“He’s been dead awhile,” I said. “I have a feeling that whatever happened to him occurred shortly after he went into the river.”
“Do we know when that was?” Danny asked as he fit scalpel handles with new blades.
“We’re assuming it was sometime after dark.”
“He doesn’t look very old.”
“Thirty-two.”
He stared at Eddings’s face and his own got sad. “It’s like when kids end up in here or that basketball player who dropped dead in the gym the other week.” He looked at me. “Does it ever get to you?”
“I can’t let it get to me because they need me to do a good job for them,” I said as I made notes.
“What about when you’re done?” He glanced up.
“We’re never done, Danny,” I said. “Our hearts will stay broken for the rest of our lives, and we will never be done with the people who pass through here.”
“Because we can’t forget them.” He lined a bucket with a viscera bag and put it near me on the floor. “At least I can’t.”
“If we forget them, then something is wrong with us,” I said.
Roche emerged from the locker room looking like a disposable astronaut in his face shield and paper suit. He kept his distance from the gurney but got as close as he could to me.
I said to him, “I’ve looked inside the boat. What items have you removed?”
“His gun and wallet. I got both of them here with me,” he replied. “Over there in the bag. How many pairs of gloves you got on?”
“What about a camera, film, anything like that?”
“What’s in the boat is all there is. Looks like you got on more than one pair of gloves.” He leaned close, his shoulder pressing against mine.
“I’ve double-gloved.” I moved away from him.
“I guess I need another pair.”
I unzipped Eddings’ soggy dive boots and said, “They’re in the cabinet over there.”
With a scalpel I opened the wet suit and dive skin at the seams because they would be too difficult to pull off a fully rigorous body. As I freed him from neoprene, I could see that he was uniformly pink due to the cold. I removed his blue bikini bathing suit, and Danny and I lifted him onto the autopsy table, where we broke the rigidity of the arms and began taking more photographs.
Eddings had no injuries except several old scars, mostly on his knees. But biology had dealt him an earlier blow called hypospadias, which meant his urethra opened onto the underside of his penis instead of in the center. This moderate defect would have caused him a great deal of anxiety, especially as a boy. As a man he may have suffered sufficient shame that he was reluctant to have sex.
Certainly, he had never been shy or passive during professional encounters. In fact, I had always found him quite confident and charming, when someone like me was rarely charmed by anyone, least of all a journalist. But I also knew appearances meant nothing in terms of how people behaved when two of them were alone, and then I tried to stop right there.
I did not want to remember him alive as I made annotations and measurements on diagrams fastened to my clipboard. But a part of my mind tackled my will, and I returned to the last occasion I had seen him. It was the week before Christmas and I was in my Richmond office with my back to the door, sorting through slides in a carousel. I did not hear him behind me until he spoke, and when I turned around, I found him in my doorway, holding a potted Christmas pepper thick with bright red fruit.
“You mind if I come in?” he asked. “Or do you want me to walk all the way back to my car with this.” I said good afternoon to him while I thought with frustration of the front office staff. They knew not to let reporters beyond the locked bulletproof partition in the lobby unless I was asked, but the female clerks, in particular, liked Eddings a little too much. He walked in and set the plant on the carpet by my desk, and when he smiled, his entire face did.