Page 18 of The Night Of
He lay naked on the steel table, the body block between his shoulder blades pushing his chest up and out. His skin was gray, the beginnings of postmortem mottling starting to show. His eyes were open, but the shine of life, the light of the soul, was long gone. That was all bullshit anyway. The light of a person’s soul in their gaze was nothing more than the reflection of the eyes’ lubrication. The dull stare of death was nothing more than a pair of dried-out eyeballs.
From this side, I couldn’t see where his jaw was broken and deformed, and I couldn’t see the exit wound at the back of his head, either. The worst of the blood had been wiped away. There was some bruising around his lips, black speckles on his cheeks and forehead. Stippling, powder burns.
Baker had the body of a middle-aged man who was trying to stay young and fit: a slight paunch, a slackness at the hips and around his neck, but he had a solid frame and had always looked like a million bucks dressed in a suit or dolled up in a tux. His genitals were soft and shriveled, and his legs were dusted in hair that ran down to his ankles. His feet were slender, the toes, like his fingers, long and tapered.
I tried to stay clinical as I watched Hendricks begin her physical examination. Numbness crept over me. I set my jaw, ground my teeth together. Crossed my arms and rocked back on my heels. Mr. Clean eyeballed me as his underlings took notes.
“No petechial hemorrhage around the nose or in the eyes. Capillaries are intact and unremarkable.”
“What’s that on the side of his face? By his temple?” one of the fed weenies asked.
Hendricks peered at Baker’s temple, his upper cheek. She swabbed his skin, collecting a sample, and then had the photographer zoom in for a close-up shot. “Tears,” she said. “He was crying before he died.”
X-rays and preliminary photos had already been taken, and they were blown up on the light box over the table. I focused on those as Hendricks pulled open Baker’s jaw and peered into the back of his throat. “Significant GSR and gas burns visible,” she said. “Entry wound is visible at the soft palate and the nasopharynx.” I could see the same in the X-ray of the skull. The bullet’s path ran through Baker’s mouth at an upward angle, through the nasal cavity and the base of the brain, shattering the back of the skull like someone had taken a baseball bat to a glass window.
“Perforating gunshot wound to the nasopharynx,” Hendricks said. “Based on the GSR and stippling on the face and the burns inside the mouth and throat, the gun was in very close proximity to his face and throat when fired.”
“Inside his mouth?” One of the feds—a young guy in a dark suit, his hair still wet from the gel he’d slicked through it—asked. He looked, and sounded, like the bureaucratic equivalent of taupe.
“Possibly. His teeth aren’t broken, which can happen with recoil. Check the muzzle and barrel for saliva and for skin fragments. I’m seeing a few wounds beneath the burns that could be muzzle strike.” She shook her head. “It’s very hard to tell with these kinds of situations.”
These kinds of situations. It was a foregone conclusion to her. The facts before her said Baker’s death was exactly what it appeared.
The fed nodded and made a note on his pad.
“Did you recover the bullet?” she asked.
Mr. Clean shifted. “We did not.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the wadded-up, inside-out nitrile glove I’d worn yesterday at Camp David. “I did.” I stepped forward, holding out the glove and letting it swing over Baker’s legs. The misshapen bullet had rolled to the center of the middle finger, and the glove was now flipping off Mr. Clean.
He looked at me like I was handing him fresh shit pulled from my own asshole. “You took this from the scene? And you didn’t document it?”
“I’m giving it to you now. Consider it documented.” I wagged the glove at him. He reached for it, and I yanked it back.
For a second, I thought he’d come over Baker’s body and kill me with his bare hands. His face was purple, and his meaty paws fisted hard as he shook. The physical effort he exerted not to murder me was palpable. His rage filled the room.
I kept poking that bear. “Bring me in on the forensics. I need to see everything.”
He stared, seething. His nostrils flared, and in the sudden stillness of the room, I heard his molars scraping against each other. “I’ll arrest you right fucking now,” he growled, “And no one could stop me. I’d be within every right. You fucking removed evidence.”
I wanted to ask him if the cabin was considered a crime scene, if the feds were treating Baker’s death as a crime. But not here, not in front of everyone. “Everything,” I repeated. “President’s orders.” I started to hand over the glove—
Mr. Clean reached out and snatched it from me. He took two seconds to look at it, then tucked it into his suit jacket pocket. He snarled and then pretended I didn’t exist.
Hendricks looked from Mr. Clean to me. Disgusted, she turned back to Baker’s body. She examined his hands, first scraping beneath each fingernail and collecting the fall outs, then swabbing the dark stains on his palms. We were quiet as she worked. I don’t know about the others, but I was thinking of the other suicides I’d seen in my career. When they’d used a gun, there was always gunshot residue left behind on the hands. Not usually on both hands, though.
“Drawing samples for the tox analysis.” She drew five vials of blood from Baker’s neck and groin veins. Five were needed for a full and complete toxicology, beyond the basic substances most autopsies tested for. For the president, they were going to run everything. She collected swabs from Baker’s mouth, nose, and rectum.
“Beginning internal examination.”
Watching the scalpel slide through Baker’s chest was almost unbearable. It felt like a scalpel was going through my own flesh, sliding over my pecs and down the center of my chest to my belly button. It got worse as Hendricks pulled the flaps of Baker’s skin back, exposing the shiny undersides of his flesh and tissue, his ribs and muscles. I’d known this man, laughed with him, spent two years protecting his life day in and day out, and here I was, watching Hendricks reach for the rib cutters. They were pruning shears, and she lined up the blades and snapped through his ribs one at a time. After, she sawed through the gristle and muscle and then lifted Baker’s breastbone and the top half of his ribcage out of his body in one piece, setting it upside down on a table behind her.
Baker’s heart and lungs glistened in their viscera. I closed my eyes. Tried not to sway. We were all the same inside, collections of organs nestled within fragile skeletons, but this was a view of him I’d never wanted.
I heard Hendricks cut through his juicy organs, then the slick sucking sound of the lungs and heart being pulled from Baker’s chest. I opened my eyes as she set them in a metal basin. “No edema, no defects. The lung tissue is unremarkable.” She sliced through the lungs and dropped three samples in jars of preservative. She examined Baker’s heart next, holding the delicate organ in the palm of her hand and turning it over beneath the harsh fluorescent lights. “Coronaries have slight hardening. Atherosclerosis is in its beginning stages. Not unusual for a man of his age.” She looked at Dr. Fernandez, Baker’s personal physician.
Fernandez nodded. “He didn’t have any significant health issues. We were monitoring his cholesterol, but he’d taken steps to lower it. His health, overall, was good.”
