low lights on the other side of the lead-lined glass. I pause to try the phone in there, hoping Anne might answer her cell, but if
she’s already at McLean and in the neuroimaging lab, it will be impossible to reach her through the thick concrete walls of that place. I am surprised
when she answers.
“Where are you?” I ask, and I can hear music in the background.
“Pulling up now,” she says, and she must be inside the van with Marino driving and the radio on.
“When you removed his clothing,” I say, “did you see a pair of black gloves? He may have been wearing a pair of thick black gloves.”
A pause, and I hear her say something to Marino and then I hear his voice, but I can’t make out what they’re saying to each other. Then she tells
me, “No. And Marino says when he had the body in ID first thing, there were no gloves. He doesn’t remember gloves.”
“Tell me exactly what happened yesterday morning.”
“Just sit right here for a minute,” I hear her say to Marino. “No, not there yet or they’ll come out. The security guys will. Just wait here,” she says
to him. “Okay,” she says to me. “A little bit after seven yesterday morning, Dr. Fielding came to x-ray. As you know, Ollie and I are always in early, by
seven, and anyway, he was concerned because of the blood. He’d noticed blood drips on the floor outside the cooler and also inside it, and that the
body was bleeding or had bled. A lot of blood in the pouch.”
“The body was still fully clothed.”
“Yes. The coat was unzipped and the shirt was cut open, the EMTs did that, but he was clothed when he came in and nothing was done until
Dr. Fielding went in there to get him ready for us.”
“What do you mean, ‘to get him ready’?”
I’ve never known Fielding to get a body ready for autopsy, to actually go to the trouble to move it out of the refrigerator and into x-ray or the
autopsy room, at least not since the old days when he was in training. He leaves what he considers mundane tasks to those whom he still calls
dieners and whom I call autopsy technicians.
“I only know he found the blood and then hurried to get us because he took the call from Cambridge PD, and as you know, it was assumed the
guy was a sudden death that was natural, like an arrhythmia or a berry aneurysm or something.”
“Then what?”
“Then Ollie and I looked at the body, and we called Marino and he came and looked, and it was decided not to scan him or do the post yet.”
“He was left in the cooler?”
“No. Marino wanted to process him in ID first, to get his prints, swabs, so we could get started with IAFIS and DNA, with anything that might
help us figure out who he is. The important point is there were no gloves at that time, because Marino would have had to take them off the body so
he could print him.”
“Then where are they?”
“He doesn’t know, and I don’t, either.”
“Can you put him on, please?”
I hear her hand him the phone, and he says, “Yeah. I unzipped the pouch but didn’t take him out of it, and there was a lot of blood in it, like you
know.”
“And you did what, exactly?”
“I printed him while he was in the pouch, and if there had been gloves, I sure as hell would have seen them.”
“Possible the squad removed the gloves at the scene and put them inside the pouch and you didn’t notice? And then they got misplaced
somehow?”
“Nope. I looked for any personal effects, like I told you. The watch, ring, keychain, the stash box, the twenty-dollar bill. Took everything out of his
pockets, and I always look inside the pouch for the very reason you just said. In case the squad or the removal service tucks something in there, like
a hat or sunglasses or whatever. The headphones, too. And the satellite radio. They were in a paper bag and came in with the body.”
“What about Cambridge PD? I know Investigator Lawless brought in the Glock.”
“He receipted it to the firearms lab around ten a.m. That was all he brought in.”
“And when Anne put his clothing inside the drying cabinet, well, obviously she didn’t have the gloves if you say they weren’t there in the first
place.”
I hear him say something, and then Anne is back on the phone, saying, “No. I didn’t see gloves when I put everything else in the cabinet. That
was around nine p.m., almost four hours ago, when I undressed the body to get it ready for the scan, not long before you got to the CFC. I cleaned
the cabinet to make sure it was sterile before I put his other clothing in there.”
“I’m glad something’s sterile. We need to clean my station.”
“Okay, okay,” she says, but not to me. “Wait. Jesus, Pete. Hold on.”
And then Marino’s voice in my ear: “There were other cases.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We had other cases yesterday morning. So maybe someone removed the gloves, but I got no friggin’ idea why. Unless they maybe got picked
up by mistake.”
“Who did the cases?”
“Dr. Lambotte, Dr. Booker.”
“What about Jack?”
“Two cases in addition to the guy from Norton’s Woods,” Marino says. “A woman who got hit by a train and an old guy who wasn’t under the
care of a physician. Jack didn’t do shit, was gone with the wind,” Marino says. “He doesn’t bother with the scene, and so we get a body that starts
bleeding in the fridge and now we got to prove the guy was dead.”
9
The directorate of what officially is called the Cambridge Forensic Center and Port Mortuary is on the top floor, and I have discovered that it is
difficult to tell people how to find me when a building is round.
The best I’ve been able to do on the infrequent occasions I’ve been here is to instruct visitors to get off the elevator on the seventh floor, take a
