Angel of Death

by Ferguson, Alane

  “Heart disease?” Patrick asked.

  “No.” Moore sliced inside, cutting the heart free.

  As he raised it up, his eyes widened and Ben said, “Oh my Lord.”

  Alarmed, Cameryn asked, “What?” Neither one of them seemed to hear.

  “Ben, give me the long knife,” Dr. Moore ordered.

  Immediately Ben handed Dr. Moore a long-bladed instrument. With an expert motion, Dr. Moore flayed the heart open in his hand. And now her father went white as he whispered, “Good God.”

  “Could one of you tell us laypeople what in the Sam Hill is so strange here?” Sheriff Jacobs demanded. Fists clenched, he rocked forward onto his toes. “What are you all worked up about?”

  “The heart. Man, I’ve been around a lot of bizarre stuff,” Ben breathed, “but this . . .”

  “This what?” Justin asked. He took a step closer, his dark eyebrows slanted in disbelief.

  Dr. Moore cleared his throat. “For those of you unfamiliar with the normal insides of a human being, this heart has been cooked. All the way through. See here?” With the tip of his blade he flicked at a dark object that seemed to pull free from the heart itself. “That’s a clot. The clot is baked through.”

  They were silent then. Only the water burbled in reply. The refrigerator hummed, the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, like night sounds outside her window. It was as if the room itself were holding its breath as everyone waited for Moore to speak again. But it was her father who broke the silence.

  “How is that possible?” Patrick demanded.

  Dr. Moore planted his legs a step apart, like fence posts, rooting his top-heavy body to the floor. “I don’t have an answer to that question, Coroner. Perhaps he was subjected to a fire elsewhere and was then moved.” Moore’s face had turned dark, angry, and Cameryn guessed it was because he didn’t like to not know the answers. The body was his domain, yet in this case he seemed to understand nothing. “He could have been moved,” Moore said again.

  “But he was holding his sheet,” Cameryn protested.

  “He died in that bed. He had the sheet clutched in his hand. How could someone pose a person like that?”

  “That was only conjecture, Miss Mahoney. My job is to tell you what happened to the decedent medically.”

  “So you’re saying it’s murder?” the sheriff asked. His glasses, reflecting light, obscured his eyes.

  “At this point, any opinion would be premature,” said Moore. “You should know that.”

  The answer did not seem good enough for Justin. He was pacing behind them, his boots clunking against tile, his head shaking back and forth as he spoke. “What I don’t get is how can there be a fire hot enough to cook someone, but not affect the skin? You’re the expert, Dr. Moore, but it seems like our vic’s outsides aren’t burned while his insides are. That’s backwards, right?”

  “Yes, Deputy, that’s backwards. At this point, it appears this man died contrary to every single known burn case on record. But if it was a fire that killed him, there will be smoke in his lungs. I’ll be very interested to see what’s inside them. Let us proceed.”

  Ben took the heart and weighed it. “Three hundred sixty grams,” he said as Patrick dutifully recorded the number on a form. “Normal weight,” Ben muttered. “That’s the only normal part in this whole thing.”

  The heart was then dipped in the water and sectioned off for various tests, after which Ben placed it into a Hefty garbage bag with yellow drawstrings bright as ribbons. Cameryn knew that the Hefty bag, once filled with organs, would be deposited back into Mr. Oakes before he was sewed up again. There was nothing romantic in the way a body’s insides were transported to the funeral home.

  Dr. Moore reached back into the chest and pulled back a lung, slicing it free from the trachea. He then carried it to a cart already laid out with a terry-cloth towel as Ben brought a tube that poured a small stream of water. Dampening the towel, Dr. Moore laid the lung against the wet surface. Then, picking up what looked to be a regular bread knife, he sliced the lung in two and flipped it open like a book, rubbing his hand over the exposed surface. The others crowded around to watch.

  “No smoke,” Dr. Moore pronounced. “There is no evidence of smoke inhalation, which I would have expected to see if he died by fire, at least in the upper lung. I’ll have to run a slide to be sure, but to the naked eye the lungs look clean.” He pushed his finger into various points of the tissue, shaking his head in disbelief. “The upper lobe is hard, but the bottom is less so,” he said. “There is variegation in the color, too. Brown at the top, more red at the bottom.”

  “So what about the lung itself?” Sheriff Jacobs pressed. “Is it . . . ?”

  Moore gave a terse nod. “Cooked. At least the upper portion. And before you ask, I have absolutely no idea. Let me pull the other lung and get a look. Ben, you forgot my music. I need it to help me focus. At this point I feel like I’m in an episode of The Twilight Zone.”

  Ben sighed as he pulled off his gloves. Flipping through a stack of CDs, he pulled out one and, grinning wickedly, popped it into the CD player. “An oldie but a goodie,” he said as hard-rock strains of guitar filled the room.

  Dr. Moore’s eyebrows disappeared into his hairline as he barked, “What is that?”

  “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” Ben said.

  “I want opera.”

  “It is opera. Rock opera. There’s a line in here that I think’s just right for the occasion, so I’ll tell you when we get to it. Come on, Dr. Moore, we all need to liven up in here. What we need is some tempo.”

  Dr. Moore, apparently consumed by more important matters, waved his hand dismissively. “Next time it’s Wagner,” he ordered as he removed the right lung, which was bigger than the left, and balanced it in his hand. “I’d say a thousand grams,” he told Ben. “When you weigh it, let me know if I’m close.” This time he used a pair of scissors to cut through the bronchia, which looked to Cameryn like one-inch tubing. The inevitable verdict was pronounced next. “This one,” he said, “is cooked, too. I’ll take a section for a fixed slide.”

  The doctor worked his way down. Organ by organ, Brad Oakes was gutted until only his scooped-out torso remained, as hollow as deer carcasses she’d seen hung at the slaughterhouse outside of town. “Do you know what dissection method I am using here, Miss Mahoney?” Dr. Moore asked.

  “The Virchow method.”

  “Correct. Virchow goes organ by organ, opposed to the Rokitansky method, where the body organs are removed all at once and dissected on the table. Students usually learn Rokitansky first. . . .”

  “Why?” Cameryn asked.

  “Because the organs will still have the same relationships to one another they had in the body. But the Virchow method is more effective. I’m impressed you knew that.”

  Cameryn nodded, acknowledging his compliment. As Dr. Moore sliced, sectioned, and weighed the bowels, Brad Oakes’s face was still hidden by the triangle of flesh. Gently, Cameryn pulled it away, folding it back onto the chest, exposing the face.

  Deliberately, she refused to look at the voids where his eyes had been; instead, she trained her eyes on the folds of his ears, at the crease beneath his lobes and the hair gently curling around it. She’d never realized there was gray mixed with the blond, like a spider’s web in yellow grass. Lower down, golden chest hairs spiraled up to his clavicles like tiny springs. His neck had lines on it she hadn’t noticed before, human tree rings to mark his age. She looked past his protruding tongue to something unchanged—his nose, a bit too big for his face but strong-looking, the kind of nose you saw in portraits of founding fathers. Hairs bristled from the edge of his nostrils. He forgot to trim them, she thought, wondering if the funeral home would fix it until she stopped herself from thinking such stupid thoughts. The man was dead. Who cared anymore? Who would he impress now?

  She leaned closer. The strange smell, that she now knew was from his cooked flesh, almost overwhelmed her. “I wish you could
tell me what happened to you,” she whispered so softly her lips barely moved. “I’m sorry this is how your life ended, Mr. Oakes. You taught me so much. I . . . I already miss you. I wish you could hear me.”

  Cameryn waited, wanting to feel something of him coming into her, his spirit, perhaps, vibrating a thought into her mind. Lyric claimed that the ghosts of the departed were all around, watching their bodies when they died and sometimes getting confused about whether they were actually dead. She said sensitive people were able to channel the thoughts of the dead into their minds, enabling them to speak once more. But Cameryn only half-believed this. The priest told her a different story, that upon death the soul soared with the angels. Whichever way was right, the soul of her teacher was no longer here. Just his shell, empty, exposed.

  “Cameryn,” Ben said gently. “We need to do his head now. Are you ready?”

  “Sure.”

  Straightening, she looked at him. Ben had a mask on, a blue one with a piece of duct tape over the bridge. He placed Mr. Oakes’s neck on a head block, which raised it almost five inches. With a precision cut, Ben sliced through the scalp in an incision that reached from one of Oakes’s ears to the other. He pulled the top of the scalp forward, slicing away the temporalis muscle, and then stretched the scalp, hair and all, folding it over the front of the teacher’s face, which he then tucked beneath his chin. Mr. Oakes’s face was once again hidden as though it had been erased. Veins snaked along the exposed scalp like tiny branches.

  “This is a bone saw,” Ben said, holding up a handheld instrument. “It’s a Stryker. The interesting thing about these is they don’t oscillate—these are the same saws that they used to cut off casts with. Only they call them an autopsy saw and double the price. You might want to put on a mask now, Cammie. This kicks up a bit of bone dust, and I don’t want you breathing that. Take this one.”

  He handed her one made of blue paper, with a white reinforced edge. Tying it on, she watched in fascination as Ben pressed the whirring blade in the middle of Oakes’s brow bone. The saw made a grinding sound as Ben gripped the skull with his left hand and cut all the way to where an ear had once been. Then, returning to the middle, he cut to the other ear in a horizontal line. Repositioning the saw, he cut from the end point all the way across the top of her teacher’s head, ending at the other ear, stopping in the middle of the line to make a small notch.

  “What’s that for?” she asked.

  “Makes it easier when I got to put the skull back on. It’s like carving a notch in the top of a pumpkin, you know?”

  Next, he inserted what looked to be a flat screwdriver into the groove cut into the bowline. When he twisted hard, the skull made a sickening crack. Repeating the process lower down, Ben wrenched the screwdriver again, and this time the skull popped off in his hand. He removed the skull cap and bent close.

  All she could see over the top of the mask was his eyes going wide. “Dr. Moore, you better take a look at this!” he cried.

  The brain had exploded. As in the eyes, the water in the brain must have expanded in the skull until the tissue burst, leaving a mess inside resembling hamburger.

  “My God,” Dr. Moore said, his voice grim. “This is sci-fi. This isn’t medicine as I know it.”

  They stood, staring numbly, as the music pounded in the background. “Could you turn that down, Ben? It’s giving me a headache!” Moore told him.

  “Sure thing. But wait—here’s the line I wanted you all to hear.”

  A rocker’s raspy voice filled the autopsy suite in a sad melody with words that drilled into Cameryn. The man sang: “To conquer death you only have to die—you only have to die.”

  Chapter Eight

  THE SMELL OF cigarette smoke wafted up to where Cameryn sat, making her eyes water, while Adam, head back and nostrils flared, drank it in like nectar. On the main floor where Cameryn and Adam and Lyric sat, Durango’s family-friendly restaurant called Scoot ’n Blues boasted a smoke-free environment. It was a meaningless claim. In the netherworld below, Scoot ’n Blues’s sister organization, The Sidecar Jazz Lounge, pulsed with energy and gave off the effluence of adult vices, which in turn drifted up the open stairwell separating the two floors. And although she’d never before wished it, tonight Cameryn longed to be downstairs in the Jazz Lounge, drinking and blotting out the day in blissful oblivion.

  She knew she was lousy company tonight, but after all, she hadn’t wanted to come here. Back at the medical examiner’s building while she was still scrubbing up after the autopsy, Lyric had phoned with an offer for dinner, which Cameryn’s father, hovering nearby, overheard.

  “I want us to have a personal tribute for Mr. Oakes,” Lyric had said. “Adam and I are already at S&B’s and we have a table, so no excuses. We’ll wait for you. I really think we need to do this. The three of us should honor him.”

  Cameryn had been in the middle of refusing when her father intervened. “It’ll do you good, Cammie,” he’d insisted. “Your friends have made a trip all the way down to Durango just for you. I’ll drop you off at the S&B. Come on, it’s Saturday night. You’ve been at it all day. Go! Eat! Try to get death out of your head.”

  But she couldn’t. Sitting here in the over-plumped vinyl booth, she could only visualize images of her teacher’s empty skull and of the Hefty bag sewn back into his gutted torso. And with all that cutting, there were still no answers. The line on the death certificate stating cause of death contained one word: unknown.

  So far, the conversation had come in fits and starts, with Cameryn barely contributing more than a monosyllabic reply. She almost felt sorry for Lyric and Adam as they tried to draw her out, but then again, she felt too tired to help them.

  “This is a cool place,” Adam said, craning his neck.

  “Retro, with a touch of the modern. Service is painfully slow, though. Not like how it is at the Grand.”

  “Thanks. But this place is really busy and it’s a Saturday night,” Cameryn replied.

  Adam’s fingers drummed along the edge of the tabletop. “I just wish they’d let me light up.” He pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and held it under his nose, sniffing deeply. “I could really use a smoke right now. It makes no sense to designate one room nonsmoking when they’re going at it like chimneys ten feet below us and we’re sitting next to an open stairwell.”

  “You’re right,” Lyric agreed.

  “I mean, do they think the sign itself has some magical powers? Like the air wouldn’t dare blow past it?”

  Rousing herself, Cameryn said, “Secondhand smoke is bad enough, Adam. You know those things will kill you. And seeing as I just came from slicing up someone’s insides, I can assure you that you don’t want to die.”

  “I don’t, but you also got to remember that good health is just the slowest possible means to arrive at the inevitable end.” Adam put his cigarettes back into his pocket, patting them affectionately. “I mean, the harsh reality is we’re all destined for the grave. Besides, you know that the spirit lives on. I wouldn’t be surprised if Oakes was hovering over us right now, watching us from the ceiling.”

  “Oh, please,” Cameryn groaned, “it’s been way too long a day for a bunch of woo-woo theories on the after-life. I am so not in the mood.”

  “Whoa, man, where did that come from?” Adam asked. He plowed his thin fingers through his sooty hair, saying, “You got to know death is part of life.”

  “Yeah, but it’s also blood and brains and . . . loss.” Cameryn shook her head. “I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have gone out with you guys tonight. I’m not very good company right now. Obviously.”

  The jazz band fired up, a thumping old-timey rendition of “Maple Leaf Rag,” which made Lyric almost shout to be heard. Her eyes, rimmed in cobalt blue, had widened in sympathy. “That’s exactly why you need your friends,” she cried, patting Cameryn with a ring-adorned hand. “That’s the reason we came all the way down here. To help you through your god-awful day. Be you happy or s
ad—whatever your emotion is, you’re entitled to feel it. You know you can be real with us.”