Page 19 of The Night Of
I watched Fernandez instead of Hendricks as she cut open Baker’s heart to expose the inner vessels. Fernandez looked away, not watching either. Moroseness clung to him, a sadness that curled his shoulders forward and bent his spine. I’d need to talk to him, soon.
Hendricks turned to Baker’s belly next, cutting out his liver, spleen, pancreas, and stomach. The stench of death bloomed in the morgue. Even though he’d been refrigerated overnight, a corpse still decayed, and that process started in the gut. Hendricks laid out Baker’s stomach on a portable tray and sliced through it, exposing the contents. Baker’s last meal was nearly completely digested, the chyme a mass of gastric juice and unappealing ooze. “Looks like it was approximately five hours since his last meal,” she said. She was right on the money.
Hendricks moved to the head of the table. She studied the X-rays, then probed at Baker’s skull, fingers searching through his hair. She took the scalpel and made her slice from ear to ear over his crown, avoiding the fractures and the bullet’s exit wound. Three of the feds looked away. I forced myself to watch. So did Mr. Clean.
Hendricks peeled Baker’s scalp off his skull, folding his skin at the forehead and laying it over his face, covering his eyes. She did the same with the back of his scalp, pulling it gingerly over the exit wound. Still, bone shards from his shattered skull fell onto the steel table, exposing his brain.
No one said a word.
The Stryker saw hummed, the pitch rising when the blade began cutting through Baker’s skull bone. The whir was like nails on a chalkboard, like the saw was vibrating against my own skull. Hendricks cut carefully in a wide circle, preserving the exit wound in all its forensic glory. When she was done, she gently pulled the skullcap off. Usually there would be a sucking sound, tissue and blood sticking to the bone, holding everything together. The human body wants to be whole. But Baker’s skull had been blown apart, and the cap came off easily, practically falling into Hendricks’s hands.
She stepped back as her tech took photos, first of the skullcap and then of Baker’s exposed brain. Or what was left of it. Massive chunks were missing. Blood had congealed into a jelly, clumps clinging to the ravaged tissue left behind. The bullet had shredded through the gray matter, slicing through the folds and narrows of Baker’s mind and obliterating not just the mechanical engine of his body, what drove his movements and his breathing, but the essence of him, the sum total of who Steven Baker was. All his memories, all his ideas, all his hopes and dreams and fears. All the snapshots he’d carried inside him, the best moments and the worst. All his loves and his hatreds. All of that had been wrapped in the dips and valleys of his cranium. All gone now. Destroyed.
“Massive trauma to the brain,” Hendricks said. “Extensive hemorrhage through both hemispheres. The bullet passed at an upward angle, near to the midline, and the cavitation caused extensive tissue trauma before the bullet exited the back of the skull.”
Exited. More likeblew the top off.
She cut Baker’s brain free and examined it gently, turning it left and right and peering at the damage before placing it in a container to soak in fixative. The brain could not be examined right away, or it would melt and liquefy all over the cutting board. She’d section it tomorrow, at the earliest.
Suddenly, the body on the table wasn’t Baker anymore. This wasn’t the man I’d known, had cared for. This was only a collection of bones and muscle and skin, an empty bag of cells missing a few organs. That was easier to believe with his skin folded over his face and his brain gone, and it let me turn away from the table and pace out of the halo of fluorescent lights. Mr. Clean’s eyeballs burned into the center of my back.
Hendricks closed Baker’s skull, sewed his scalp back together, bagged his organs, and placed them inside his chest cavity. She stitched him closed, long Frankenstein stitches running up the center of his chest. She could have passed that off to a tech, but she did it herself, every stitch, and no one said a word as she finished.
Lastly, she and her techs rolled Baker over, laying him facedown on the steel table. The exit wound was a black hole now, partially covered by his hair. His shoulders were straight, his spine bowing toward his belly now that he had no muscle tone to hold his back rigid. His ass and the backs of his legs were dark with lividity.
I took three quick steps to the side of the table, peering at Baker’s neck.
“Back up,” Mr. Clean growled. “Get the fuck back.”
I ignored him.
“Hey, asshole!”
“Both of you, quit it!” Hendricks barked. “Shut your mouth or you will leave my postmortem! Understood?”
Mr. Clean gritted his teeth but backed off.
I wasn’t paying him, or even her, any attention. All of my focus was on a discoloration at the juncture of Baker’s back and neck, right where the skin creased. It wasn’t much, a bruise slightly larger than the size of a fingernail in the shape of a thick, rounded line.
Almost like the muzzle of a gun had been pressed to the back of his neck and dug into his skin, but only part of that circle had left an imprint.
Could it be that someone had pressed a gun to the back of Baker’s head, forced him to his knees? Put the gun in his mouth and made him pull the trigger?
But who? And how? I’d seen no evidence of anyone else in that bedroom. And we’d been on the scene in under thirty seconds. If someone else had fired the shot that killed him, how could they have gotten out of there? My mind whirled, imagining and discarding possibilities one by one.
“Hmm.” Hendricks had followed my gaze, and she tilted Baker’s head and took a closer look at the bruise. “Minuscule bruising on the base of the neck. About a third of an inch. A semicircular line.”
Mr. Clean got all up in my business then, crowding me across the table and trying to push me out as he started asking questions. Like he was pissed he hadn’t seen it first, pissed that he was busy babysitting me and not focusing on the autopsy. “Post- or antemortem?”
Hendricks took her time, making sure. “Antemortem. But not by long.”
“You’re sure?” I stared hard at her. “It’s not something from the hospital, or the helicopter when he was brought in?” There was a truth in what I was saying that hadn’t been brought up before. When I was beating on Baker’s chest at Camp David, and when Garcia, Pitt, White, and I were running him out to the medevac chopper, we were already dealing with a corpse. Baker was dead before I set foot in that room. He was dead when I heard the shot.
“That is not a postmortem bruise or a lividity mark. Whatever happened, it happened when he was alive. Was there something he could have brushed against or been leaning on in Marine One on the way to Camp David? I’ve had irritation and bruising from harness restraints and from headphones and mics before.”
“Yeah, sure, ’cept there’s none of that in Marine One. It’s a luxury chopper. He would have been resting his head against supple Italian leather the entire flight. That doesn’t bruise.”
Hendricks’s eyes flashed. “I don’t have answers for you on how he was bruised. All I can tell you is that this happened before he died.”
