I go over every inch of him with a lens and the story he tells grows more suspicious. His elbows and knees are slightly abraded and covered with dirt and fibers, which I mundanely collect by pressing them with the adhesive backs of Post-its, which I seal inside plastic bags. Over the bony prominences of both wrists are incomplete circumferential dry, reddish-brown abrasions and minute skin tags. I draw blood from the iliac veins and vitreous fluid from the eyes, and test tubes ride up on the dumbwaiter to the third-floor toxicology lab for STAT alcohol and carbon monoxide tests. At half past ten, I am reflecting back tissue from the Y incision when I notice a tall, older man heading toward my station. He has a wide, tired face and maintains a safe distance from my table, gripping a grocery-size brown paper bag, the top folded over and sealed with red evidence tape. I have a flash of my bagged clothing on my red Jarrah Wood dining room table.
“Detective Stanfield, I hope?” I hold up a flap of skin and free it from ribs with small, quick strokes of the scalpel.
“Good morning.” He catches himself as he stares at the body. “Well, I guess not for him.”
Stanfield hasn’t bothered with protective clothing over his ill-fitting herringbone suit. He wears no gloves or shoe covers. He glances at my bulky left arm and refrains from asking me how I broke it, telling me he already knows. I am reminded that my life has been all over the news, which I am adamant in my refusal to follow. Anna has halfway accused me of being chicken, as much as a psychiatrist is allowed to accuse, and she would never actually use the word “chicken.” “Denial” is her word. I don’t care. I am staying away from newspapers. I don’t watch or listen to a goddamn thing that is said about me.
“Sorry it took so long, but the roads out there are bad on their way to awful, ma’am,” Stanfield says. “Hope you got chains on your tires, ’cause I didn’t and got stuck. Had to get the tow truck and then get the chains put on, so that’s why I wasn’t here earlier. You found out anything?”
“His CO’s seventy-two percent.” Vernacular for carbon monoxide. “Notice how cherry-red the blood is? Typical in high levels of CO.” I pick up rib shears from the surgical cart. “STAT alcohol’s zero.”
“So it was the fire that got him, for sure?”
“We know he had a needle in his arm, but carbon monoxide poisoning is his cause of death. Doesn’t tell us much, I’m afraid.” I cut through ribs. ”He’s got anal tunnelingevidence of homosexual activity, in other wordsand his wrists were bound at some point prior to his death. It appears he was gagged.” I point out the abrasions on the wrists and the cor- ners of the mouth. Stanfield’s eyes pop open, “The abrasions on his wrists aren’t crusty,” I go on. “They don’t look old, in other words. And because he has fibers in his mouth, you can be pretty certain he was gagged at or around the time of death.” I hold a lens over the anticubital fossa, or crook of the arm, and show Stanfield two tiny blood spots. “Fresh injection sites,” I explain. “But what’s interesting is he has no old needle tracks to suggest a history of drug abuse. I’ll put a block of liver through to check for triaditismild inflammation of the structural support system of bile duct, artery and vein. And we’ll see what comes back on his tox.”
“Guess he could have AIDS.” This is foremost on Detective Stanfield’s mind.
“We’ll do an HIV on him,” I reply.
Stanfield backs up another step as I remove the triangular-shaped breastplate of ribs. This a stage cue for Laura Turkel, on loan to us from the graves registration unit at the Fort Lee Army Base in Petersburg. She is so attentive and officious and almost salutes me when she suddenly appears at the end of the table. Turk, as everyone knows her, always refers to me as “Chief.” I suppose for her Chief is a rank and doctor isn’t.