The preliminary hearing in People v. Samuel Urias took place in one of the Hall of Justice’s older courtrooms. There’s no jury in a prelim. It’s usually a brief and straightforward affair, presided over by a judge. This one was a graying woman with the air of a grumpy umpire.
I was on the witness stand. Oskar Haring, the son of the man Samuel Urias was being charged with killing, sat in the public gallery, keeping himself apart from the ruck of journalists with open notebooks. He was unkempt and fidgety, and had his eyes locked on me. Another man, also alone in the crowd, watched me from a pew on the opposite side. He had tightly curled brown hair, thick at the top and shaved at the sides, and a reddish mustache and goatee. His skin was freckled and wrinkled beyond his years: he spent a lot of time in the sun. He saw me watching him and flicked a shy smile, then caught himself and looked away.
Assistant District Attorney Jason Bevner lifted his blocky self to approach the stand, and launched into the direct examination by asking me if I had performed an autopsy on Leopold Haring on October 29.
“Yes,” I replied.
“During the autopsy did you collect a blood specimen for DNA, for identification purposes?”
“Yes.”
“What was the cause of death?”
“Penetrating trauma to the heart.”
“Did you determine the manner of death?”
“Yes.”
“What was that?”
“Homicide.”
“You did not determine that this was an accident?”
“It was not an accident.”
“How do you know that?”
I addressed myself to the court reporter and described, slowly and clearly, the many postmortem injuries to the body and the single fatal one, a penetrating wound through Haring’s back, between his fifth and sixth ribs, straight into his heart.
“The scene was staged with the fallen pipes to appear as an accident. But that wasn’t what happened. The body had been moved. There were drag marks in the dirt that matched evidence on the clothing and the body, and the lack of vital reaction in the wounds caused by the fallen pipes indicates that Mr. Haring did not die there.”
“Someone killed him somewhere else, and then placed him under the pipes and dropped them on him?”
“That’s what the physical evidence shows.”
“What kind of weapon would have caused the penetrating trauma that you determined was the cause of death?”
“Something at least five inches long and about one-quarter inch thick, with a round shaft.”
“Did you tell the police that the wound was consistent with an injury caused by a screwdriver?”
“I did.”
“No further questions.”
Bevner swiveled and returned to his seat. The judge looked to the defense table and said, “Cross.”
Eva Yung came in front of me, nodded in a staged, impersonal way, and asked if I had examined the screwdriver the police said they had recovered from her client’s truck. I answered yes.
“Isn’t it true that you said, after handling, examining, and measuring that screwdriver yourself in the police evidence room, that it was not the right size to have caused the fatal injury in the deceased?”
“Yes.”
Eva walked me through a couple of questions about the fibers I’d found on the screwdriver’s shaft—whether they matched the fibers I’d found in the wound track. They did not, I said. Did I find any fibers on the screwdriver that did match the fibers I’d seen under the microscope, or any that matched the clothing Haring was wearing? I did not.
“Isn’t it true, Dr. Teska, that you cannot state with reasonable medical certainty that the fatal wound was caused by the screwdriver that was recovered from my client’s truck?”
“That’s true.”
Eva Yung told the judge she was finished with cross-examination, and the judge asked the ADA if he wanted to redirect. He did.
“Dr. Teska, if you were provided with evidence that the screwdriver in question, the one Inspector Jones recovered from the back of Samuel Urias’s truck, had blood on it that matched the DNA of the victim, would it change your mind that it might be the murder weapon?”
“Maybe. Depends on what kind of evidence.”
Jason Bevner went back to his table and held up a document. “Your Honor, I’d like to approach the witness with people’s exhibit three, the police criminalistics lab’s DNA report on the blood from the screwdriver—”
Eva Yung sprang back out of her seat. “Objection, Your Honor—hearsay, lacks foundation. Dr. Teska isn’t a DNA expert.”
“She is a board-certified forensic pathologist and she is more than qualified to interpret DNA,” the prosecutor shot back. “Heck, she could be running the criminalistics lab. She’s been qualified as an expert witness, and as an expert she can rely on hearsay like this report.”
“I’ll allow it,” the judge said.
The prosecutor smirked and Eva Yung sat. Then he got permission from the judge to approach me on the witness stand, and handed me a copy of people’s exhibit three. I read it over. I had reviewed DNA laboratory reports like it a hundred times, but this one held a surprise. I said nothing, and took the time to read it again carefully before I looked up at ADA Bevner.
“What does the report say, Dr. Teska?”
“That the evidence marked as ‘screwdriver recovered from truck’ was positive for human blood, and that the DNA was a mixed specimen of two contributors, both male.”
“And was one of the contributors matched to the decedent, Leopold Haring?”
“Leopold Haring cannot be excluded as a contributor.”
“That means yes?”
“Yes.”
“It says that the DNA on the screwdriver was matched to the blood specimen you took from the body of Leopold Haring during the autopsy, correct?”
“Yes, that is how I would interpret this report.”
“No further questions.”
Eva Yung was still scrutinizing the defense copy of the lab report when she approached me. She kept her eyes on the paper and said, “Isn’t it also true that my client Samuel Urias was excluded as a contributor?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“That means his DNA is not on this screwdriver that the police say belongs to him?”
“Yes.”
“How is that possible?”
I opened my mouth to expound on the complexity of extracting DNA off a piece of forensic evidence, but the prosecutor cut me off.
“Objection, Your Honor. She hasn’t been qualified as an expert in DNA methodology.”
“She’s exactly just such an expert, Your Honor,” Eva Yung argued. “Dr. Teska works with DNA all the time. Besides, the ADA just handed her the report and said she’s an expert in interpreting it!”
“Your Honor, I plan to call Dr. Shirley Shimamoto back to the stand. As the expert who authored this report, she alone is qualified to answer questions about methodology at the crime lab.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” the judge said. “I’m allowing the people’s objection.” She peered down at me over the tops of her half-moon glasses. “You are instructed not to answer that question, Dr. Teska.”
“Yes, Your Honor,” I said dutifully. Then the judge asked Eva Yung if she had any further questions. She didn’t. Same question to Bevner. Nothing coming from him, either.
“You’re excused, Dr. Teska. The court thanks you for your time.”
I tucked the DNA report into my case file, thanked the judge back, and made my way to the door at the rear of the courtroom. As I walked down the aisle through the public gallery, two men watched me—Oskar Haring from one side, and the man with the red goatee from the other. Both looked perturbed.
A couple of reporters followed me out of the courtroom and started barking questions as soon as we were in the hall. I told them I had no comment. They barked more questions, with more urgency. I said nothing. I made for the stairs, knowing they wouldn’t follow. If I wasn’t talking, the next witness to take the stand in the prelim, whoever that was, would be more interesting to them. I was right—they stayed behind as the heavy metal door clanged shut on the stairwell.
I wove through the familiar old corridors of the Hall of Justice, and mulled. Eva Yung was pursuing the theory that someone had planted that screwdriver in the open bed of Samuel Urias’s truck. Now the DNA report showed that the screwdriver, which did not match the fatal wound, seemed to have the dead man’s blood on it. Plus it had another, unidentified man’s blood mixed in. No, wait—not blood; DNA. Just because there’s blood on the screwdriver doesn’t mean that the DNA came from blood. The blood could belong to both of the two contributors, or only one of them. That one didn’t necessarily need to be Haring. It could be the mystery man’s blood on the screwdriver, and Haring’s DNA that got onto it somehow other than by being plunged into his back.
I was contemplating how much scotch I would go through every night in order to make it into work each morning as a DNA analyst when I nearly bumped right into Denis Monaghan. He was coming off the line of people cramming through the metal detectors in the Hall’s main lobby, and looked as surprised as I was.
“Small world,” I said, barely beating him to the punch.
“Small town, anyhow,” he replied, grinning wide.
Denis was wearing another suit, this one more conservative than the Twinning Day outfit I had stripped off him on Saturday night. With his brawn stuffed under its seams, it made for another sharp piece of business attire.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Ara,” Denis said, and waved his hand toward the crowd behind the security checkpoint. “Business nonsense. You get to see me in my other suit!” He struck a pose. “That’s the full formal wardrobe for Denis Andrew Monaghan, the complete and entire collection.”
I did a quick double-arch of my brows, which I hoped was a suitable display of appreciation, given the public setting. “What is it, a lawsuit?”
“Always. A carpenter makes lawsuits like a pig makes shite.”
“Another colorful Irish saying?”
“No—my own poor personal slogan, I’m afraid.”
“But you aren’t a carpenter.”
“Sure I am.”
“Carpenters don’t fix HVAC, I know that much.”
Denis sidled carefully into my personal space. The smell of his cologne brought me back to his bedroom, and a flush spread across my collarbones. “Ah, Doctor,” he said. “I thought I’d already demonstrated that I’m a jack-of-all-trades and master of some.”
“Um-hm,” I said. I didn’t trust myself to say more, but I didn’t back away.
He made sure no one was in earshot, and then he murmured, “Come out with me again.”
“No,” I murmured back, and cold shame pushed the flush right off my skin.
“Why not?”
“Denis... I misled you the other night. I never told you I’m in a relationship.”
The spell broke. Denis straightened. “No ring on your finger,” he said with a defensive twinge. “I checked.”
“You’re right. But, still—no.”
He smiled in a rueful way and shrugged. “That’s a shame, really it is. We had a good time together, didn’t we? You had a good time—didn’t you.”
“I did. Oh yes I did... But it was only a one-time good time.”
Denis started to say something, but it never came out. He looked off and shrugged, then stepped back, clapped his hands, and rubbed them together as though we’d just settled a building contract.
“Right, so,” he said. “Be well, Jessie.” And he slipped right into the stream of people heading for the elevators. I watched Denis go, and decided that there are worse ways to hammer home the coffin nail in a one-night stand.
I crossed the lobby to put myself into the line for the exit onto Bryant Street, but stepped back out when I saw beyond it, to the parade of news vans out there. The crowd at the doors was enormous, and it had cameras. Cameras, and the hungry look of murder-trial reporters. Muscle memory took me another way, across the lobby to a side corridor, where a sheriff’s deputy guarded a pair of glass doors marked Authorized Personnel Only. I showed my badge and he waved me through, outside to the gray concrete cloister of the police parking lot.
I hustled down the walkway that skirted the parked cruisers, congratulating myself for my cleverness, until a young woman appeared from the corner off Seventh Street and started straight at me. She had her phone thrust out like a microphone.
“Dr. Teska,” she said before I could dogleg into the parking lot, “when you testified up there about the DNA on that screwdriver—”
“Who are you?”
“Amber Bishop, KnowNowSF, did you mean that the weapon the police found in the back of the defendant’s vehicle should be—”
“No comment.”
The walkway was narrow, and I didn’t want to shoulder past the reporter, but I didn’t much like being ambushed, either.
“Are you aware that the prosecution has called witnesses who will testify that Samuel Urias repeatedly threatened Leopold Haring at the work site?”
“No comment.”
“You’re saying the bloody screwdriver doesn’t match the wound you found during the autopsy, but they know the blood belongs to Haring. How do you account for that?”
“One of the DNA profiles can’t be ruled out as Haring’s. That doesn’t mean it’s his blood. DNA and blood aren’t the same thing.”
Mój Boż, Czecia, ucisz się, I heard my mother tell me from inside my skull. She was right: I should shut up. I slid past the reporter, brushing against her on one side and a patrol car’s dirty fender on the other. She followed as I power walked toward the street.
“If that isn’t the screwdriver that killed Leopold Haring, then how come it’s covered in his blood?”
“No comment.”
“There’s another man’s DNA profile on that sample, but it isn’t Samuel Urias. Who’d it come from?”
“No comment.”
“You’ve seen that report, Doctor. Who’s the other man with DNA on that screwdriver?”
“No comment.”
“Oh come on!” Amber Bishop swooped past me on the sidewalk and planted herself in my path again. “What’s with this stonewalling? Why won’t you talk to us? That’s your job!”
“I have no comment, Ms. Bishop.”
“You’re the deputy chief! Mike Stone always talked to us...”
I stepped up but didn’t step around her this time. I put my nose right into the reporter’s, till I could smell the hustle and the Coco Mademoiselle coming off her pores.
“You take Mike Stone’s name right out of your mouth,” I said carefully and quietly. “I have no comment for you.”
When I walked away again, Amber Bishop had sense enough not to follow.
I was back at my desk, clearing out backlog cases, when the phone rang. It was the veteran day-shift 2578, saying he had a caller on hold for me—and that the caller wouldn’t give his name.
“Sure, put him through.”
The mystery caller was a man with a Spanish accent. He wouldn’t give me his name, either.
“Why do you want to talk to me, sir?” I asked.
“You were in court today, in the case of Samuel Urias. I have information.”
“What kind of information?” The first thing I do when I testify as an expert witness is to state my name, occupation, and place of work. It’s not hard to track me down. The caller could be another journalist from the public gallery, and I was not going to put up with any anonymous-caller shenanigans.
“Samuel didn’t kill that man,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I know he didn’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“A lot of people want Samuel off that job site where he’s working. A lot of them. He gets blamed for this killing, and now he is off the site. You see?”
“Sir, the police are really—”
“No. They will not. You must help Samuel, Doctor. There must be something you can do—because the way they blame him, it cannot be true what they are saying, and it’s your job to find that out. Yes?”
“You haven’t answered my question. Why do you say you know Samuel could not have committed this murder?”
“I was...with him that night.”
“What night are you talking about?”
“October twenty-seven.”
“What time were you with him?”
The mystery caller was silent. I waited.
“All night.”
“Okay,” I said, flat. “Can you prove it?”
“No.”
“But you can swear to it. Samuel has a lawyer. Her name is Eva Yung. I’m going to give you her number, so you can call her and testify to this alibi. Even if you—”
“No. I cannot.”
“But your friend is in serious trouble here—”
“I cannot. You have to stop them.”
“Who?”
“The police. You said this screwdriver is not the one. That’s right. It cannot be. What the police are saying Samuel did, he didn’t do it.”
“You were there today? You saw me testify?”
I waited out another itchy pause. “Yes.”
“What you saw was only one small piece of the trial. The evidence—all the evidence, taken together—looks pretty bad for your friend. But if his lawyer can establish that he was with you that night, it would prove he didn’t do what the prosecutor—the police—say he did. You understand that, right?”
“I understand. But I cannot testify.”
“Can you tell me why?”
“No.”
I guessed the caller must be the curly-haired guy with the red goatee who had been watching me so intently when I took the stand.
“Okay, look. You called me out of the blue. How do I know you’re telling the truth? What do you expect me to do?”
“Fijate en la sangre,” the man said. “The blood—look at the blood.”
“What about it?”
“You said that the screwdriver has the dead man’s blood, and someone else’s, but not Samuel’s. You have to find that other person, the other blood. That must be the killer. It is not Samuel.”
I started to explain that the presence of another person’s DNA doesn’t necessarily point to the murderer, but the damn guy got agitated and cut me off again.
“I am telling you that Samuel was with me that night and he didn’t do it. Fijate en la sangre.”
And he hung up.
Son of a bitch. I found Eva Yung’s email address and fired off a quick message giving her a heads-up about the call. If the guy called her, and if he was legit, then she might be able to establish an alibi for her client. Then again, Eva Yung had given me a song and dance about Samuel Urias being a warrior for his brother workers, a solid family man, a pillar of his community. This guy was trying to push the story that he was Urias’s secret lover. Yung might have been leaving that part of her client’s biography off for my sake, or she might be ignorant of it. The mystery caller might be lying.
Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Except, I realized with a sorry sigh, alone there in my office, they were my monkeys. The mystery caller—Redbeard, if that’s who it was—had a good point about one thing, damn him: Who was that second DNA contributor? The prosecutor had mentioned the specialist who produced the report. It was a Japanese name, something moto. Wait—it would be on my copy of the lab report. I pulled it out. Shirley Shimamoto, PhD.
I called the police crime lab and asked for her. I got a secretary, who told me that Dr. Shimamoto was still stuck in court at the Hall of Justice, but that she should be back at the lab by four or four thirty.
If Redbeard was telling the truth, whoever belonged to that second set of DNA alleles might be able to help Eva Yung keep an innocent man out of prison. The bony finger on the minute hand on the novelty death’s-head clock I keep on my desk started inching toward 4:00. I looked up the police criminalistics laboratory’s address. Turned out it was in the disused shipyard at Hunters Point, not far from my office. I decided to head home early, and pay a quick visit on the way to DNA expert Shirley Shimamoto.
My BMW’s navigation system gave up somewhere in the shipyard’s ruined plain of rusted cranes and rotting warehouses. Internet mapping apps on my cell phone fared no better. I found the criminalistics lab only because it was the sole structure lit up in the gloomy autumn dusk. It was a newer building surrounded by a moat of parking lots, empty but for a cluster of half a dozen cars huddled together.
“The unnamed contributor could be nearly any male person,” Shimamoto told me as we clattered our way through the echoing building to her office. “Anybody who touched the thing. It could be someone who handled the screwdriver at the store, or another worker at the site—it was found in an open-air truck bed, remember.”
“They wouldn’t have to bleed on it?”
She shook her head. “DNA don’t care.”
“That’s a good slogan.”
“We like it. What’s the OCME’s?”
“They’ll still be dead tomorrow.”
Shimamoto snorted a laugh.
I looked over the report again. “Is there anything unique about this DNA profile?”
Shimamoto went to her computer and poked around. Then she swiveled the screen to show me a graph, and pointed. “See these STR loci? They’re more common in African Americans.”
“How accurate is that measure?”
“Eighty percent likelihood.”
“Hmm. What are the ways you would match this sample to an individual?”
“If he gets arrested on a felony, his DNA would get entered into the FBI database, and it would be flagged here. We check it automatically on any unidentified human sample.”
“So that means he hasn’t been arrested for a felony in the past.”
“Not since we started collecting DNA.”
“And how long’s that?”
“Thirty years, more or less.”
It was a dead end. I don’t like dead ends. I asked Shirley Shimamoto if there was anyplace else she could look, any other resource where she might find a match for this DNA profile.
Luckily for me, Shirley liked a challenge. “Let me see,” she said, and fiddled with her computer. “There’s another database that might... Aha! We have a match here...”
“Really? That’s great! So who is it?”
“It’s not a name. We have a match to an internal sample from the medical examiner.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Case number SFME-1556.”
“What’s the name on the case?”
“John Doe number fifteen.”
“Ugh,” I said. “Should have thought of that. Somebody in my office must have submitted the DNA for identification.”
Shirley typed some more. “Let me look... Yes. Says here a C. Teska, MD. Two weeks ago, on November second. Wait, C. Teska? Any relation?”
“Yes,” I said, “I know her a little.” I sighed and leaned back in the office chair. “That’s me. I go by Jessie, but my name’s Czesława.”
“It’s what?”
“Czesława.”
“Oh,” said Shirley. “So this is your John Doe.”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Convenient!”
“Isn’t it, though.”
“You don’t seem thrilled.”
“What was your first clue, Shirley?”
It was a little easier to get out of the shipyard than it had been getting in, and I made it back to the Office of Chief Medical Examiner just after five. The 2578s had completed their shift change, and Cameron Blake was at his desk in the Ops Shop.
“Just the man I want to see,” I said.
“Oh no.”
“That’s right. I need an ID on a Doe. John Doe fifteen, case number fifteen fifty-six. Do we have any leads on who—”
“Wait, wait,” Cam said, and clicked around on his computer. “You told me his name was Curtis something, and you wanted to match him to a Doe, right? Now you’re saying he’s a Doe and you want...what?”
“No, not that one. John Doe number fifteen. Different guy. This one matches a DNA profile in one of my homicides.”
“Which homicide?”
“Case 1584, Leopold Haring.”
Cam found the computer file and scanned his monitor. “Oh, the architect. Right. High profile. That family is a pain in the ass. They can’t decide what to do with the remains. First they wanted direct cremation, then somebody sent a legal order halting direct cremation, and then another legal order from somebody else, about foreign removal...”
“Where?”
“Hell, I don’t remember. Australia?”
“Austria?”
“Sure. They keep switching funeral homes, and every single thing about this body has lawyers attached.”
“Wait,” I said. “We still have Leopold Haring?”
“No one has picked him up yet.”
“That’s going on three weeks. He must be getting pretty ripe.”
“Crazy rich people,” Cam said, and rubbed his gleaming scalp with one hand. “They’re the worst. Four hundred bucks a day in morgue storage fees doesn’t bother them, so they stiff us with the cadaver till they’re good and done fighting over what to do with it. By the time this bunch figures it out, Mr. Haring will be a soupy bag of bones.”
“So what have you done on this case so far?”
“Which case?”
“John Doe number fifteen!”
“Okay, okay, hold your horses.”
He bounced around the computer database again. Case file SFME-1556 came up. “Oh, I remember this one. From the King Street rubble, way down the bottom. His face was no good for a visual ID, and we couldn’t get fingerprints—one hand was never recovered, and the other one wasn’t viable.” He clicked on the computer again, and pulled up a photo of the mangled body. “Blunt trauma, blunt trauma, blunt trauma...disarticulation of the extremities, starting to bloat.”
“You’re right about the face,” I said. It was not recognizable as human, except that it was attached to something that was wearing clothes.
“Yeah. So we sent his DNA to the lab, and we’re waiting to hear back if they get a hit.”
The circular irony of this made my head spin. Our 2578s had sent John Doe #15’s DNA to the police criminalistics lab to see if they could identify him when their other methods failed. Instead, the crime lab had connected John Doe #15 to the Haring homicide when they discovered that he was the second DNA contributor on the bloody screwdriver...and still nobody had a name to hang on him.
“Damn it,” I said to Cam. “I need an ID on this Very Important Doe.”
“What’s the hurry?”
“There’s been an arrest in the case, but I’m skeptical that the guy did it. Very Important Doe here is connected to a key piece of physical evidence.”
“Very Important Doe.” Cam chuckled. “Since it came in as a decomp, you must’ve done a full-body X-ray, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you looked at the films for something unique—a skeletal deformity or a healed fracture, maybe?”
I thought about it and realized I hadn’t. We’d been so swamped after the earthquake, I had just performed the autopsies and handed the John and Jane Does off to the investigators to worry about.
“Maybe you’ll get lucky and find something on radiology that we can use for an ID, at least a presumptive one,” Cameron said. “Get a presumptive ID, and we can try to contact the family, collect a DNA sample from them, get a comparative going, and bingo—we got him.”
I sat down at another Ops Shop computer, logged in, and opened the radiology images I’d taken before starting the autopsy, looking for anything that might stand out. It wasn’t hard—a bright white line jumped off the X-ray of the dead man’s right forearm. It was something metal. I clicked on another view and saw that the metal object was actually two separate surgical plates used for repairing badly broken bones. John Doe #15 had one on the surface of his radius and one on the ulna. I never saw the plates when I cut into the body because you don’t dissect limbs during an autopsy unless there’s a good reason to, like the presence of a wound.
This was a good reason. Medical devices have serial numbers. I was going to have to go find John Doe #15 in our cooler, open him back up, and retrieve the two plates. Maybe I could track them to whatever hospital put them into my Very Important Doe. Then I could get comparative radiology and see if the patient’s X-rays from the time of the surgery matched the autopsy X-rays. If they did, I’d have the patient’s name.
A lot of ifs.
Cam thought this was a hilariously bad idea. “That corpse was already ripe when we brought it in, and now it’s been sitting in the cooler for two weeks! Yarina’s gonna love you forever, Doc.”
“She’ll be fine with it.”
Cam laughed wickedly. “And she’s got a long memory, our Yarina Marchenko. I’m telling you.”
I found Yarina cleaning up the autopsy suite, getting ready to close down for the day. I told her we needed to pull out a body.
“Now?”
“Afraid so.”
“It cannot wait until tomorrow?”
“Believe me, I wish it could. It has to do with a homicide, and I need to do it before we get new cases in the morning. Will you help me?”
She didn’t want to, of course, and started grousing.
“I promise I’ll clean up by myself,” I said. “You can go home as soon as we’re done.”
She groused some more, but didn’t refuse—Yarina was nothing if not conscientious. She went back to fixing up the autopsy suite for the next day’s work, and I hustled to the locker room and got suited up in my PPEs before she could change her mind. Cam was right: two weeks is a long time for a body that came into our office in a state of pronounced decomposition to continue to marinate in the cooler. Better Yarina find out what we were doing at the last possible moment.
The state of the cooler took the wind right out of my sails. It was crammed—absolutely crammed, floor to ceiling—with body bags.
“What the hell...?” I said.
“Earthquake dead.” Yarina squeezed in there and started examining toe tags. “They must go somewhere.”
“Yes, but...” The cadavers were stacked two or even three to a gurney. It was horrifying.
“We wait for funeral homes to come and collect. Meantime, every morning, more cases. More bodies. They come faster than they go. We have surplus.”
Yarina was unfazed by the catacomb cooler. She is unflappable, that woman. She had been some sort of clinician back in Ukraine. I could only imagine her bedside manner.
It took a while, but we found John Doe #15. His nylon pouch sat on top of another, both of them sharing a single gurney. I asked Yarina whose body was the one underneath my Very Important Doe.
She peered at the toe tag. “Haring, L.”
“You’re kidding.”
“This is your case, also, yes? The architect.”
“Yes.”
Yarina found this morbid coincidence absolutely hysterical. “Look! Now they are like brothers, sharing a bed!”
I took the head and Yarina took the feet, and we started to move John Doe off of Leopold Haring. As soon as we shifted the pouch, a wave of stench billowed up. It was so strong I could taste it. I swore in Polish, and Yarina agreed in Ukrainian. We tried again, and discovered the hard way that a greasy mess had been leaking out of a seam in John Doe’s body bag and slicking onto Haring’s. We freed up another gurney and slid John Doe onto it. When we did, some of his decomposition juice dribbled onto the cooler floor.
“You clean,” Yarina said. “This you promised.”
“I know what I promised!” I snapped.
It was a whole lot of nasty, sweaty, gagging effort to get John Doe #15 out of the cooler. We managed it eventually, and rolled him over to the Decomp Crypt.
The Decomp Crypt is what we call the Advanced Decomposition and Virulent Disease Vector Isolation Vault, a small room with a single autopsy table and an exhaust system that’s separated from the rest of the morgue. It’s claustrophobic and loud. Yarina and I crammed ourselves in there with the remains of John Doe #15. She maintained a steady stream of bitching and moaning about the double-stacking of bodies. The investigators should be working harder to get them out! The Haring case came in before the earthquake, and new earthquake cases were still coming in, when the injured died under hospital care. Why’s this completed case still taking up room in our morgue...?
I kept my mouth shut and ground my own gears. I was deputy chief medical examiner, and it was supposed to be my job to manage cadaver storage so we didn’t end up stacking them like cordwood in the cooler. Yarina was right about Leopold Haring, too—and I resolved to call Natalie and prompt her to deal with her dead husband’s remains, like it or not. What if the press caught wind of—
“Co tak jebie!” I yelped, and gagged, and turned away.
Yarina had unzipped the nylon pouch but didn’t even attempt to shift the body off the gurney and onto the table. It was just too soupy. Even she was appalled. This thing that had once been a man had gone beyond bloating and had collapsed in on itself. The skin hung on the bones like wet paper. The fat had melted, spreading and resettling in fetid blobs. An oily sludge heaved around the bottom of the vinyl pouch. John Doe’s head was still attached. It looked like a December jack-o’-lantern.
The right arm was still attached, too, and that’s all we needed to access. I told Yarina we’d work on the body in the pouch, on the gurney, and not even try to get it onto the table. There was no point—and I was not confident it would hold together if we tried.
Yarina said, “Okay, good luck,” and left the crypt for the regular autopsy suite before I could object.
I reached into the mire, pulled out the right forearm, and went to work with my scalpel as quick as I could, slicing and scraping through the soft tissues till I reached the two surgical plates. They had been there a long time—stout bone calluses had grown around them, like an old tree swallowing a fence post. There was only one way I was going to get the plates out of John Doe’s arm. I put it back in the body bag and pushed through the pressurized door to the autopsy suite.
“No,” said Yarina. “You cannot have my bone saw.”
“But it’ll only take me a few minutes...”
“You will break my bone saw.”
“No, I will not.”
“You will. Plates are titanium. Saw blade is stainless steel. Titanium is more hard. You will break my blade.”
“I promise I will not break the blade, Yarina. Now, please go get the thing so I can finish this unpleasant job.”
Yarina went off to find the bone saw, muttering darkly to herself.
The electric handsaw’s rattling din filled the tiny, airtight Decomp Crypt. I aimed the blade for the distal end of the ulna and plunged down. The tool bit into bone and made a neat line all the way through.
“Świetnie!” I declared to no one, and made the same cut at the proximal end. I made two more to free the smaller plate, and emerged victorious from the Decomp Crypt with two pieces of a dead man’s rotting bones in one hand and Yarina’s precious power tool in the other.
All I had left to do was to pull off the metal plates. I clamped a dura stripper to the longer piece of bone to hold it, readied the bone saw again, and pressed it forward, bone dust flying, ripping smoothly along the edge of the surgical plate—
Until, with a sickening grind, it stopped.
Across the room, Yarina sighed. “You have broken my blade.”
“Don’t worry, it’s just jammed...” I said, and wrenched the saw out of the bone.
She was right. I had snapped the damn thing clean in half.
I admitted fault. I begged Yarina’s forgiveness. I asked, “Do you have another blade?”
“Yes,” she said, and held out her hand for the saw. I gave it to her. “But not for you, Dr. Teska.”
She shuffled across the autopsy suite, and returned to my table with a hammer, a set of chisels, and a hacksaw. I took the tools without a word.
Yarina left, and I was alone in the morgue. It’s something I don’t like to do; not because I’m afraid of a room full of corpses or because I believe in ghosts. I don’t. I believe in people. I believe people are capable of doing violent, evil, stupid things to one another if they convince themselves they have to, or simply that they really want to, as long as they have also convinced themselves that they can get away with doing those things. I had faced such a person in another morgue once. I didn’t want to do it again.
I aimed a chisel perpendicular to the bone and whaled away with the hammer until the plates were free, then put the bigger one under my magnifying glass and peered at the inner surface. Engraved there was a figure, an O with an X overlapping it—probably a corporate logo—followed by something that looked like a serial number: L-418 S-C88D46M. I checked the other plate and found a similar pattern, cut into the metal, clear and complete.
It had been, as I imagined it would be, a whole lot of sweaty, nasty work—but I had found the information I hoped I would find, buried as deep as it could possibly be buried inside my Very Important Doe’s right forearm. Whether or not I would be able to make use of it remained to be seen.
Bea was going bananas by the time I got back to Mahoney Brothers #45, but she hadn’t shat the rug or torn up the furniture, so I rewarded her with a nice long romp down the beach. She enjoyed it, but I sure didn’t—it was pitch dark already, and a soggy little north wind was blowing. California was making me soft. Back in Lynn it would start getting dark around four o’clock this time of year. Any given day in November is grim and cold and likely to sleet. The foliage has blown away and the snowy postcard days are still weeks off. Thanksgiving can be the gloomiest time of the year.
Thanksgiving. It was, what, ten days away? Anup and I had never finished planning for the holiday—the last time I’d raised the subject, we were sharing soup dumplings at House of Shanghai Taste and the earthquake interrupted us. When Bea and I got back to the house and I’d settled into bed, I called him.
“How you feeling?” he asked, right off the bat.
“Fine. Why?”
“Yesterday you said you were laid up. Is it a cold?”
“Oh—no. A stomach bug. Or maybe something I ate. I’m fine now.”
I’d forgotten that I’d lied to him on Sunday morning to beg off going hiking, his way of making up for Saturday night, the Lakshmi puja I wasn’t welcome to attend—the Saturday night that had turned into an off-the-hook debauch for me and Denis Monaghan.
“I tried calling you earlier,” Anup said.
“Yeah, sorry—something came up last minute at work.”
“But your stomach is okay?”
“Fine now.”
“Well, try to take it easy tomorrow, will you?”
I promised him I would, compounding lies with more lies. I had a sudden flash of panic that I would trip up—or he would catch on—so I changed the subject to my testimony at the preliminary hearing. It worked; Anup knew both Jason Bevner and Eva Yung and was eager to hear about their sword-crossing in a murder case. I curled up under the duvet with Bea at my feet, and we gossiped.
It was no use trying to blame the drinking. I could’ve pulled the plug on Denis’s advances at any moment, there in Trad’r Sam’s, but I didn’t. No use trying to pin blame on Anup, either, with his rejection of me on Diwali. He had pissed me off and I had gone and cheated on him, first chance I got. One man I hadn’t lied to was Denis, when I told him I’d enjoyed my night with him. I had. But it was a stupid and spiteful betrayal of Anup’s trust and I regretted it. I couldn’t take it back. Anup would never know the story of my one-night-stand with Denis Monaghan. Not if I could help it.
I never did raise the subject of Thanksgiving, either. We still had time enough to put the plans together. When I hung up, though, a notion entered my sleepy head and worried around in there. It was the realization that the spark I’d felt for Anup ever since I’d first fallen for him had faded. It was still there, but it was dim. That dark night, it felt like it was dying.