Page 24 of A Deeper Darkness
Her heart rate dropped, and her clinical mind took over at last. She looked on Donovan as objectively as she could.
It was him, and yet it wasn’t. Her Donovan had never looked so slack, so pale and insubstantial. Her Donovan didn’t have wide black stitches holding his tender flesh together, one on each side of his chest, another above his groin, tied in the middle, nor the quickly apparent scars on his torso and arms. Shiny, knotted, tightly stretched flesh. Burns. No one told her he’d been burned in Iraq. Or shot, for that matter.
Damn Eleanor. Glossing over the truth. As if Sam wouldn’t have been able to handle the news.
Damn her eyes. And damn Donovan, too.
She resisted the urge to brush his hair back from his blanched forehead. He had a bit less of it now, a slightly receding hairline that she was sad to see. When they’d sewed him up they’d gotten it slightly crooked. Only she would notice it, though. Or maybe Susan.
Nocek was looking at her strangely, his insect head tilted to one side as he tried to decide what was wrong with the situation.
She swallowed and met his eyes.
“Shall we?”
Nocek nodded. He stepped to the body and cut the twine that held Donovan’s Y-incision together.Snip. Snip. Snip.The fancy stitching that closed the flesh entirely would be done by the undertaker after the embalming. For their purposes in the M.E.’s office, to send the body to the funeral home, they simply threaded the needle through in the three places: midsternum right and left, plus a stitch from the bottom of the incision, spots that pulled the flayed flesh back together, then tied the twine in a knot. Brutal and utilitarian. The first time Sam had seen it done she watched in horror, sure the twine would tear and the skin would fly back open, but flesh was surprisingly tough and the method quite effective.
The field was quickly revealed, and Nocek pulled the slimy plastic bag that contained the victim’s organs from the abdominal cavity.
The victim. Good girl, Sam. Maintain your distance. Do not personalize this.
Nocek gestured to the bag. “Do you wish to redissect? I can do it if you’d like to observe instead.”
“No, that’s all right. I’d like to get my hands on everything, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. I will read to you the measurements that were taken as we go through the organs.”
Sam ignored the little voice screaming in the back of her head and settled into work, the routine. A secondary postmortem was not easy. Decomposition had begun in earnest. And without seeing the organs in situ, having the standard reference points to go on, it was slow, sloggy work. The previous M.E. had been good, though; the remaining organ sections were large enough to work with, hadn’t been chopped into little pieces. Sam had been at this a long time; once she started, she found everything she needed without too much trouble.
His liver wasn’t enlarged. His heart looked beautiful, with only the barest minimum of cholesterol plaque lining the valves. She sectioned off a fresh piece of lung from the upper lobe, cut it into a triangle—a trick she’d been taught to keep the upper and lower lobes identifiable after they were placed in the formalin-filled organ container. Upper lobes were triangles, lowers were squares. If she needed to pull the jar from evidence to take a second look at the organs from her own posts, she could easily identify which was which. Donovan’s lungs were hard to cut, much tougher than what was normal.
“What is this?” she asked, under her breath. The bronchioles were covered in scar tissue, developed foreign-body granulomas.
“Sand,” Nocek said. “From the multiple military engagements in the desert. All of the soldiers we are unfortunate enough to see have this in their bronchial trees, deep in the tissue. They breathe it in and it settles. They practically drown in sand over there.”
Nausea hit in the pit of her stomach again, hard and sudden, and she felt the edges of her world crumbling.
Don’t do it, Sam. Don’t even think about it.
She imagined herself at the sink. The washing was the only solution.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.
“Dr. Owens, are you feeling all right? You’ve lost your color.”
She opened her eyes. Got her breathing under control.
Normal. Nominal.
“Yes, I’m fine. Forgive me. I didn’t eat breakfast.”
She refocused on the section in front of her.
This is Donovan, Sam. Donovan. Not Simon. Don’t do this now. Not now.
Sam swallowed down the rising bile and used the back end of her scalpel to scrape away some of the grit.
“I’ve…” Her voice was weak, broken. She coughed, cleared her throat. “I’ve seen this before. We get soldiers from time to time, as well. Usually 101st Airborne. But…”
