I got up from my chair and gathered paperwork while McGovern looked at me, her eyes shadowed by thought. She took off her face shield and mask and untied her gown in back.
‘If she had a drug problem, is there any way you might be able to tell that?’ she asked me as the phone rang and rang.
‘Toxicology will certainly tell us if she had drugs on board,’ I said. ‘There may also be crystals in her lungs or foreign body granulomas from cutting agents like talc, and fibers from the cotton used to strain out impurities. Unfortunately, the areas where we might be most likely to find needle tracks are missing.’
‘What about her brain? Would chronic drug abuse cause any damage that you might be able to see? For example, if she started having severe mental problems, was getting psychotic and so on? It sounds like Sparkes thought she had some sort of mental illness,’ McGovern then said. ‘For example, what if she were depressive or manic-depressive? Could you tell?’
By now the skull had been opened, the rubbery, fire-shrunken brain sectioned and still on the cutting board.
‘In the first place,’ I answered, ‘nothing is going to be helpful postmortem because the brain is cooked. But even if that were not the case, looking for a morphological correlate to a particular psychiatric syndrome is, in most cases, still theoretical. A widening of the sulci, for example, and reduced gray matter due to atrophy might be a signpost if we knew what the weight of the brain originally was when she was healthy. Then maybe I could say, Okay, her brain weighs a hundred grams less now than it did, so she might have been suffering from some sort of mental disease. Unless she has a lesion or old head injury that might suggest a problem, the answer to your question is no, I can’t tell.’
McGovern was silent, and it was not lost on her that I was clinical and not the least bit friendly. Even though I was aware of my rather brittle demeanor around her, I could not seem to soften it. I looked around for Ruffin. He was at the first dissecting sink, suturing a Y incision in long strokes of needle and twine. I motioned to him and walked over. He was too young to worry about turning thirty anytime soon, and had gotten his training in an O.R. and a funeral home.
‘Chuck, if you can finish up here and put her back in the fridge,’ I said to him.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
He returned to his station to finish his present task while I peeled off gloves and dropped them and my mask into one of many red biological hazard containers scattered around the autopsy room.
‘Let’s go to my office and have a cup of coffee,’ I suggested to McGovern in an attempt to be a little more civil. ‘And we can finish this discussion.’
In the locker room, we washed with antibacterial soap and I got dressed. I had questions for McGovern, but in truth, I was curious about her, too.
‘Getting back to the possibility of drug-induced mental illness,’ McGovern said as we followed the corridor. ‘Many of these people self-destruct, right?’
‘In one way or another.’
‘They die in accidents, commit suicide, and that gets us back to the big question,’ she said. ‘Is that what happened here? Possible she was whacked out and committed suicide?’
‘All I know is, she has injury that was inflicted before death,’ I pointed out again.
‘But that could be self-inflicted if she were not in her right mind,’ McGovern said. ‘God knows the kinds of self-mutilation we’ve seen when people are psychotic.’
This was true. I had worked cases in which people had cut their own throats, or stabbed themselves in the chest, or amputated their limbs; or shot themselves in their sexual organs, or walked into a river to drown. Not to mention leaps from high places and self-immolations. The list of horrendous things people did to themselves was much too long, and whenever I thought I’d seen it all, something new and awful was rolled into our bay.