Ghouls (34 page)

“Thought you’d never get here,” he said. “The M.E.’s waiting for us. County’s already been called.”

“Fuck the county,” Bard said. “Explain.”

Glen began to mouth a response, but words never materialized. He led them down a shiny, vacant hall to a black door with a chicken-wire window. Hovering on the glass were the words, OFFICE OF THE PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER. Glen entered without knocking.

In the anteroom, they found themselves hemmed in by dented file cabinets, bookshelves, and data processing equipment. Kurt stood unnaturally stiff, pinned to the wall by shadows. On a cork bulletin board ragged with crinkled notes and memos he noticed several misaligned bumper stickers. YES NUKES. GET IN THE SWIM. WARNING: I
DON’T
BRAKE FOR ANIMALS. Above the desk hung a framed eight-by-ten glossy of Moe, Larry, and
Shemp
.

“This place looks like a pawn shop,” Bard said. “Where’s the fucking M.E.?”

“Assistant
M.E.,” a stocky shadow across the room corrected. “Only assistants get stuck with night duty.”

Glen introduced the shadow to Kurt and Bard as Dr. Greene.

At last moving into the light, Greene more resembled a college student torn between academics and barbells. Very short blond hair and thick glasses created in him a serious if not unfeeling outer cast, yet he dressed shoddily in jeans and desert boots, the kind with the seam down the middle. Beneath his open lab coat he wore an old gray T-shirt centered with the face of Eddie Haskell. Kurt detected an awkward prominence about him—Greene was shorter than average but stood firm as a fire hydrant, with a physique that could’ve been sculpted out of rock, massive shoulders and back tapering to a trim waist. Kurt could easily see this man bending tire irons during periods of extended boredom.

“You guys are cops,” Greene said. “So I assume you’ve been to morgues.”

Kurt and Bard nodded, neither admitting that it had been years.

“The only reason I ask is because I’ve seen it happen too many times.” Greene opened a pint carton of chocolate milk and sipped. “The county morgue isn’t exactly fun for the whole family, I realize that. But I’m always getting these county hot dogs coming in here thinking it’s going to be a lot of laughs. Next thing I know, they’re throwing up like gushers. One time I had a state sergeant come in. Big guy, macho, ‘Death Before Dishonor’ tattoo on his arm. He took one look around and just let ’
er
rip, running circles around the room with his hand over his mouth, vomit shooting out between his fingers, a regular volcano. He threw up on my lunch, my instruments, and a cadaver’s face.” Quickly, Greene doled to each of them a plastic-lined paper bag. “So that’s the rule of the house—nobody throws up in my morgue. I don’t throw up in your police station, so don’t throw up in my morgue.”

Greene walked to the other side of the room and opened a large gray metal door which no one had noticed in the anteroom’s slabs of shadows. Its doorknob was in the middle, and it bore a sign that read, KEEP THIS DOOR CLOSED, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Greene disappeared into a slant of white blaze. “The doorman to hell,” Bard whispered. “Get a load of this guy.” They followed reluctantly, single file.

A high fluorescent fixture veiled them all in flat light. Fumes in the air chafed Kurt’s eyes and reamed his sinuses; he thought of the hot sausages they sold in jars at the Jiffy. “Sorry about the horrible smell,” Greene apologized. “It’s fixation fluid. Trade hazard.”

Kurt felt the blood empty out of his face. The slightly cooler air made his skin tighten. There were no metal drawers here as he’d seen on TV. The room had a bare cement floor potted with crusty drains, and was walled all around by slate-gray tile. Metal shelves occupied one entire wall; they seemed bowed under the weight of countless white five-gallon buckets each taped with various labels as JORES’, ZENKER’S SOLUTION, PHENOL, FORMALIN 20%. A tin tray marked AMYLOID/FAT NECROSIS PREP held several bottles of iodine and copper sulfate. A large sink and heat-sealing iron hung on one wall, and at the opposite wall was another door. Kurt didn’t care to see what was behind it.

“Chief Bard, Officer Morris, Mr.
Rodz
,” Greene said, extending a hand, “I’d like you to meet Ollie, Nick, and Christine.”

Kurt didn’t get it at first, then it occurred to him that Dr. Greene’s sense of humor kept in line with his job. He’d been introducing them to cadavers which lay on three trough-like tables. All three corpses had been macabrely wrapped in white plastic bags from crotch to head, so that only bare legs were visible. They made Kurt think of bundled meat.

In the middle of the room was the autopsy table, brushed aluminum, with a total scale, inclination and height adjustment, suction lines, and a removable filter trap. “Here she is,” Greene said. He gestured toward the table’s slatted platform.

Kurt felt as though he were standing on someone’s roof when he looked. A skeleton lay stretched across the table—a skeleton for the most part at least, because the frail arrangement of bones seemed flecked and hanging with an indescribable matter which reminded him of creek scum. It was not a clean skeleton. Parts of it glistened wetly in the light.

“This is what I found tonight,” Glen said in a parched tone.

“Where?” Kurt asked. He contemplated his vomit bag.

“Right next to one of the back access roads. Less than a mile from where I found Drucker.”

Greene set his milk down on top of a compact cassette tape recorder. He looked at them, indifferent but speculative. “This could be the missing person you reported.”

“The Fitzwater girl’s only been missing a couple of days,” Kurt told him.

“There’s almost nothing left of it,” Bard added. “It’d take a lot longer than a few days to do this.”

“Not true,” Greene asserted. “This body’s been almost stripped to the bone. It would take weeks for it to rot to this state; putrefaction just doesn’t happen that fast… This body was devoured by animals, which isn’t all that strange in a heavily wooded area. It’s just a little surprising that it could happen so quickly, provided that this is the Fitzwater girl.” Lazily, Greene turned his head, immune to this environment of death. He pointed to the skull with unsettling detachment, and brought to light a rough hole at the back. Kurt felt his stomach flutter when he absorbed the implication. The skull had been bitten open, its contents evacuated.

Greene continued. “This is the only part that really bugs me—no brain. Very clean job, almost like it was scooped out through that hole. At least I’ve never seen a head trauma like this before; and don’t get me wrong, I’m not a zoological expert, but I couldn’t tell you what kind of animal could bite a hole like this in the cranial vault and then get the brain out so cleanly.” He arched a shoulder, unimpressed at even his own grisly revelations. “We’ll see what the boss says in the morning. If he doesn’t know, he’ll find someone who does.”

Kurt winced one last time at the opened skull. It conjured an image of huge, snapping jaws and teeth. “If this person died more than two days ago, then we know it can’t be Donna Fitzwater. Are you going to be able to give us a time of death?”

Greene leaned casually against a bracketed tray cluttered with clamps, scissors, and smudged scalpels. The light reflected off his glasses in opaque white discs and made him look like a misanthropic cartoon character. “This 81 of yours lacks all of the normal major factors by which we determine time of death. We can’t make muscle pH and glycogen readings because there’s not enough muscle left. No way to measure the extent of gas formation in the blood, no way to measure fixation, temperature, or rigor. We can usually narrow TOD down to two or three hours by graphing the potassium levels in the ocular fluids of the eyes. But as you can see—”

“No eyes,” Kurt said.

“No nothing,” Bard said.

“All I can tell you now is that she hasn’t been dead long. One thing we could measure was the state of H
₂
O retention in the ligaments and tendon ends, plus the absence of sufficient peroxidation—”

“Wait a minute,” Bard interrupted. “You said
she.
It’s a fucking skeleton. How do you know it’s a
she?”

“Sex-chromatin test?” Kurt ventured.

“No,” Greene said. “What little tissue material is left has already turned
karyolytic
. But that’s all beside the point. You don’t need any of that for a complete skeleton. Basic osteology proves this is a woman. Broad
os
coxae
.
Improminent
supercilliary
ridge. Wide pelvic inlet… She’s a woman, all right. No bout a doubt it.”

No one laughed at Greene’s quip. Kurt could only stare at the
twiglike
thing on the table. It had been hollowed out, its bones gnawed. “What about age?” he asked. “Dead end?”

Greene seemed to be losing interest fast; he looked ready to fall asleep. “From this, exact
age’ll
be impossible to determine. We’ve only got guidelines. The fusion state of the epiphyseal plates indicates she’s older than eighteen, while the marginal fusion of the coronal and sagittal sutures in her orbital dome points out that she’s younger than, say, forty.” He picked up a long
bivalving
knife and tapped the stripped jaw, as if to test its solidity. “Most important of all is that her back row of molars are coming in, so unless she was subject to several superincumbent nutritional deficiencies, she’s more than likely in her early twenties.”

Kurt glanced glumly to Bard. “The Fitzwater girl was twenty-two.”

“Piss,” Bard said. He was a fat, angry mannequin in the ghastly light. “Piss. Cock.” Then, to Greene: “You’re sure of all this?”

“Sure I’m sure,” Greene said. He seemed amused that his competence had been questioned. “Now for the clincher. The most obvious atypical aspect of this 81 was the definite osteoporosis of the lower extremities. So I ordered some X rays and found positive evidence of complete spinal transection. Severe displacement of the upper lumbar group. Fractured neural arch.”

“In other words,” Kurt said, “she was crippled?”

Greene adjusted his glasses. His biceps made his sleeves look stuffed. “Exactly,” he verified. “But it wasn’t a recent fracture. This back injury occurred years ago, maybe many years. Was Donna Fitzwater paraplegic?”

“Yes,” Kurt droned. By now the fumes were making his eyes water. “Her father said she’d been crippled since she was young.”

“Then there’s no doubt that this is Donna Fitzwater,” Bard concluded, bile in his words.

“Unless you’ve got another missing person who’s a girl in her early twenties with a broken back,” Greene said in a long, laborious breath. “Bring in her dental records for positive ID. The M.E. will examine everything in the morning, but he won’t tell you any different.”

Bard glanced around, then looked into his vomit bag and gulped. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, pawing his gut. “My belly’s doing cartwheels.”

“Thanks for your time, Doc,” Kurt said. “We’ll give you a call tomorrow for the preliminary.”

Greene smiled faintly, shaking his head as Kurt, Bard, and Glen made a swift exit. They took long, nearly ludicrous strides until they were in the darkened lobby, a comfortable distance from Green’s facility.

“Fucking place is like a goddamned lab at Auschwitz.” Bard collapsed into a seat. “And how do you like that meat rack in there? You need a Ph.D. in anatomy just to understand the guy. He might as well be talking fucking Swedish.”

“Yeah, but that meat rack saved us a hell of a lot of time,” Kurt said. “At least we don’t have to rush being confused.” The light in the candy machine continued to flicker and buzz. Kurt couldn’t believe they’d put one this close to the morgue, of all places. He blinked rapidly till the sting in his eyes began to subside. He relished air that was free of fixators, and shortly the sick wooziness cleared from his head.

Bard looked like a limp sack in the seat. “For two days straight I’ve been praying that girl would turn up.” Then his voice roughened. “I should’ve known she’d turn up like that.”

“And how are we going to find out what happened to her?” Kurt drew on the complaint. “Unless we find something at Belleau Wood. We don’t even know the cause of death. How can we get a line on who’s responsible?”