I pulled apart the Velcro fasteners of his light blue denim shirt, checking pockets as I undressed him. Searching for personal effects is pro forma and usually fruitless. Inmates are not supposed to carry anything with them to the electric chair, and I was very surprised when I discovered what appeared to be a letter in the back pocket of his jeans. The envelope had not been opened. Written in bold block letters across the front of it was EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL. PLEASE BURY WITH ME!! “Make a copy of the envelope and whatever’s inside and submit the originals with his personal effects,” I said, handing the envelope to Fielding.

He tucked it under the autopsy protocol on a clipboard, mumbling, ‘Jesus. He’s bigger than I am.”

“Amazing that anyone mold be bigger than you are, ” Susan said to my bodybuilder deputy chief.

“Good thing he’s not been dead long,” he added. “Otherwise we’d need the jaws of Life.”

When muscle-bound people have been dead for hours, they are as uncooperative as marble statues. Rigor had not begun to set in. Waddell was limber as in life. He could have been asleep.

It required all of us to transfer him, facedown, to the autopsy table. He weighed two hundred and fifty-nine pounds. His feet protruded over the table’s edge. I was measuring the burns to his leg when the buzzer sounded from the bay. Susan went to see who it was, and shortly Lieutenant Pete Marino walked in, trench coat unbuttoned, one end of the belt trailing along the tile floor.

“The burn to the back of his calf is four by one and a quarter by two and three-eighths,” I dictated to Fielding. “It’s dry, contracted, and blistered.”

Marino lit a cigarette. “They`re raising a stink about him bleeding,” he said, and he seemed agitated.

“His rectal temp is one hundred and four,” Susan said as she removed the chemical thermometer. “That’s at eleven-forty- nine.”

“You know why his face was bleeding?” Marino asked.

“One of the guards said a nosebleed,” I replied, adding, “We need to turn him over.”

“You saw this on the inner aspect of his left arm?” Susan directed my attention to an abrasion.

I examined it through a lens under a strong light. “I don’t know. Possibly from one of the restraints: ” “There’s one on his right arm, too.”

I took a look while Marino watched me and smoked. We turned the body, shoving a block under the shoulders. Blood trickled out of the right side of his nose. His head and chin had been shaved to an uneven stubble. I made the Y incision.

“There might be some abrasions here,” Susan said, looking at the tongue.

“Take it out.”

I inserted the thermometer into the liver.

“Jesus,” Marino said under his breath.

“Now?”

Susan’s scalpel was poised.

“No. Photograph the burns around his head. We need to measure those. Then remove the tongue.”

“Shit,” she complained. “Who used the camera last?”

“Sorry,” Fielding said. “There was no film in the drawer. I forgot. By the way, it’s your job to keep film in the drawer.”