Secrets & Lies
Page 13
CHAPTER TEN
It was Monday morning. Ashleigh hoped this week she would be able to catch up on some of the backlog of paper work sitting in her in tray. She walked at a leisurely pace along the corridor of the Glebe Mortuary, carrying a coffee in a polystyrene cup, ignoring her footsteps as they echoed on the polished linoleum floor. A bank of fluorescent lights lit the corridor and the cool light bounced off the bluish-green walls; she was headed for the autopsy suites. The double doors slid open as she keyed in the security code and walked into the white tiled room. She looked around for Sam. It was seven-fifteen; she was early. She knew the other pathologists and technicians wouldn’t start arriving until at least eight-thirty.
The autopsy suite had two rows of seven metallic examination tables. The only difference between the room and a hospital operating theatre was that here, all the patients were dead. Ashleigh checked her phone for any messages before switching it off. She sat down at her desk and pulled out a muesli bar from her top drawer and unwrapped it. She was about to take a bite when Sam Lewis walked into her office.
‘Mike’s called in sick. Looks like you’ll have to take his cases for today, Doc.’
Ashleigh returned the health bar to the drawer and stood up. ‘Well let’s get on with it then,’ she sighed and looked at her in tray. It was going to be a long day.
Ashleigh followed Sam into the examination room. A pair of pale blue surgical gloves hung out from one of the pockets of her scrubs. She reached over and grabbed a glass jar from a row of specimen bottles lined up against the side wall. The contents of the jar offered little resistance as she dug her index finger into the solidified eucalyptus oil. The jelly like substance helped to mask the smells of the examination room, the disinfectant and the stench of decomposing bodies. This was something she had learnt from Doctor Ian Markham, her predecessor, who had introduced her to this trick of the trade on her first day on the job. The substance seared the inside of her nose. Sam Lewis suddenly appeared beside her. The morgue technician was holding a clipboard in his hands. He had been going through the day’s list before Ashleigh had arrived and now he moved closer to her, close enough to feel her breath on him and smell her French perfume. ‘No double dipping now, Doc,’ he laughed as he inserted his finger into the jar and proceeded to prod the white substance up his left nostril. ‘That should do the trick,’ he said as he returned the jar to the shelf.
A gust of foul smelling, chilled air struck Ashleigh in the face when she opened the stainless steel refrigerator doors. The freezer held up to ten bodies at a time; today it was a full house. Sam came over to her and pulled out the first gurney. Ashleigh looked down at the orange body bag in front of her and read the tag through the transparent label pocket. Phillips, Rose and her date of birth. She grabbed the clipboard from Sam and looked again at the name at the top of the day’s list. Ashleigh caught her breath.
Ashleigh followed the outline of Rose’s body with her eyes. She reasoned that Rose Phillips wasn’t a relative, not even an acquaintance – she was a neighbour, someone she’d never met or spoken to. Chewing her top lip, she silently reminded herself that she was a professional and had a job to do.
‘You okay, Doc?’ Sam asked, as he noticed the look on Ashleigh's face.
‘Yep, I'm fine. Let's just get on with this, okay? It’s going to be a long day.’
Sam rolled the gurney into the high risk suite at the far end of the room where autopsies were performed on badly decomposed bodies. Ashleigh wondered how many bags she had opened, three hundred, four hundred? She was reluctant to open the zipper at first, knowing that once she did, all the horror of death would be exposed. It was always like this. Ashleigh never knew what she would find until she mustered the courage and opened the bag, but once she did, she accepted what she was dealing with and just got on with the job. Time of death, cause of death, mechanism of death. These were the questions, she just had to find the answers.
The tang of rotting flesh escaped as Ashleigh unhooked the zipper and dragged it carefully down the length of the bag. Sam transferred the body onto the cold metallic table and set about removing and bagging the clothing. He washed the body while Ashleigh went over the day’s list which now also included Mike Cole’s list. When Sam was finished, Ashleigh returned to the examination table. She pushed her arms into her white lab coat, strapped her mask over her face and pulled on the pair of blue disposable gloves. She began her initial examination and pressed the button on her Dictaphone. Bacteria had already started its work on the tissues and the skin had taken on a greenish-red colour. She turned to Sam.
‘She’s been deceased for at least four to five days.’ Maggots crawled on the outside of Rose’s body and gas had already formed in the cavities and beneath the skin. She began to pick the maggots off with her gloved hand and deposited a small sample of them in a vial. She touched Rose’s abdomen, the skin was splitting and leaking fluid. Ashleigh thought it ironic that she was now about to know more about Rose Phillips in death, than she would ever have known about her while she was still alive and living two doors down from her in Eden Street.
Sam began taking photos of the body. Ashleigh’s lips tightened. She was silently annoyed that Rose’s hands had not been bagged at the scene and sighed in resignation as she began the first part of the physical examination. Ashleigh looked over at the plastic bag and the coat that Rose’s body had been wrapped in, the same woollen coat she’d been wearing the day she saw her walking up Eden Street with her shopping trolley. The timing was right. She cleared her throat and spoke in a professional and monotone voice into the Dictaphone. She stretched and tugged at the surgical gloves before she took Rose’s hands in hers and lifted them gently, rubbing them as if to reassure the woman, even though her lifeless body was beyond reassurance. She examined Rose’s fingernails searching for any skin or paint residue. Using an ultraviolet light, she scanned the body, searching for anything which she may have missed. Sam was taking hair and nail samples when Ashleigh sensed someone's presence behind her. Detective Senior Sergeant Nick Rimis entered the viewing room, a glass mezzanine enclosure above the autopsy room.
‘How ya doing, Ash?’ he said in his usual sardonic voice through the room’s microphone.
‘Fine, perfectly fine, Senior Sargeant,’ she replied with a frown. Ashleigh tried to ignore him for as long as she could. She was annoyed by the interruption his presence had caused and didn't bother to look up at him. Instead she continued recording her observations and concentrated on the notes she had already made. She could do without interruptions right now and wondered what he was doing here. Nick Rimis always had a habit of turning up in places she wished he wouldn’t. Like the time he turned up drunk at her apartment after his last girlfriend, Laura dumped him.
Frown lines surfaced on Ashleigh’s forehead. They became more pronounced now as she placed her pen and clipboard down on the stainless steel counter and pulled the mask and safety glasses away from her face. She stripped her hands of her gloves and threw them with the mask in the yellow bin marked ‘toxic waste’.
Rimis looked up from his newspaper when she entered the viewing room. He was reading the sports section. The Roosters were at the bottom of the league table two seasons running. ‘What’s up?’ Rimis said, sensing something was troubling Ashleigh.
Ashleigh looked down at the body on the examination table. ‘She’s my neighbour, or rather, she was my neighbour.’ They both looked at Rose’s body. ‘She lived two doors down from me.’
‘I didn’t know you’d moved. Why didn’t you tell me? We could have had a house warming party.’
‘That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you.’
‘So who’ve you got down there?’ Rimis tugged at his tie as if was strangling him.
‘Her name’s Rose Phillips.’
Rimis raised his eyebrows. ‘She’s one of mine. I’m working on her case.’
‘So, do you want to join me? I’ve got a spare pair of scrubs. You can fill me in, answer an
y questions I might have.‘
‘You know I’ve got a sensitive stomach, Ash. I only dropped by to see if you feel like going for a drink and something to eat after work?’
Ashleigh knew Nick Rimis well enough to know that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. She also knew that by the end of the day she would probably need a drink and knew he was probably the only person capable of filling her in on the missing pieces of this case.
She looked down at Rose’s body. ‘I should be finished here around seven. I’ll meet you at Otto’s, but only for a drink, okay?’
Rimis placed his hand on her arm, smiled and wondered what it was about the Phillips’s case that was getting to Ashleigh. She was usually so cool and detached. Ashleigh returned to the autopsy room and Rimis returned to his newspaper. He had time to kill before meeting up with his new recruit Jill Brennan, and he hoped that she wasn’t going to be as raw as he had been when he joined the unit. But he doubted it; she had acted like a real pro when he met her for the first time at the Phillips’s house last Friday.
‘Caucasian, female, mid eighties, grey, shoulder length hair, brown eyes, one centimetre birthmark on left cheek, scar, two and a half centimetres below her right knee, a vertical cholecystectomy scar on the abdomen, bruising on the forehead and chin, signs of poor circulation. Overall condition of the body – undernourished.’ Ashleigh pulled her safety glasses on, plugged in the Stryker saw and opened the chest cavity. She lifted off the sternum and the attached ribs releasing with it a foul smelling odour of blood and offal. She placed it on the stainless steel tray and then examined the exposed lungs and heart. Systematically, she removed the organs, weighing each as she went.
‘Got any big plans for tonight, Doc?’ Sam asked.
‘Yep, lots of paperwork,’ Ashleigh lied. Sam was good at his job, a little too good. He enjoyed working with dead people, probably because they never complained. She thought he was ghoulish and wondered if he had a girlfriend. Ashleigh made an incision from behind the left ear over the crown of the head to the right ear. She examined the brain in situ and then severed the cranial nerves and spinal cord, lifted the brain gently from the skull so she could examine it further. It was a long process and Ashleigh’s legs were aching. She methodically recorded her findings. She looked up at the viewing room and realised that Rimis had left. A finding of death from suicide or natural causes would make him happy she thought to herself, but a finding of homicide would not. ‘Sam sew up for me and tidy up here will you? I’m going to my office.’
‘Sure. No problemo.’ Sam liked Ashleigh. Nothing was ever too much trouble for Doc Taylor. The whole department liked her; she was a real pro, but she took her job to heart, too much sometimes.