“Come on. Billy Joe,” the funeral director said to the man in the porkpie hat.
“Let’s go get something to eat.”
They went out. Dr. Jenrette locked the door.
“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling on gloves.
“Lucias can be overbearing sometimes, but he really is a good person.”
I was suspicious we would find that Emily had not been properly embalmed or had been buried in a fashion that did not reflect what her mother had paid.
But when Jenrette and I opened the casket’s lid, I saw nothing that immediately struck me as out of order. The white satin lining had been folded over her body, and on top of it I found a package wrapped in white tissue paper and pink ribbon. I started taking photographs.
“Did Ray mention anything about this?” I handed the package to Jenrette.
“No.” He looked perplexed as he turned it this way and that. The smell of embalming fluid wafted up strongly as I opened the lining. Beneath it Emily Steiner was well preserved in a long-sleeve, high-collar dress of pale blue velveteen, her braided hair in bows of the same material.
A fuzzy whitish mold typically found on bodies that have been exhumed covered her face like a mask and had started on the tops of her hands, which were on her waist, clasped around a white New Testament. She wore white knee socks and black patent leather shoes. Nothing she had been dressed in looked new.
I took more photographs; then Jenrette and I lifted her out of the casket and placed her on top of the stainless steel table, where we began to undress her. Beneath her sweet, little girl clothes hid the awful secret of her death, for people who die gracefully do not bear the wounds she had. Any honest forensic pathologist will admit that autopsy artifacts are ghastly. There is nothing quite like the Y incision in any pre mortem surgical procedure, for it looks like its name. The scalpel goes from each clavicle to sternum, runs the length of the torso, and ends at the pubis after a small detour around the navel. The incision made from ear to ear at the back of the head before sawing open the skull is not attractive, either.
Of course, injuries to the dead do not heal. They can only be covered with high lacy collars and strategically coiffed hair. With heavy makeup from the funeral home and a wide seam running the length of her small body, Emily looked like a sad rag doll stripped of its frilly clothes and abandoned by its heartless owner. Water drummed into a steel sink as Dr. Jenrette and I scrubbed away mold, makeup, and the flesh-colored putty filling the gunshot wound to the back of the head and the areas of the thighs, upper chest, and shoulders where skin had been excised by her killer. We removed eye caps beneath eyelids and took out sutures. Our eyes watered and noses began to run as sharp fumes rose from the chest cavity. Organs were breaded with embalming powder, and we quickly lifted them out and rinsed some more. I checked the neck, finding nothing that my colleague hadn’t already documented. Then I wedged a long thin chisel between molars to open the mouth.
“It’s stubborn,” I said in frustration.
“We’re going to have to cut the masseters. I want to look at the tongue in its anatomical position before getting at it through the posterior pharynx. But I don’t know. We may not be able to. ” Dr. Jenrette fitted a new blade into his scalpel.
“What are we looking for?”
“I want to make certain she didn’t bite her tongue.” Minutes later I discovered that she had.
“She’s got marks right there at the margin,” I pointed out.
“Can you get a measurement?”
“An eighth of an inch by a quarter.”
“And the hemorrhages are about a quarter of an inch deep. It looks like she might have bitten herself more than once. What do you think?”
“It looks to me like maybe she did.”
“So we know she had a seizure associated with her terminal episode.”
“The head injury could do that,” he said, fetching the camera.