“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.”