SCHÄFER SCANNED THE row of white rubber boots lined up below a garland of chainmail gloves. Various names were written with a Sharpie on the ankles of the boots, and he reached for the pair on the far right.
They were labeled Erik Schäfer.
He slipped the boots on and walked down the long hallway of the autopsy room. He passed the isolation room, where some poor guy who had died of meningitis or the plague or some other barbaric bacteria was being autopsied. The next four tables in the autopsy room were empty and clean, and Oppermann stood at the fifth and last one up to his elbows in Thomas Strand’s internal organs.
“Well, Doc, what do you say?” Schäfer came to a stop next to the autopsy table and nodded at the bullet hole in Thomas Strand’s face. “Did he die of natural causes or what’s your verdict?”
John Oppermann looked up from the open ribcage without lifting his head.
“Very funny.”
“You know I admire you for the way you don’t cut corners.” Schäfer smiled. “Even when a man’s been shot in the face, you won’t determine a cause of death until he’s been checked for pneumonia and syphilis. I mean, that’s thorough!”
Oppermann ignored him and continued working in silence.
Schäfer watched the man’s experienced hands and recognized the procedure: Oppermann made a Mercedes incision over the victim’s heart, three incisions that met in the middle, like the car logo.
“What are you looking for?” Schäfer asked.
“Scars in the heart.”
“Scars in the heart,” Schäfer repeated and happened to think of what Heloise had said about soldiers with PTSD. Those were the words she had used to describe their situation, that they had scars in the heart. But wouldn’t anyone have scars in their heart if you looked closely enough?
Scars from trauma? Scars from grief?
He knew that if he dissected his own heart, it would be full of scar tissue, old scars from old battles.
“Some scars are visible to the naked eye,” Oppermann explained, as if he could read Schäfer’s mind. “It could be from an old blood clot or other heart disease. Other scars are harder to see. It could be like the ones that …” He paused for a moment, trying to find the right way to express it.
“Like the ones that we have, from Kosovo?” Schäfer suggested.
“Yes,” Opperman agreed somberly. “Like the ones we have from Kosovo.”
Opperman moved on to the head. He made an incision with the scalpel from ear to ear over the crown of Thomas Strand’s head and everted the skin forward. Then he began sawing the cranium open.
Schäfer’s gaze fell on the bloody blob at the top of Thomas Strand’s neck, where his face had been turned inside out, and he thought of Lukas Bjerre’s Instagram photos.
“Are you familiar with something called pareidolia?” Schäfer had to raise his voice to be heard over the wail of the Stryker saw Oppermann was using to cut the cranium open with.
The medical examiner stopped the saw and looked up at Schäfer. “What was that?”
“Pareidolia,” Schäfer repeated. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“You mean like when you see faces in different things?”
Schäfer nodded, impressed. “Yes! How the hell did you know that?”
“I remember we discussed it back when I was in medical school.” Oppermann opened the top of the cranium, like the flip top on a tube of toothpaste. “People who are resuscitated after having been dead for a minute or two sometimes say that they’ve seen a face surrounded by a luminous glow. Then of course they always start talking about life after death and that sort of thing. They become tremendously religious. Really, it’s more likely that what they saw was just some random light incursion. In the final seconds before death occurred, the eye took in random patterns, which the brain subsequently decoded as facial features. And then that’s the sight they remember when they wake up again.”
“So you don’t think they had a quick gin and tonic with the Lord?” Schäfer asked with a smirk.
It was an inside joke. What Schäfer and Oppermann saw in their jobs did not leave any room for religious fantasies.
John Oppermann raised a bushy eyebrow and allowed a snort to escape his nose. “Hardly. But it is actually quite human.”
“What is?”
“Trying to find some meaning in things.”
“Believing in a higher power, you mean?”
“No, I’m talking about pareidolia. It’s really about our need to understand the world we live in. We’re so preoccupied with labeling the things around us that we misinterpret what we’re seeing.”
“Academics think it has to do with being prepared to fight,” Schäfer said. “That we’re so on our guard that we see the face of the enemy everywhere—even in places where there is no enemy.”
“That makes sense.” Oppermann nodded thoughtfully. “It’s always wise to take precautions. What’s that old scouting motto … better safe than sorry?”
“Be prepared.”
“Potato-potahto.” Oppermann blinked and lifted the brain out of Strand’s skull with a practiced motion and a loud, wet squelch.
After John Oppermann had washed and changed his clothes, he and Schäfer left the department. They stopped briefly on Simon’s Bridge. The sky bridge was named for one of Oppermann’s predecessors and connected the autopsy rooms to the rest of the department.
Schäfer leaned against the glass wall and looked at Oppermann. “So he was shot. It was an assassination, right?”
Oppermann nodded. “One bullet from what looks like a nine millimeter.” He pointed with his thumb at his lower jaw where the entry wound had been.
“Can you tell me anything else right now?”
“You know the procedure,” Oppermann said elusively. “The blood tests go to Toxicology. Ballistics will look at the bullet wound and the bullet. Fingernail scrapings will be sent in for examination, even if there’s no current indication that he fought his killer. There are no signs of defensive injuries on the deceased, no cuts or marks on the arms from any kind of struggle.” He shrugged. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
The deceased, Schäfer thought.
Oppermann had once confided in him that he never learned the names of the people he autopsied. He did his work and when he was done, he hung up his lab coat along with his memories of the milky-white dead eyes that he had looked into over the course of the day.
He didn’t take his work home with him. He didn’t let his emotions stew, not anymore.
Schäfer sometimes envied him.
But then again, not …
He remembered the name of every single victim in every single murder case he had ever investigated, and he remembered them best if their cases were never solved, the ones whose killers were never caught.
“All right, John.” He shook Oppermann’s hand. “Let me know if anything turns up.”