Chapters (48)
- also by patricia cornwell
- title page
- copyright
- dedication
- contents
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- thirteen
- fourteen
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- two nights later
- credits
“You saw footage of me getting her out of the water?” I watch Toby cover the gurney with the sheet and open the tailgate, and he’s scowling now, clearly unhappy with whatever someone is saying over the phone. “Do you happen to know which TV station it was?”
“No, ma’am, Chief. That I can’t tell you for a fact,” Ron says. “Because it’s not just on the local stations. CNN, for sure, and a Yahoo headline on the Internet about a prehistoric monster turtle, and that’s the exact words, and a dead body tied to a cage that the turtle got tangled up with. I think it’s pretty much all over the Internet, pretty much everywhere.”
thirteen
thirteen
THE CFC’S SEVEN CORRIDORS ARE PAINTED WHITE, their recycled glass tiles glazed a grayish brown called truffle. Soft reflective LEDs create a soothing cloud of light, and acoustical drop ceilings conceal miles of wire while cameras and RFID trackers monitor the passage of all who come here, the living and the dead.
Our round headquarters was built by a bioresearch company that went bankrupt late in construction, and with rare exception the original design is ideal for what we do—in fact, a medical examiner’s dream. We can look out energy-efficient solar windows that no one can look in, and a high-performance HVAC controls the environment so precisely we have our own customized weather. Boilers remove moisture from the air before chillers cool it, preventing condensation and an inconvenient phenomenon known as indoor rain, while robots and HEPA filters suck in and scrub away pathogens, chemical vapors, and accompanying awful odors.
The CFC is cleaner than most healthcare clinics, the tissue recovery room I briskly walk past a hundred times more sterile than a hospital OR. Patients declared brain-dead can be transported here while still on life support, ensuring that eyes, organs, skin, and bones are harvested without wasteful delays, the dead helping the living and the living helping the dead. The progress I’ve witnessed in my profession isn’t the straight trajectory I once imagined but a circle like the corridor I follow, passing ID now, then ducking inside large-scale x-ray to see if my technician Anne is there.
Her chair is pushed back and turned around as if she just got up, and glowing on flat video screens are 3-D images of a head and thorax with bright white areas of fresh hemorrhage into brain tissue and lungs, and the brighter white of bones, of a basilar skull fracture that extends into the sinuses, and shattered scapulas, and ribs broken so badly they’re detached from chest walls. The blunt-force trauma case from this morning, Howard Roth; I read the information on his CT scans. A forty-two-year-old black male from Cambridge who allegedly fell down his basement stairs, his body discovered late yesterday afternoon.
I don’t have time for this.