‘That’s nice,’ I said, frowning as I read. ‘Damn it, how many times do I have to tell Dr Carmichael that you don’t sign out a death as cardiac arrest. Jesus, everybody dies of cardiac arrest. You die, your heart quits, right? And he’s done the respiratory arrest number too, no matter how many times I’ve amended his certificates.’
I sighed in annoyance.
‘He’s been the M.E. in Halifax County for how many years?’ I continued my tirade. ‘Twenty-five at least?’
‘Dr Scarpetta, don’t forget he’s an obstetrician. And an ancient one at that,’ Rose reminded me. ‘A nice man who’s not capable of learning anything new. He still types his reports on an old manual Royal, flying capitals and all. And the reason I mentioned the church dinner is, I’m supposed to be there in ten minutes.’
She paused, regarding me over her reading glasses.
‘But I can stay if you want me to,’ she added.
‘I’ve got some things to do,’ I told her. ‘And the last thing I would think of is to interfere with a church dinner. Yours or anyone’s. I’m always in enough trouble with God as is.’
‘Then I’ll say good night,’ Rose said. ‘My dictations are in your basket. I’ll see you in the morning.’
After her footsteps vanished down the corridor, I was enveloped by silence broken only by the sounds of paper I was moving around on my desk. I thought of Benton several times and warded off my desire to call him, because I was not ready to relax, or maybe I simply did not want to feel human quite yet. It is, after all, hard to feel like a normal person with normal emotions when one is about to boil human remains in what is essentially a large soup pot. A few minutes after seven, I followed the corridor to the decomposition room, which was two doors down and across from the cooler.
I unlocked the door and entered what was nothing more than a small autopsy room with a freezer and special ventilation. The remains were covered by a sheet on a transportable table, a new forty-quart pot filled with water on an electric burner beneath a chemical hood. I put on a mask and gloves and turned the burner on a low heat that would not further damage the bones. I poured in two scoops of laundry detergent and a cup of bleach to hasten the loosening of fibrous membranes, cartilage, and grease.
I opened the sheets, exposing bones stripped of most of their tissue, the extremities pitifully truncated like burned sticks. I gently placed femurs and tibias into the pot, then the pelvis and parts of the skull. Vertebrae and ribs followed as water got hotter and a sharp-smelling steam began to rise. I needed to see her bare, clean bones because they might have something to tell me, and there simply was no other way to do it.
For a while I sat in that room, the hood loudly sucking up air as I drifted in my chair. I was tired. I was emotionally drained and feeling all alone. Water heated up, and what was left of a woman I believed had been murdered began to process in the pot, in what seemed one more indignity and callous slight to who she was.
‘Oh God,’ I sighed, as if God might somehow hear me. ‘Bless her, wherever she is.’
It was hard to imagine being reduced to bones cooking in a pot, and the more I thought about it the more depressed I got. Somewhere someone had loved this woman, and she had accomplished something in this life before her body and identity had been so cruelly stripped away. I had spent my existence trying to ward off hate, but by now it was too late. It was true that I hated sadistic evil people whose purpose in life was to torment life and take it, as if it were theirs to appropriate. It was true that executions deeply disturbed me, but only because they resurrected heartless crimes and the victims society barely remembered.
Steam rose in a hot, moist vapor, tainting the air with a nauseating stench that would lessen the longer the bones were processed. I envisioned someone thin and tall and blond, someone wearing jeans and lace-up boots, with a platinum ring tucked in her back pocket. Her hands were gone, and I probably would never know the size of her fingers or if the ring had fit, but it wasn’t likely. Fielding probably was right, and I knew I had one more thing to ask Sparkes.