After having to notify the loved ones of a murder victim that their family member had been killed, attending the autopsy was the second-toughest thing for a homicide detective to do.
Kennicott always felt as if he were an intruder. Seeing the dead person, their naked body laid out on a stainless-steel operating table. Silent, motionless, all their past secrets an open book, the way their bodies were sliced apart, their insides pulled out, weighed, bottled, and sent off to a nameless lab.
Over the years he’d grown accustomed to the gruesome medical parts of the procedure: the slick swishing sound of the sharp knife slicing through skin, the high-pitched whir of the circular saw cutting off the top of the head, and the horrid stench of an opened body, which was inescapable in the sterile room. But the thing he never got used to was going through the personal effects of the deceased.
He’d examine the usual things: money, credit cards, cell phones, makeup kits, sunscreen, lip balm, pens, Post-it notes, Tylenol bottles, mints, gum. Then there would be the clues to a normal day in a normal life cut short: a pair of tickets for a show, a receipt for an item they’d bought and intended to return, a shopping list, a letter not yet put in the mail. The hardest part was the clothing, rummaging through their pockets, their shoes, their socks, even their underwear.
No one gets up in the morning expecting to be murdered. They left behind all the minutiae of their day-to-day existence. It all seemed innocent, typical of another day in the life. Not death. As if their lives were a clock, ticking along, and in an instant, smashed, never to start again. Kennicott’s job as a homicide detective was to try to trace their life from that moment backwards, live the life the dead person had lived before it was snatched from them.
That’s what made this autopsy and the one he’d attended last night unusual. Both were homeless people who had lived in the Humber Valley, and neither of them had any of the accoutrements most people took for granted. No wallets, no driver’s licences, no cell phones, no identification, no money. They literally had nothing but the shirts on their backs. Shirts plural, not just one shirt, because they wore layers and layers of clothes. Their only real possessions.
“Back so soon,” Dr. Ramos, the pathologist, said greeting Kennicott. She was a stylish, agile woman with long thin fingers. She had the look of someone who, in another life, could have been a concert pianist.
“Thank you for coming in on such short notice,” he said.
“I appreciate that this is urgent. Another homeless person from the same location is what I understand,” she said in her lovely accent.
“A woman this time,” Kennicott said.
“We’ve had Adam, now we have Eve.”
“Both from the Humber Valley. Hardly the Garden of Eden.”
“Let’s have a look, shall we,” she said, as casually as a dentist about to examine a sore tooth.
Kennicott watched as she opened up the body efficiently, cut away and scooped out the key organs, all the while narrating her actions into a small mic clipped to the top of her white coat. An assistant followed her every move, anticipating the tools she would need and preparing the appropriate jar or steel plate with which to take and store the various body parts.
In less than an hour she was done, pulling off her surgical gloves, using her elbows to turn on the long-stemmed taps over the deep sink in the corner of the room and washing her hands. “Cause of death is easy,” she said to Kennicott as she scrubbed away. “Smack on the top of the head with a glass bottle—lots of fragments in her hair and scalp—and the head bashed hard in the back.”
“Which killed her?”
“The bash to the back of the head. The glass bottle would have stunned her but wouldn’t have been fatal.”
“Can you tell which came first?”
“Wouldn’t want to speculate. The back of the head was bashed in with one blow from a blunt-force object.”
“Any idea what it could have been?”
She kept cleaning her hands. “Can’t say. I think that’s your job, Detective.”
“Similar to the male victim we had last night.”
“Appears to be.”
She used her elbows again to turn off taps and then pulled down a roll of fresh paper towels to dry off her pristine hands. She scanned the operating room. Her assistant was at the other end, labelling the samples.
“This woman had cervical cancer. I suspect it was totally untreated. It had spread throughout her body.”
“Life on the street for her must have been rough.”
“Horrible.” She lowered her voice. “There’s one thing about both of these cases that I find unusual.”
This could be useful, Kennicott thought. But he didn’t say anything.
She took off her white coat and hospital scrubs and neatly folded them up as if she were packing for a trip, before putting them squarely in the laundry bin.
Be patient, Kennicott told himself. The way Greene would be.
“If one does this job long enough, one does get a feel for things.” She headed for the door. Kennicott walked beside her.
“You mentioned that both times a vodka bottle seems to have been used on the back of their heads.”
“Yes.”
She opened the door and politely stood aside, insisting that Kennicott go first.
Kennicott understood what was going on. She wanted to tell him something completely off the record and was being careful. Pathologists were meant to be scrupulously objective and to never speculate about the crime itself.
He walked through the doorway and Ramos followed behind him. She waited patiently for it to close before she spoke.
“One also develops this extraordinary sense of smell,” she said quietly. “You see, Detective, when I opened up both of these people’s stomachs, I didn’t smell any alcohol. Anywhere.”
“No?” Kennicott said, surprised. “Meaning?”
“Meaning, it will take a few days to get the laboratory results of the blood tests to confirm this,” she said. “Perhaps this was not a fight between two drunkards or a battle concerning a bottle of alcohol, as it first appeared to be. Perhaps someone wished to create that impression. No?”