Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 13 - Unnatural Selection

by Unnatural Selection

  Robb immediately got on the telephone while Clapper clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, savoring his victory and the job ahead.

  “Just in time, Sarge, they say the body’s already on the autopsy table. Dr. Gillie’s about to get started.”

  “Well, tell him to stop where he is and get the body bagged up. Have him send off whatever he’s written up, too. Oh, and see that a copy of our report goes out to Treliske along with the body as well.”

  Clapper, content and serene, leaned back and re-clasped his hands, but suddenly sat up straight and smacked his forehead. “Gideon, I forgot, I’ve left the pathologist hanging on the blower. He asked to speak with you. You can take it in my office, line one, if he’s still there.”

  “With me? About what?” Puzzled, Gideon got up.

  “He didn’t say. I happened to mention your being here, and he said would that be Dr. Gideon Oliver, the Skeleton Detective, and I said yes, and he said, may I speak with the gentleman, and there the matter stands.”

  In Clapper’s office, Gideon leaned over the desk to punch line one and picked up the phone.

  “This is Gideon Oliver. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “Not at all, not at all!” a bluff, jolly voice declared. “How are you, old friend?”

  The voice was only vaguely familiar. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

  “This is Wilson Merrill!” the voice cried, after which there was an expectant pause.

  It took Gideon a second to make the connection, but when he did, it was with real pleasure. “Wilson!” he said. “How good to hear your voice. Do I understand that you’re the Cornwall and Devon pathologist now?”

  “Indeed, yes. My aged mother lives in Falmouth, and Lydia and I are happily settled here now. I left the Dorset Constabulary two years ago. We had some fun there, didn’t we? Remember Inspector Bagshawe?”

  Gideon remembered, all right. In the annals of successful police bogglement, the experience with Detective Inspector Bagshawe of the Dorset CID was at the top of his list. Gideon had been staying in the coastal village of Char-mouth in connection with an archaeological dig nearby, and a rotted corpse had turned up in the bay. Merrill, who knew Gideon by reputation, had been responsible for the autopsy. He had asked Gideon to attend, which Gideon, who hated autopsies—especially on corpses well along the road to putrescence—had reluctantly done. As it turned out, there was so little soft tissue to work with that Merrill had simply turned the remains over to him to see what could be gotten from the skeleton. In less than an hour’s time, Gideon had emerged from the autopsy room with his conclusions.

  The unidentified body, he told Merrill and the supercilious (until then) Bagshawe, was that of a large motorcycle-rider in his mid-thirties who also, by the way, happened to be a left-handed baseball pitcher (not a cricket-bowler, a baseball pitcher!). Might that possibly be of some help in identifying him?

  “Fun” is not something that is generally associated with forensic anthropology, but this was surely as close to fun as it ever got. Bagshawe’s big, curving cherrywood pipe had actually fallen from his mouth and clattered to the table, scattering ash and tobacco shreds. And the delighted Merrill couldn’t have been more pleased. He’d come near to embracing him.

  “You bet I remember,” a laughing Gideon said now. “Wilson, it’s really nice of you to say hello. You know, I’m not exactly sure where Treliske is—”

  “It’s a neighborhood in Truro, really.”

  “Well, I don’t really know where Truro is either, but—”

  “Just up the road from Trelissick,” Wilson told him unhelpfully.

  “—but maybe we can get together before I leave. It’d be nice to—”

  “I didn’t want to speak to you merely to say hello, old man.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. I want to invite you to the postmortem! Lend a hand, don’t you know.”

  He made it sound as if he’d just invited Gideon to a private reception at the White House. It was Gideon’s experience that forensic pathologists in general were a happy, outgoing crew, but he had never met another one quite as exuberant as Wilson Merrill, or one who found so much challenge and fulfillment in the grisly work that took place on the slanted metal tables. But for the notoriously squeamish Gideon, watching a human body get debrained and disemboweled to conduct a postmortem had about as much allure as watching one get dismembered to conceal a murder; namely, zero. And “lending a hand” made it less than zero.

  “To the postmortem?” Gideon said, trying for surprised delight. “Well, I really appreciate that, Wilson, and of course I’d like to come but, I’m not sure how I’d get there—”

  “No problem there, Gideon! The helicopter should be arriving at St. Mary’s any time now for the body. You could ride back here with it.”

  “Umm . . . well, I’d like to, of course, but I do have some things to do here—”

  “Nonsense. You can spare a few hours. We’ll have you back in St. Mary’s by teatime.”

  “Oh. Well, actually . . .”

  “I’ll see you in an hour, then. It will be a treat to work with you again. We’ll have a jolly time of it, you’ll see!”

  “I’m looking forward to it, Wilson,” Gideon managed. It wasn’t the first time he’d been overwhelmed by Wilson Merrill.

  Or in this case, only partly overwhelmed. He had to admit that he was extremely interested in having a look at those “complex trauma” of Joey’s skull to which Dr. Gillie had referred. It was the process of getting down to the skull that he wasn’t looking forward to.

  Back in Robb’s cubicle, he was explaining what the call was about when a clatter overhead drew all three men’s eyes to the window. A red helicopter was descending mantislike toward the open space of Holgate’s Green. “Cornwall Air Ambulance,” it said on the side.

  “Your conveyance, I believe,” said Clapper.

  “Mine and Joey’s,” Gideon said.

  NINETEEN

  TRURO is a venerable cathedral and market town, but the Royal Cornwall Hospital at Treliske, on its western outskirts, is sleek, modern, and well-equipped, with its gleaming basement mortuary being no exception. The waiting room, mercifully unoccupied at the moment by any apprehensive, fearful relatives or friends, was living-room friendly, with plum-colored fabric on the walls, homey furniture, flowers, coffee-table picture books, and up-to-date magazines. Having announced himself to the receptionist, Gideon had finished an article on human cloning (“Another you—the next best thing to teleportation”) in New Scientist and was starting one on a methane-spewing volcano that had been discovered on one of Saturn’s moons, when his host came barreling through the door from the interior.

  Wilson Merrill in the flesh, was, if anything, even heartier than he was on the telephone. A ruddy, stocky, country-squireish sort of man who radiated bluff good humor, he stuck out a blunt-fingered hand in greeting. “Well, well, it seems the Dynamic Duo is back in business again.”

  “It’s good to see you, Wilson,” Gideon said.

  “Come on, old man, let’s get you suited up.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I need to put on scrubs,” Gideon said. “I don’t really expect to be doing anything—just observing.” From as great a distance as I can get away with, he might have added.

  Merrill laughed as merrily as if Gideon had told an amusing joke. “Nonsense,” he said, taking him by the elbow and shuffling him along the corridor. “Gets a bit splashy in there sometimes. Wouldn’t want to get anything nasty on that pretty shirt.”

  Merrill himself was wearing the green, oversized, hand-me-down (from the hospital upstairs) scrubs that were usual in mortuaries around the world, fronted by a plastic apron, and complete with oversize booties. Gideon had noted before this preference of pathologists for roomy scrubs. They needed them, too. Unlike surgeons (other than orthopedic surgeons) who work mostly in small spaces with delicate instruments: scalpel, forceps, probes, retractors—pathologists use implements
that look as if they came from a carpenter’s tool chest: hammers, chisels, saws, even pruning shears (for snipping through the ribs). A grizzled, old-school coroner Gideon knew claimed that he bought all his instruments at kitchen shops and hardware stores. “They’re the same damn knives and things, just as good, but if it has ‘autopsy’ in front of it, they charge you an arm and a leg.”

  Five minutes later, in the locker room a few yards down the hall, Gideon was getting similarly outfitted in scrubs that must have been made for a professional wrestler. While he was swimming his way into them, Merrill used the time to browse through the file folder of materials that had come with Joey’s body.

  “Oh, dear,” he said as Gideon wrapped the drawstring twice around his waist, “did you see what his blood alcohol level was?”

  Gideon shook his head. “Pretty high, I imagine.”

  “That’s putting it mildly. One hundred and fifty-two milligrams. Not surprising he fell off that catwalk. The wonder is that he was able to get out on it in the first place.”

  “You’re inclined to go with the ‘accident’ theory, then?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go quite as far as that. That’s what we’re here to try and determine, isn’t it? But I must say it seems like a reasonable starting hypothesis. At that level of intoxication, one is anything but steady on one’s stumps.”

  Gideon slipped into the booties—normal-sized ones—and the two men shuffled down the corridor to the autopsy room, Gideon stolidly, and Merrill practically skipping at his side.

  “It’s a pity you weren’t here just two days ago,” the pathologist told him. “We had an astonishing case, really incredible. This chap had committed suicide by turning on his table saw and jamming his head into it. Never seen anything like it. Cleaved his head in half right down the middle, neat as a pin, exactly through the longitudinal fissure, clear down to the vermis of the cerebellum, can you believe it? Like looking at a median sagittal section of the head in an anatomy text.” He sighed. “Gone now, though. Had to release the body.”

  “Sorry I missed it,” Gideon mumbled. “My bad luck.”

  Merrill brightened. “We have photographs, though.”

  “Oh, great. Maybe later if there’s time.”

  “Here we are, then,” Merrill said with transparent pride, pulling open the door to a spic-and-span, white-tiled autopsy room. “Hic locus est ubi—”

  “—mortui viventes docent.” Gideon finished for him. This is the place where the dead teach the living. A favorite motto of forensic labs. Gideon had it on a plaque on the wall of the anthropology department’s bone room at the university.

  The moment the door opened, the mildly unsettling smell of hospital antiseptic was displaced by the more unsettling, though more familiar, mixture of formaldehyde and tissue going bad, l’arome de la morgue. Inside, Joey’s graying body lay faceup on the metal table, naked and pitifully vulnerable under glaring fluorescent light fixtures. Above the foot of the table hung the usual meat-market scale, shocking in its ordinariness, in which his internal organs would be weighed. A tall, somber, long-limbed Indian man, the diener—the autopsy assistant—was finishing up his tasks of preparing the body and the instruments, and taking the preliminary measurements and photographs.

  “We are all ready, Doctor,” he said on seeing Merrill.

  “Hello, Rajiv. X-rays?”

  “Yes, Doctor. The physician from St. Mary’s sent them.” Rajiv nodded toward the wall-mounted viewing box, to which four X-ray plates had been clipped. Merrill walked to the box and, leaning over, peered briefly at the indistinct images. “Fractured spinous processes on these upper thoracic vertebrae, you see?” he said, pointing. “Some damage to the sacroiliac region as well. Both perfectly consistent with a fall onto his back, wouldn’t you say?”

  Gideon nodded and placed a finger on a photograph of the left arm. “And I think the olecranon is broken, too; that’d go along with it as well.”

  “Yes, I believe you’re right. The cranial photos are ambiguous, though, but then who can read a cranial X-ray? There’s damage to the head, all right, inside and out, but hard to tell exactly what kind.” Merrill straightened up, his eyes alight and already straying toward the saws and knives that Rajiv had set up on a small rolling table. “May as well have a look at the real thing, shall we?”

  “May as well,” Gideon said forlornly.

  “Well, let’s cover him up, Rajiv,” Merrill said.

  “Cover him up?”

  “For decency’s sake.”

  “Decency’s sake?”

  “Yes, we’ll start at the top—”

  The top? Gideon said to himself.

  Rajiv didn’t disappoint him. “The top?”

  “Yes, the top. Dr. Oliver will be most interested in the skull, I believe, so let’s begin there. In the meantime, let’s drape him from the neck down, why don’t we?”

  Rajiv was obviously dubious about the correctness of this—pathologists generally began with the trunk; the famous Y-incision—but he did as he was told without even a murmured “Drape him?”, pulling a sheet neatly, even tenderly, up over Joey’s body. Clearly, understanding that Gideon had known Joey, Merrill had had this done out of sensitivity for his feelings, and Gideon very much appreciated it. It was, for whatever reason, easier—less of a violation, less defiling—to open up Joey’s head with the rest of him covered up.

  Rajiv handed both men plastic “bouffant-style” operating room caps, which they slipped on over their hair. Gideon was grateful that Clapper wasn’t there to see him.

  “You didn’t want gloves, did you?” asked Merrill, who was partial to doing his dissecting bare-handed. “When I’m working with tissue, I find the sense of touch in my bare hands extremely sensitive,” he had once told Gideon—who much preferred gloves, and for exactly the same reason.

  “Gloves?” Gideon said now, as if they were the furthest thought from his mind. “No, of course not.” With luck, he wouldn’t have to touch anything.

  Many pathologists had their dieners do the gross cutting—the Y-incision, and the ear-to-ear over-the-top-of-the-head incision to get at the skull—but not Merrill, of course. He preferred to do it all himself, so once Rajiv had placed a support block under the back of Joey’s head and turned on the hanging microphone to record their observations, the diener stepped away from the table, awaiting further instructions.

  “Well, let’s see what we have,” Merrill said happily. Gideon half expected him to rub his hands together, but with his arms remaining folded, he peered long and hard at Joey’s head. “What do you think?”

  Until that moment, Gideon hadn’t looked directly at Joey’s face, but now he did. It helped, he found, that Joey didn’t look much like Joey anymore. In addition to the puffiness and distortion that went with death from cranial blunt-force trauma, on his face had blossomed a pair of bilateral periorbital hematomas—spectacular, purplish, shiny black eyes, which were known in the trade as “raccoon eyes,” and for good reason. Huge and round, blackening both his upper and lower eyelids, swelling them closed, and as dark as stage makeup, they made it look as if he were wearing a strange, pale face mask with black holes cut out for the eyes. His hair, so colorless and fine to begin with, had been rinsed by Rajiv under the faucet at one end of the autopsy table and was still damp, so that it seemed limper and sadder than ever. High on the back of his head, about two inches up from the part of the scalp overlying what anthropologists called “lambda”—the Y-shaped juncture where the two parietals meet the occipital bone—a circular area three or four inches in diameter had been shaved, the better to show a gaping, star-shaped laceration where his scalp had split open.

  “You’re the pathologist,” Gideon answered. “What do you think?”

  “I think we’re looking at a pretty obvious case of blunt-force trauma to the posterior parietal region, which, of course, goes along with the injuries on the radiograph.” He added a few observations for the microphone and pressed gently against Joey’
s cheeks and temples. “No indications of superficial damage around the eyes, and the craniofacial skeleton seems undamaged. I expect we’ll find that the orbital hematomas are not distinct injuries, but a result of the parietal trauma, the force having been transmitted by the brain.”

  Gideon nodded. “Contrecoup.”

  “Contrecoup,” Merrill agreed.

  They were talking about one of the most intriguing and least understood aspects of damage to the human skull and brain: the distinction between coup and contrecoup injuries. Generally speaking, when a moving object hit a stationary head—a blow with a hammer, say—the injury to the brain was going to be directly under the impact point. Whack a man hard enough on the occipital bone at the back of the head, and it will almost always be the occipital lobe of the brain that gets pulped. That was a “coup” injury. But when things were reversed, when a moving head hit a stationary object—in a fall, for example—the brain injury was likely to be at the opposite pole of the brain. Let a man fall off a catwalk onto stone paving and land on that same, rearward occipital bone, for example, and it would be the frontal lobe of the brain that got mashed into red jelly: a “contrecoup” injury.

  Why this should be had puzzled scientists for centuries. In 1766 the Royal Academy of Surgeons in Paris had offered a prize for a definitive explanation of contrecoup. They didn’t get one then, and they still didn’t have one that satisfied everybody. Gideon, no expert on the brain, was willing to accept the common theory that, in a fall, the skull is traveling faster than the brain that is cradled inside it, so that when the back of the head hits the ground the brain continues to move, subjecting it to a piling-up of impact forces at the front.

  Whether that was really the way it worked or not, contrecoup injuries were a fact, and he agreed with Merrill that they were looking at one now.