How’s the knee?”
“I don’t think it’s ever going to get better. It’s already been almost three months and I still can barely go down stairs.
“Patience, keep up your physical exercise, and yes, it will get better,” I repeated what I had said before. “Have you rayed him yet?”
Danny had worked diving deaths before. He knew it was highly improbable that we were looking for projectiles or broken bones, but what an X-ray might reveal was pneumothorax or a mediastinal shift caused by air leaking from lungs due to barotrauma.
“Yes, ma’am. The film’s in the developer.” He paused, his expression turning unpleasant. “And Detective Roche with Chesapeake’s on his way. He wants to be present for the post.”
Although I encouraged detectives to watch their cases autopsied, Roche was not someone I particularly wanted in my morgue.
“Do you know him?” I asked.
“He’s been down here before. I’ll let you judge him for yourself.”
He straightened up and gathered his dark hair into a ponytail again, because strands had escaped and were getting in his eyes. Lithe and graceful, he looked like a young Cherokee with a brilliant grin. I often wondered why he wanted to work here. I helped him roll the body into the autopsy suite, and while he weighed and measured it, I disappeared inside the locker room and took a shower. As I was dressing in scrubs, Marino called my pager.
“What’s up?” I asked when I got him on the phone.
“It’s who we thought, right?” he asked.
“Tentatively, yes.”
“You posting him now?”
“I’m about to start,” I said.
“Give me fifteen minutes. I’m almost there.”
“You’re coming here?” I said, perplexed.
“I’m on my car phone. We’ll talk later. I’ll be there soon.
As I wondered what this was about, I also knew that Marino must have found something in Richmond. Otherwise, his coming to Norfolk made no sense. Ted Eddings’ death was not Marino’s jurisdiction unless the FBI had already gotten involved, and that would not make sense, either.
Both Marino and I were consultants for the Bureau’s Criminal Investigative Analysis program, more commonly known as the profiling unit, which specialized in assisting police with unusually heinous and difficult deaths. We routinely got involved in cases
outside of our domains, but by invitation only, and it was a little early for Chesapeake to be calling the FBI about anything.
Detective Roche arrived before Marino did, and he was carrying a paper bag and insisting that I give him gown, gloves, face shield, cap and shoe covers. While he was in the locker room fussing with his biological armor, Danny and I began taking photographs and looking at Eddings exactly as he had come to us, which was still in a full wet suit that continued to slowly drip on the floor.
“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?”