The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [50]
At 8:15 on the morning of October 3, Stations 1, 4, and 6 were in operation, and a sheet-wrapped body rested on the table at Station 2. Wallace Huttner was standing, arms folded, at Station 4. The risers were empty but for a resident scheduled to post the body on table 2 and three medical students. As David approached, he caught sight of Charlotte’s open-mouthed, chalk-colored face. He bit at his lower lip, swallowed a jet of bile, and decided that it would be best to concentrate on the rest of her anatomy. He could deal reasonably well with autopsies as long as he viewed them as examinations of parts of a body. The nearer he allowed himself to get to the human aspect, the more unpleasant the procedure became for him.
Ahmed Hadawi, a quick, dark little man with disproportionately huge hands, had made his initial incision and was elbow-deep in the chest cavity, busily separating the chest and abdominal organs from their attachments to the neck and body wall. He made a soft clucking noise with his tongue as he worked, but otherwise seemed without emotion or expression. Occasionally he bent over and murmured a few words into a pedal-operated Dictaphone.
Huttner nodded coolly in response to David’s greeting. His stance and manner bore no hint of the relaxed, interested, almost fatherly physician who had sat with David in the surgeons’ lounge just thirty-six hours before. After the nod, he returned his attention to the dissection, carefully avoiding further eye contact. David looked at the man helplessly. Then, as so often happened in difficult situations, the macabre portion of his humor took over. If he hugs himself any tighter, he thought, maybe he’ll just break into little pieces and I can cover his practice until someone glues him back together.
At that moment he caught another glimpse of Charlotte’s face. “Stop it, Shelton!” he screamed at himself. “This isn’t funny. Just stop it!” The mental slap was enough. He shifted his weight several times from side to side, then settled down, his attention focused on the pathologist.
“Now, then, we are ready to take a look at some things,” Hadawi said. The resident stepped down from the risers to get a better view and Huttner tightened his autoembrace a notch as the pathologist began pointing out the anatomical status of each of Charlotte’s organs as they existed at the instant of her death.
“The heart,” he began, “is moderately enlarged, with thickening of the muscle and dilatation of all chambers. There is a small, fresh puncture wound through the anterior left ventricle, which I assume is the result of Dr. Shelton’s commendably accurate intracardiac injection.”
David thought that the moment might be right for a modest smile and nod, but then realized that no one was looking at him. He smiled and nodded anyway.
The little pathologist continued speaking as he dissected. “There is fairly advanced narrowing of all coronary arteries, although there is no gross evidence of recent damage such as might be caused by a myocardial infarction.” Margaret Armstrong’s interpretation of Charlotte’s electrocardiogram had been right on the button, David noted. “Keep in mind,” Hadawi added, “that evidence of an acute infarction—say, less than twenty-four hours old—is often seen only in microscopic examination of the heart muscle itself, and then only if we happen to catch just the right section.”
“I want to be notified as soon as those slides have been examined,” Huttner ordered, more, it seemed to David, out of a need to make some kind of statement than anything else. Hadawi glanced up at him and, with no more acknowledgment than that, turned his attention to the lungs. Immediately his stock as reflected in David’s eyes rose several points. Both lungs