Carved in Bone - Jefferson Bass [49]
She held the look. “So, what, two years or more? That’s a long damn time for a man in his prime. And you’re around young women—smart, attractive young women, women who look up to you—day in and day out. I’m amazed you haven’t thrown some poor lass to the floor and ravished her by now. Jesus, Bill, give yourself a break. Yeah, you kissed a student. Probably as much her doing as yours—take my word for that. And yeah, your timing sucked. Too bad. You want to apologize to one of them, or both of them, go ahead. And then go on.” Her voice softened. “Bill, Bill. We all make mistakes. Even you. Grieving, lonely, stiff-upper-lip you. And if getting caught in a kiss knocks you off that pedestal your diener’s put you on, well, maybe that’s best.” She leaned closer, right into my face. “Understandable as it is, Bill, it’s not healthy for her to idolize you.”
I blinked. A lot had just happened: confession, understanding, forgiveness, counsel. “I thought you were supposed to be a pathologist. Sound more like a shrink. A damn good one, by the way.”
She smiled. “Nope, just a woman who’s been around the block a time or two. If I weren’t happily lesbian now, I might take you for a spin myself, try to put a smile back on your face. But enough with the therapy. We’ve got a corpse to dissect.”
She left me with my jaw hanging open—“happily lesbian now”? Whatever happened to the husband she’d introduced me to at that forensic conference a year or so ago?—and turned her attention to Ledbetter’s corpse. The Y incision from Dr. Hamilton’s autopsy had been stitched shut with coarse black baseball-style sutures, which Jess cut with a flick of the scalpel. Stuffed into the abdomen was a red plastic biohazard bag; extricating it and laying it on the table, she said, “Well, at least he bagged the organs instead of just dumping them into the cavity. We might as well look at the lungs first, although I’m not feeling optimistic about what kind of shape they’re in.”
“Nine months is a long time,” I agreed. “I’ll be surprised if they’re not completely putrefied.”
“Me too. Looks like our man got the bare minimum of cosmetic embalming—just enough in the neck to keep his face presentable for the funeral. And the organs were already removed and bagged at that point, so they didn’t get any formalin at all.” She cut the zip tie at the neck of the bag. “Brace yourself—this is going to be pretty ripe.” Opening the bag wide, she revealed the contents to our eyes and our nostrils.
The lungs—or, rather, what had once been the lungs—were now a few handfuls of gelatinous gray goo. They had been sliced apart during the original autopsy, and the dissection and decay had combined to render them useless as any source of additional forensic information. “Shit,” she said. “And I mean that descriptively as well as editorially.” She tied the bag shut again and strode toward a stereomicroscope at a desk against one wall of the autopsy suite. “At least your girlfriend did me one favor before she stomped out of here. She got us the slides.” Jess switched on the light source and peered into the eyepieces. “Come take a look.”
I took her place at the scope and leaned in, tweaking the focus a bit to compensate for my lack of reading glasses. The field of view was filled with lacy, delicate circles of pale pink; the insides of the circles were nearly opaque brown. “Tell me what I’m seeing.”
“Cross-section of the alveolar sacs from the lower right lobe of the lungs. Five microns thick—one two-hundredth of an inch. The water in the tissue has been replaced with paraffin.”
“So the pink circles?”
“The business part of the lungs—the sacs where air exchange takes place.”
“That was what I figured. And the brown?”
“Blood.”
“Perimortem?”
“Nope. Clotted. Definitely antemortem.”
“Any way to tell how long antemortem?”
“Top of the head, I’d guess two weeks,” she said. “I wish Dr. Hamilton had kept the save jar.”
“Save jar?”
“Yeah—a highly technical term for the jar where we packrat-type pathologists sometimes pickle bigger slices of organs in formalin. I’ve got thousands