The pediatric intensive care unit was at the end of a polished hallway, panes of glass in the double wooden doors covered with friendly dinosaur paper. Inside, rainbows decorated sky blue walls, and animal mobiles were suspended over hydraulic beds in the eight rooms arranged in a semicircle around the nurses’ station. Three young women worked behind monitors, one of them typing on a keyboard and another talking on the phone. A slender brunette dressed in a red corduroy jumper and turtleneck sweater identified herself as the head nurse after Trent explained why we were here.
“The attending physician’s not in yet,” she apologized.
“We just need to look at Eddies injuries. It won’t take long,” Trent said. “His family still in there?”
“They stayed with him all night.”
We followed her through soft artificial light, past code carts and green tanks of oxygen that would not be parked outside the rooms of little boys and girls were the world the way it ought to be. When we reached Eddies room, the nurse went inside and shut the door most of the way..
“Just for a few minutes,” I overheard her say to the Heaths. “While we do the exam.”
“What kind of specialist is it this time?” the father asked in an unsteady voice.
“A doctor who knows a lot about injuries. She’s sort of like a police surgeon.”
The nurse diplomatically refrained from saying I was a medical examiner, or worse, a coroner.
After a pause, the father quietly said, “Oh. This is for evidence.”
“Yes. How about some coffee? Maybe something to eat?”
Eddie Heath’s parents emerged from the room, both of them considerably overweight, their clothes badly wrinkled from having been slept in. They had the bewildered look of innocent, simple people who have been told the world is about to end, and when they glanced at us with exhausted eyes I wished there were something I could say that would make it not so or at least a little better. Words of comfort died in my throat as the couple slowly walked off.
Eddie Heath did not stir on top of the bed, his head wrapped in bandages, a ventilator breathing air into his lungs while fluids dripped into his veins. His complexion was milky and hairless, the thin membrane of his eyelids a faint bruised blue in the low light. I surmised the color of his hair by his strawberry blond eyebrows. He had not yet emerged from that fragile prepubescent stage when boys are full-tipped and beautiful and sing more sweetly than their sisters. His forearms were slender, the body beneath the sheet small. Only the disproportionately large, still hands tethered by intravenous lines were true to his fledgling gender. He did not look thirteen.
“She needs to see the areas on his shoulder and leg,” Trent told the nurse in a low voice.
She got two packet of gloves, one for her and one forme, and we put them on. The boy was naked beneath the sheet, his skin grimy in creases and fingernails dirty. Patients who are unstable cannot be thoroughly bathed.
Trent tensed as the nurse removed the wet-to-dry dressings from the wounds. “Christ,” he said under his breath. “It looks even worse than it did last night. Jesus.”
He shook his head and backed up a step.
If someone had told me that the boy had been attacked by a shark, I might have gone along with it were it not for the neat edges of the wounds, which clearly had been inflicted by a sharp, linear instrument, such as a knife or razor. Sections of flesh the size of elbow patches had been excised from his right shoulder and right inner thigh. Opening my medical bag, I got out a ruler and measured the wounds without touching them, then took photographs.
“See the cuts and scratches at the edges?”
Trent pointed. “That’s what I was telling you about. It’s like he cut some sort of pattern on the skin and then removed the whole thing.”
“Did you find any anal tearing?” I asked the nurse.
“When I did a rectal temperature I didn’t notice any tears, and no one noticed anything unusual about his mouth or throat when he was intubated. I also checked for old fractures and bruises.”