I examined it through a lens under a strong light. “I don’t know. Possibly from one of the restraints: “ “There’s one on his right arm, too.”
I took a look while Marino watched me and smoked. We turned the body, shoving a block under the shoulders. Blood trickled out of the right side of his nose. His head and chin had been shaved to an uneven stubble. I made the Y incision.
“There might be some abrasions here,” Susan said, looking at the tongue.
“Take it out.”
I inserted the thermometer into the liver.
“Jesus,” Marino said under his breath.
“Now?”
Susan’s scalpel was poised.
“No. Photograph the burns around his head. We need to measure those. Then remove the tongue.”
“Shit,” she complained. “Who used the camera last?”
“Sorry,” Fielding said. “There was no film in the drawer. I forgot. By the way, it’s your job to keep film in the drawer.”
“It would help if you d tell me when the film drawer’s empty.”
Women are supposed to be intuitive. I didn’t think I needed to tell you.”
“I got the measurement of these burns around his head;” Susan reported, ignoring his remark.
“Okay.” – Susan gave him the measurements, then started work on the tongue.
Marino backed away from the table. “Jesus,” he said again. “That always gets me.”
“Liver temp’s one hundred and five,” I reported to Fielding.
I glanced up at the clock. Waddell had been dead for an hour. He hadn’t cooled much. He was big. Electrocution heats you up. The brain temperatures of smaller men I had autopsied were as high as a hundred and ten. Waddell’s right calf was at least that, hot to the touch, the muscle in total tetanus.
“A little abrasion at the margin. But nothing big time,” Susan pointed out to me.
“He bite his tongue hard enough to bleed that much?”
Marino asked.
“No,” I said.
“Well, they’re already raising a stink about it.”
His voice rose. “I thought you’d want to know.”
I paused, resting the scalpel on the edge of the table as it suddenly occurred to me. “You were a witness.”
“Yeah. I told you I was going to be.”
Everybody looked at him.
“Trouble’s brewing out there,” he said. “I don’t want no one leaving this joint alone.”
“What sort of trouble?” Susan asked.
“A bunch of religious nuts have been hanging out at Spring Street since this morning. Somehow they got word about his bleeding, and when the ambulance drove off with his body they started marching in this direction like a bunch of zombies.”
“Did you see it when he started bleeding?” Fielding asked him.
“Oh, yeah. They juiced him twice. The first time he made this loud hiss, like steam coming out of a radiator, and the blood started pouring out from under his mask. They’re saying the chair might have malfunctioned.”
Susan started the Stryker saw and no one competed with its loud buzzing as she cut through the skull. I continued examining the organs. Heart was good, coronaries terrific. When the saw stopped, I resumed dictating to Fielding.
“You got the weight?” he asked.
“Heart weighs five-forty, and he’s got a single adhesion of the left upper lobe to the aortic arch. Even found four parathyroids, in case you didn’t already get that.”
“I got it.” I placed the stomach on the cutting board. “It’s almost tubular.” “You sure?”
Fielding moved closer to inspect. “That’s bizarre. A guy this big needs a minimum of four thousand calories a day.”
“He wasn’t getting it, not lately,” I said. “He doesn’t have any gastric contents. His stomach is absolutely empty and clean.”
“He didn’t eat his last meal?” Marino asked me.
“It doesn’t appear that he did.”
“Do they usually?”
“Yes,” I said, “usually.”
We were finished by one A.M., and followed the funeral home attendants out to the bay, where the hearse was waiting. As we walked out of the building, darkness throbbed with red and blue lights. Radio static drifted on the cold, damp air, engines rumbled, and beyond the chain-link fence enclosing the parking lot was a ring of fire. Men, women, and children stood silently, faces wavering in candlelight.