Rudolph Gambarin was a workaholic, and he liked to start cutting bodies early in the day. Lucy Merchant’s examination had begun by the time Codella got there. From outside the room, she heard the whirr of a precision saw. She could almost feel the high-speed blade grinding into her own sternum. She waited for the sound to stop. Then she opened the door, stepped inside, and silently worked her arms into a gown and tied on a mask. She positioned herself at the foot of the stainless table, opposite Gambarin. She’d been in his exam room enough times to know that he didn’t like to talk while he worked.
As usual, the ubiquitous odor of decay was unpleasant. Codella always avoided taking deep breaths during postmortems. When she inhaled the smell of putrefaction, it felt as if someone else’s death were infesting her lungs. She had never been repulsed by the clinical dissection of a body, but as she watched Gambarin pull the chest flap up, exposing blood-red tissue and organs, she felt the familiar heaviness that always invaded her arms and legs in an autopsy room. The sensation was like an unearthly gravity pulling her right into the ground.
She focused on Gambarin’s delicate gloved fingers severing arteries and ligaments, and then in her mind she was back at the side window of Joanie Carlucci’s house, staring through the glass at her father’s fat gloved hands gripping the handle of the baseball bat. And for the first time, she realized why she always felt this strange paralysis during autopsies. Here in this room of stainless steel and cold tile, her muscles and tendons remembered that first time she had met death. Now she pictured Joanie Carlucci holding her arms in front of her face as her father adjusted his grip like a designated hitter heading to the plate. If Claire had fled from the window in that moment, she would not have seen his act of violence. He might have gotten away with murder. But she hadn’t been able to move. Her legs had felt glued to the driveway of that house the same way they felt fixed to Gambarin’s autopsy room floor right now.
The precise, methodical medical examiner detached Lucy Merchant’s organ set. One at a time, he cradled each organ like a newborn and transported it to a scale where his assistant weighed it, recorded its measurement, and took tissue samples. And all the while, Codella gripped the edge of the table the way she had grasped the ledge below Joanie Carlucci’s window, and she reflected on the consequences of her father’s violent act. At the age of ten, she had become a foster child to a jewelry manufacturer’s rep and his wife in Meshanicut. Throughout her father’s trial, the couple devoured the local news coverage at night when they assumed she was asleep, but she hardly ever slept in those weeks and months, and she heard the live reports from her bedroom at the back of the first floor. Organized crime experts described her father’s ties to Rhode Island mob families, panels of forensic psychologists diagnosed his abnormal psychology, and notable child psychologists predicted her fate in brashly clinical terms. She would suffer paralyzing post-traumatic stress disorder, severe depression, attachment issues, and sleep disorders. “That monster didn’t just murder a woman; he murdered his child’s future,” one expert concluded.
When Gambarin and his assistant finished with the organs, they placed a body block behind Lucy Merchant’s head. Codella watched as Gambarin picked up his saw. Had she been psychologically damaged? Was she depressed? Did she have attachment issues? She thought of Haggerty and his own family of alcoholics and how the two of them had finally, after so many years, stumbled their way into cautious intimacy. Well, wasn’t everyone in some way or other fucked up by their childhood?
The procedure was over in two hours. When Gambarin pulled off his mask and wiped his forehead with a towel, Codella held her breath, trying not to betray her deep impatience for information. He might or might not weigh in on the cause of death before he finalized his report, and if she left without confirmation of her theory, she would be very disappointed.
She watched him stare at the fruits of his labor. “The external exam yielded nothing out of the ordinary,” he finally announced as he rubbed his eyes. “No scratches. No bruises. Certainly no knife wounds or bullet holes. She did have one little basal carcinoma spot on the dorsal side of the left hand but nothing to indicate a cause or manner of death.”
“And internally?” Codella asked in a carefully neutral voice calibrated to Gambarin’s perpetually blunted affect.
He reached for a water bottle on a stainless counter. “She was a physically fit woman with the musculature of someone still in her prime. There is no plaque in her arteries. The blood vessels around her heart look perfectly normal. The valves appear healthy. I saw no thickening of the pericardium. Heart disease did not cause her death.”
“So do you know what did?”
He pointed to her lungs and nodded. “Noncardiogenic pulmonary edema.”
“Fluid in her lungs?”
He nodded. “She basically drowned to death.” He picked up a pen and pointed it at Lucy Merchant’s mouth. “That’s why her lips turned bluish. You see? She wasn’t getting enough oxygen.”
“But how? Why?”
“Usually pulmonary edema results from congestive heart failure. But as I’ve said, this victim’s heart was completely healthy when death occurred. Something else caused her edema.”
“What?”
Gambarin lifted Lucy Merchant’s left eyelid, exposing a milky-white cornea. “It’s difficult to see, but there’s miosis of the pupils.”
“Miosis,” she repeated. “Constriction?”
“That’s right.”
She couldn’t contain her impatience any longer. “So what are you saying?”
“The autopsy results are consistent with toxin-related noncardiogenic pulmonary edema.”
“A drug overdose?”
“Yes.”
Codella let out a huge sigh. “Her medicine cup tested presumptively for oxycodone.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “An opioid overdose could certainly explain this, depending on the concentration, of course. We won’t know for certain until we get the toxicology back.”
“Which could take weeks.”
“More like a month,” he said. “Things have been very slow coming back. They really need to do something about that. But based on my observations, I’m willing to go out on a limb and state that there’s probable cause of an overdose. And that should be sufficient for you to move your investigation forward.”
When Codella got back to her car on First Avenue, she called Muñoz and gave him the news. “I’m going up to Manhattan North to fill McGowan in. I’ve got to get a team looking into the Park Manor staff. Can you swing over there, get a contact list of employees and residents, and e-mail it to me before ten o’clock? I’ll let Hodges know you’re coming.”