“Of course,” she said without hesitation.

“Good. We’ve got a floater coming in. Couple of fishermen found the body out by the flats this morning.”

“I’ll finish my paperwork and get on it as soon as it comes in.”

“You’ll present your findings at afternoon rounds,” Dr. Colt said. He pulled a small notepad from his breast pocket and jotted a reminder as he walked out of her office.

CHAPTER 2

The body arrived at one p.m., which gave Livia two hours to perform the autopsy, clean up, and gather her notes before three o’clock rounds. Afternoon rounds were the bewitching event each day, when the fellows presented the day’s cases to the staff at the OCME. The audience included Dr. Colt and the other attending MEs under whom the fellows were training, the subspecialists in pathology who assisted in nearly every case, visiting medical students, and pathology residents. On a given afternoon, thirty people stared at Livia as she presented.

If fellows were confused about the details of the cases they were presenting, it was painfully obvious and very unpleasant. There was no faking it. Hiding was impossible when you were in the cage, as was termed the presentation room where afternoon rounds took place. Surrounded by ugly metal chain link that belonged in someone’s 1970s backyard, the cage was a feared place for all new fellows. Standing in front of the large crowd was meant to be stressful and challenging. It was also, throughout the course of the year, supposed to get easier.

“Don’t worry,” one graduating fellow told Livia when they swapped spots in July. “The cage is a place you’ll hate at first, but later love. It grows on you.”

After two months on the job, the love affair had yet to blossom.

Livia finished her paperwork on the heroin overdose and headed back to the autopsy suite. She gowned up in a disposable blue surgical smock over her scrubs, triple-gloved her hands, and pulled a full shield over her face as the investigators rolled the gurney through the back door of the morgue and parked it next to Livia’s autopsy table. In a sterile operating room, the surgical dressings were meant to protect the patient from the doctor. In the morgue, the opposite was true. Cotton, latex, and plastic were all that stood between Livia and whatever disease and decay waited inside the bodies she dissected.

With one at the head and the other at the feet, the two scene investigators lifted the body—zipped in the standard black vinyl—onto the autopsy table. Livia approached as the investigators gave the scene details to her—male floater discovered by fisherman at just past seven a.m. Advanced decomposition, and an obvious broken leg from wherever he’d jumped.

“How far is the closest bridge from where the body was found?” Livia asked.

“Six miles,” Kent Chapple, one of the scene investigators, said.

“That’s a long way to float.”

“He’s ripe enough to suggest a long swim,” Kent said. “Colt’s giving this to you, huh?”

Water leaked from the body bag and dripped through the holes of Livia’s table, collecting in the basin below. A body pulled from salt water was never a pretty sight. Jumpers usually die on impact, and eventually sink. They were termed floaters only after the body began the decaying process where intestinal bacteria fester and eat away the insides, releasing noxious gases captured within the abdominal cavity that, literally, raise the dead. This process could take hours to days, and the longer the body sat underwater before floating to the surface, the worse condition it was in when it finally arrived at the morgue.

Livia smiled from behind her clear plastic face shield. “Lucky me.”

She slid the zipper down and watched as Kent and his partner slipped the bag gently away. She saw immediately the body was badly decomposed, worse than any floater she’d seen before. Much of the epidermis was missing and, in some areas, the full thickness of the integumentary system gone entirely with only muscle and tendon and bone visible.

The investigators took their dripping body bag and placed it on the gurney.

“Good luck,” Kent said.

Livia waved her hand but kept her gaze on the body.

“I see it every year, Doc,” Kent said at the door. “Around September it starts. They break you in with drunks and overdoses. Then the ugly ones come. Decomps and kids. Doesn’t let up until January or so. Colt does it to all the fellows to find out what you’re made of. You’ll get some juicy homicides eventually. I know that’s what you’re all after. A nice gunshot wound or strangulation. But you’ll have to wait until winter. Deal with the messy ones first. Prove you can handle them.”

“That’s how it works around here?” Livia asked.

“Every year.”

Livia lifted her chin. “Thanks, Kent. I’ll let you know how this one goes.”

“Don’t bother.”

The investigators wheeled the empty gurney out of the morgue, shaking their heads with suppressed smiles and sideways glances at the mess they’d left on the table that would surely make most people vomit, and would be a challenge for even a seasoned ME to get through. They knew Dr. Cutty would be at it for a while. Lots of work and trouble, and likely a few dry heaves, all to scribble on a death certificate that internal organ damage or aortic dissection was the cause of death; suicide the manner.

*

The back door to the morgue closed and with the investigators gone Livia was the only physician in the autopsy suite, just her and the jumper, still dripping on her table. Mornings saw most, if not all, of the autopsy tables crowded with pathologists garbed up and in various stages of examination. Others milled around as well, subspecialists weaving between the tables and around the autopsy suite to offer their expertise. The morgue was not a sterile environment and all that was required for entry was an OCME badge or a police shield. Detectives routinely peered over a pathologist’s shoulder, waiting on a crucial nugget of information that would either set them off on an investigation or give them clearance from one. Technicians wheeled away bodies for X-ray or picked up specimens for neuro-path or derm-path or dental-path. Other technicians completed the autopsy process by sewing closed the gaping incisions made by the physicians. Scene investigators came and went, sometimes delivering new bodies to empty tables. Overseeing it all was Dr. Colt, who strolled the autopsy suite, hands clasped behind his back and cheaters hanging at the tip of his nose. Mornings were organized chaos.

But today was Livia’s first double, the first time she was in the autopsy suite during afternoon hours. This was the time of day usually spent on paperwork, gathering notes and preparing for three o’clock rounds in the cage. With just her and the body in the quiet morgue, Livia sensed the eeriness of the place. Every sound was amplified, her tools clanking off the metal table and reverberating in the corners, the body dripping like a leaky faucet into the basin below. Usually, bone saws from adjacent tables or conversation from her colleagues overwhelmed these noises. But today her movements were magnified and obvious, and it made for a most unpleasant experience as she manipulated the body in front of her and listened to the sucking and sloshing of tissue. It took some time to adjust to the solitude, but when she got deeper into the external examination, the hollowness of the morgue faded and soon skepticism was all that remained.