With Corey vacationing in deep Florida, soaking up the blazing heat of a tropic sun, I did not have the satisfaction of my go-to forensics expert. Rather, I had to settle for Blanch—an old fixture at the lab who had long ago forsaken her peroxide roots for an honest spray of brittle, gray hair. Now in her sixties, Blanch had grown severe in her judgments and set in her ways, and she was the one pathologist at the morgue whom people avoided at all costs. Corey had warned me about her numerous times, and had made the point of advising me to steer clear of any autopsy where Blanch held the scalpel in her hands.
But here she was—scheduled on Christmas . . . and why not?
After I had called ahead and secured her services, I steeled myself in pleasant thoughts and brought the hearse around to the morgue entrance. I unloaded Sheila Carrington’s body on the gurney by myself, an easy enough measure on the spring-loaded wheels, and led the deceased toward the forensic lab doors. Blanch, her wild gray strands emphasizing a set of piercing blue eyes, met me at the door.
“I’m sorry, Blanch,” I said. “I would rather be home, too.”
“All in a day’s work, Mary,” she told me, her voice a quiver of nerves and unfiltered cigarettes. I was prepared for worse, but her response was more pleasant than I had anticipated.
I helped Blanch load the body onto the autopsy table and, after securing the perimeter of the room, we washed and suited up: masks, gloves, surgical garb. Blanch threw a switch and sent the exhaust into gear, its gentle winds extracting air from the room and replacing it with scented lilac. “You gonna take notes while I work?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, taking a step back and positioning my pen on a clipboard.
Blanch removed the sheet, peeled the rest of the clothing from Sheila Carrington’s body, and prepared to conduct the autopsy. “Female. Mid-fifties,” she said behind her mask. Blanch ran her fingers down the limbs, under the armpits, around the neck, the legs. All business, she was looking for any signs of wounds, any puncture marks, cuts, or abrasions. “No visible marks on the body,” she said. “Epidermis appears healthy. Slight discoloration around the neck, but could be makeup.”
I took notes, made my own shorthand marks in the margins that I could decipher later.
Blanch reached for her scalpel and I took another step back. She began in the usual procedure, cutting on either side of the torso just below the neck, a large dark V forming where the cuts met at the center of the breast-bone. And then a single line down the center of the abdomen all the way to the genitals. Dark ridges of blood formed at the lines, but Blanch worked them back as she peeled away the epidermis with her quick scalpel, her hands moving deftly, gracefully, to flay open the body, the breasts parting to the sides of the table and, once opened at the center, exposing all of the internal organs—stomach, liver, kidneys, bowels—in their bright pink glory.
As Blanch ran her fingertips across the organs, removing each one to examine it more closely, she made verbal notations which I scribbled hastily upon the clipboard.
“Liver healthy, no signs of disease.”
“Kidneys . . . good.”
“Intestines—small and large—no signs of tumor or obstruction. But . . .”
She had not yet examined the stomach and was considering reaching for the large rib cutters so she could open the chest cavity and examine the lungs and heart. I was prepared to turn away during the pruning of the ribs—a procedure that always set my nerves on edge, like fingernails raked across a chalkboard. But Blanch hesitated as she placed the stomach on the tray.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m going to run a culture,” she said. “This doesn’t look right.”
“The stomach?”
“Yes. And maybe the intestines. We’ll see.”
I scribbled my notes on the clipboard, wondered what further revelations the exploration would conclude. The exhaust fan was whirring overhead. I found myself breathing in the shallow air.
When Blanch cut into the stomach, I had to turn away lest I lose the contents of my own. The contents, thick as bile, flowed out into the containment pouch. “Well, this is something,” Blanch said. “Looks like bacterial infection. Probably quite painful.”
“She was vomiting,” I whispered under my mask.
“I can see why,” Blanch stated matter-of-factly. “It’s in the intestines, too.”
“You have more?”
“I’ll run a culture to make sure,” Blanch said. “But I think this woman just joined the one-percent club.”