The capitol police officer walked in, portable radio in hand. I finally remembered his name was Rankin.
“He was pronounced at eleven-oh-five,” he said. “Will be here in about fifteen minutes.”
The ambulance beeped a warning as it backed into the bay, and when its rear doors swung open, enough Department of Corrections guards hopped out to control a small prison riot. Four of them slid out the stretcher bearing Ronnie Waddell’s body. They carried it up the ramp and inside the morgue, metal clacking, feet scuffing, all of us getting out of the way. Lowering the stretcher to the tile floor without bothering to unfold the legs, they propelled it along like a sled on wheels, its passenger strapped in and covered with a bloodstained sheet.
“A nosebleed,” one of the guards offered before I could ask the question.
“Who had a nosebleed?” I inquired, noting that the guard’s gloved hands were bloody.
“Mr. Waddell did.”
“In the ambulance?”
I puzzled, for Waddell should not have had a blood pressure by the time he was loaded inside the ambulance.
But the guard was preoccupied with other matters and I did not get an answer. It would have to wait.
We transferred the body to the gurney positioned on top of the floor scale. Busy hands fumbled with unfastening straps and opening the sheet. The door to the autopsy suite quietly shut as the Department of Corrections guards left just as abruptly as they had appeared.
Waddell had been dead exactly twenty-two minutes. I could smell his sweat, his dirty bare feet, and the faint odor of singed flesh. His right pant leg was pushed up above his knee, his calf dressed in fresh gauze applied postmortem to his burns. He was a big, powerful man. The newspapers had called him the gentle giant, poetic Ronnie with soulful eyes. Yet there had been a time when he had used the large hands, the massive shoulders and arms before me to rip the life from another human being.
I pulled apart the Velcro fasteners of his light blue denim shirt, checking pockets as I undressed him. Searching for personal effects is pro forma and usually fruitless. Inmates are not supposed to carry anything with them to the electric chair, and I was very surprised when I discovered what appeared to be a letter in the back pocket of his jeans. The envelope had not been opened. Written in bold block letters across the front of it was EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL. PLEASE BURY WITH ME!! “Make a copy of the envelope and whatever’s inside and submit the originals with his personal effects,” I said, handing the envelope to Fielding.
He tucked it under the autopsy protocol on a clipboard, mumbling, ‘Jesus. He’s bigger than I am.”
“Amazing that anyone mold be bigger than you are, “ Susan said to my bodybuilder deputy chief.
“Good thing he’s not been dead long,” he added. “Otherwise we’d need the jaws of Life.”
When muscle-bound people have been dead for hours, they are as uncooperative as marble statues. Rigor had not begun to set in. Waddell was limber as in life. He could have been asleep.
It required all of us to transfer him, facedown, to the autopsy table. He weighed two hundred and fifty-nine pounds. His feet protruded over the table’s edge. I was measuring the burns to his leg when the buzzer sounded from the bay. Susan went to see who it was, and shortly Lieutenant Pete Marino walked in, trench coat unbuttoned, one end of the belt trailing along the tile floor.
“The burn to the back of his calf is four by one and a quarter by two and three-eighths,” I dictated to Fielding. “It’s dry, contracted, and blistered.”
Marino lit a cigarette. “They`re raising a stink about him bleeding,” he said, and he seemed agitated.
“His rectal temp is one hundred and four,” Susan said as she removed the chemical thermometer. “That’s at eleven-forty-nine.”
“You know why his face was bleeding?” Marino asked.
“One of the guards said a nosebleed,” I replied, adding, “We need to turn him over.”
“You saw this on the inner aspect of his left arm?” Susan directed my attention to an abrasion.