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Authors: Alane Ferguson

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BOOK: The Circle of Blood
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“So when does rigor start?” Ben asked, bending over. Outsiders would never understand the way dieners and medical examiners could drink or eat only inches away from a body.
“In as little as ten minutes,” she replied.
“Exactly,” he said between sips. “And how long does it last?”
“It depends. It depends on how much a person weighs and how much fat they have, and on the temperature and how dry the air is. This isn’t an exact science. I think rigor can go for as long as seventy-two hours. And I think the body’s at its stiffest between, like, twelve and twenty-four hours.”
Ben stood, and Cameryn noticed there was water on his chin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. “And then what happens?”
Cocking her head, she said, “I didn’t know there was going to be a test.”
“I’m just doing my part,” Ben said. “I’m getting you ready for college. I heard there’s some fancy headhunter out for you.”
Mariah’s elbow made a knot against the side of the body bag. Cameryn felt its hardness beneath her fingertips. “Once decomposition kicks in, the body reverses itself. It goes soft again as it decomposes.”
“You get an A.” Ben nodded. “No wonder your daddy hired you.”
“Yeah, I’m getting a little worried about my job,” Patrick interjected. “I think she’s gunning for it.”
“Not yours,” she replied. “I’m gunning for Dr. Moore’s.”
“You’re definitely what’s next.” Ben curled his fingers around the gurney and said, “Let’s get this girl to X-ray.”
The casual chatting was the way people dealt with death, Cameryn knew. Like Ben and her father and Dr. Moore, she could regurgitate the facts. But as the gurney moved on the last leg of its journey, Cameryn realized the disconnect between her knowledge in her head and the feel of a human turning to stone beneath her hand.
You never get used to death,
she thought.
Never.
They passed a room with a spindly fern in a large clay pot painted with Hopi flute dancers. Throughout the building, cheap art hung on the walls, mostly pictures of gurgling brooks and sunrays bursting from behind clouds—she guessed those were meant to bring comfort to the bereaved.
They arrived at X-ray, where, Cameryn knew, Mariah would be filmed through the bag by the machine’s long movable arm. “You all know you gotta stay out here,” Ben told them at the door. “I’m gonna try to get film so we can pinpoint that bullet. If we find it, we won’t have to dig around so much.” He wheeled Mariah inside, and the door clicked softly behind him.
Patrick sagged against the wall as if the weight of the whole day had suddenly settled onto his shoulders. The fluorescent lights made his skin appear even grayer; Cameryn could see tiny threads of veins at the base of each nostril. She hadn’t remembered seeing them before. There was a redness to his eyes. Squeezing them shut, he pinched the lids with his fingers and said, “I think the day’s finally catching up to me.”
Just then his phone rang.
“Why don’t I go on down to the autopsy suite,” she began, but her father held up one finger to signal Cameryn to stop. “Hi, Ma,” Patrick said.
Cameryn waited, paying close attention to their conversation.
“We’re down here now. . . . With Cammie. . . . We’re outside X-ray.... No, it’s fine, what is it?” His back was hunched away from her, but suddenly he wheeled around to face Cameryn. “All right, I’ll ask her. . . . No, I’m glad you called. I’ll talk to you later.”
Something had changed in his voice. Cautious, she looked up and saw that his face was grave. Her father rubbed the back of his head, then raked his hand forward, making tufts. “That was your grandmother.”
Cameryn shrugged. “Okay. So?”
“So she said you never came home, that you left from the driveway and she got worried. She called Lyric. Cameryn, did you see Hannah today?”
Her fingers clenched at the sound of her mother’s name.
Guessing the truth, Patrick cried, exasperated, “We had an hour-long ride in the car. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know.” Eyes lowered again, she noticed a small nick in one square of the tile. “I guess I didn’t want to get into it.”
“Did you— Did you talk about Jayne?”
She planted the tip of her boot onto the notch and pressed it. “Hannah told me what happened.”
“She did? Can you please look at me?”
She did. Patrick’s eyes were warm, sad, and full of love. There was so much love in Patrick’s eyes that it was almost impossible to hold his gaze. But she made herself do it. “I—I feel sorry for Hannah,” she said in a thickened voice.
“You feel
sorry
for her. Wow.” He blinked hard. “That’s not the reaction I expected.”
“It’s just, there are worse things . . . worse people . . . than Hannah,” Cameryn tried to explain. “Baby Doe put a bullet in her head. Imagine how screwed up her life must have been. Maybe she had problems and everyone abandoned her and then she killed herself. I’m not going to abandon Hannah,” she told him. “I think I can help.”
“Cammie . . . there’s more that you don’t know.”
“But I don’t want to hear any more giant revelations. I think I’ve had enough for one day. Can we just let it lie?”
The door to X-ray popped open, and Ben pushed Mariah out, feet-first. “All done,” he said.
For just the barest of seconds, her father held Cameryn in his gaze until, like a cord breaking, he released her. They once again became the coroner and assistant to the coroner, a father/daughter team, the cheerful partners who worked cases together in family harmony. No outsider would ever guess the truth. She wouldn’t let them.
“You two ready?” Ben asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re ready.”
They began to walk down the hallway, the worn heels of Cameryn’s cowboy boots reverberating along the linoleum in rhythm with the soft padding sound of her father’s new shoes. Other than the overheads, most of the lights had been turned off. As she walked, she thought of Lyric and how frightened she would be if she were here. Lyric believed the deceased hovered close to their remains—sometimes, she claimed, unaware they were actually dead. But Cameryn didn’t sense any floating spirits here. No, it was the smell that haunted, a reminder of what really went on inside these plain beige walls. As she got closer to the autopsy suite she inhaled it, the sickly sweet odor scrubbed by bleach and covered by ineffective fresheners. The air in the building hung heavy with death. It had entered into the very pores, weaving its own kind of DNA from the hundreds of bodies dissected inside these walls. The hardest thing about her chosen profession, worse than anything Cameryn ever looked at, was this clinging smell of death.
With the ball of his fist, her father pushed open the door to the autopsy suite. Dr. Moore, already at the sink, looked up and grunted. “Didn’t think I’d see you again so soon, Patrick,” he said. “What’s going on in that town of yours? Two children in one day? Silverton’s become a charnel house.”
“We’ve had a bad run,” her father admitted. With his feet planted, he rocked back on his heels. “Car accidents are part of living in the mountains, but this . . . Well, you’ll see. Suicides are always hard, and this girl’s practically a baby.”
“A baby with a gun. Move it, Miss Mahoney,” Moore ordered, turning his small eyes onto her. “Get suited up and get in the game. I don’t intend to spend the night here. Since you’re our famed forensic prodigy—”
“I never said that,” she protested, but Dr. Moore dismissed her objection, waving his hand through the air as if he were swatting flies. “A prodigy should know to get into her scrubs instead of standing there with her mouth open. You’ll find them exactly where they were before, in that cabinet over there. Hurry. I’ve got a job for you. And I think it’s something even you have never seen before. Get ready, Cameryn. You’re about to go on quite a ride.”
Chapter Seven
CAMERYN’S MIND RACED as she put on her forensic gear piece by piece, as though she were suiting up for battle. A pale green gown went on first. Next came a disposable black plastic apron, shiny as beetle wings, the strings of which she tied behind her, then in front, before knotting them together. She lifted a disposable cloth shower cap, the kind she’d seen doctors use in surgery, shoving her hair beneath it so that it ballooned out at her neck. Last, she removed a matching pair of booties to slip on later.
Shutting the door behind them, her father and Ben had disappeared into a back room where Justin and the sheriff stood quietly talking. It felt odd to be alone with Dr. Moore. The doctor had an acid tongue, which made Cameryn apprehensive. It was best, she decided, to say nothing to him until she was spoken to, but when she looked up, she saw something she had never seen before. Words were painted on the walls in a spidery script against a scene of what looked to be mountain peaks. She squinted, trying to understand.
Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.
“Dr. Moore?” she asked. “What is that? What does it mean?”
He turned off the spigot and stared at her, water dripping from his thick rubber gloves. “You’re going into medicine and you don’t know Latin?” he asked, staring at her over his reading glasses, which had slipped down his bulbous nose.
“The priest uses Latin sometimes in a High Mass, but I never know what he’s saying.”
Dr. Moore crossed his arms over his ample middle. Had he been more jovial and sported a white beard, he could have been a mall Santa. His white hair formed a wreath around his bald head while his half-moon glasses winked in the light, making him look almost friendly. But Cameryn knew better. Dr. Moore was a brilliant, demanding, work-obsessed man who, despite his prickly nature, she was beginning to like. Still, she remained cautious around him. One time he’d thrown her out of his autopsy suite, an event she never wanted to repeat.
He began to open metal cupboards over the autopsy sink. “If you want to get ahead in medicine, I suggest you take at least a cursory course in Latin. Most medical names have Latin roots,” he told her, pulling out a cotton towel and spreading it on a metal countertop.
“Latin isn’t offered at Silverton High.”
“Why am I not surprised? It’s yet another example of our education system going to hell in a handbasket. Ah, well,” he sighed. With his arm, he swept an arc toward the wall as he announced, “That verse can be found in autopsy theaters across the world. Since we didn’t seem to have a budget for such things, I painted it myself. The phrase is most commonly translated:
‘This is the place where death delights to help the living.’
”
“You’re a painter, too?” Cameryn asked, startled. “I didn’t know that.”
Dr. Moore’s voice was dry. “It may surprise you, Miss Mahoney, to realize I have a life outside these walls.”
Of course he did—she knew that. But she found it hard to imagine what Dr. Moore did when he was away from the autopsy suite. Squatting, she adjusted a paper bootie, and when she looked up at him from this angle, the man seemed different. The profound grooves that had formed at the sides of his mouth exaggerated both his underbite and his perpetual frown, and yet . . . there was something changed in his eyes. They seemed to be smiling, as though Cameryn amused him somehow. He’d never looked so approachable. Without thinking, she blurted, “Dr. Moore, can I ask you something? Even though it’s personal?”
“
May
you,” he said tartly. “I’ll decide the answer when I hear your question.”
“How did you know you wanted to be a forensic pathologist? My mammaw says I should be a ‘real’ doctor instead of a medical examiner. Everyone says that.”
Dr. Moore pushed his glasses up his nose, staring at her for a moment. “How I got into this line of work is a story I don’t often share.”
“I won’t tell anyone. Believe me, Dr. Moore, I can keep a secret.” She pulled on her second bootie and stood—she and the doctor were practically the same height. He might have been taller if his neck had not been swallowed by his generous torso, although his limbs were so thin they looked as though they belonged to another body, as if he were made up of separate parts.
“It’s not that kind of story. It’s more . . . whimsical.” He seemed to be deciding something. “Very well, I’ll answer your question. I discovered my path”—he waited a beat, and then said, with absolute seriousness—“from a fortune cookie.”
Cameryn was completely astonished by this, and it must have shown, because Dr. Moore said, “Don’t look so surprised, Miss Mahoney.”
“It just—that doesn’t seem very scientific.”
“You’re young, but as you mature you’ll discover that things—and people—are rarely what they seem.” As he talked, Dr. Moore began to busy himself positioning forensic instruments on the terry-cloth towel. “At the time, I was deciding between becoming a general practitioner”—he placed a bread knife on the cloth, straightening it so that it lined up precisely to the towel’s edge—“or a medical examiner. I found myself being drawn to the darker art of forensics. So the question before me was to either stay the course”—he set down a bone saw—“or convert to pathology. One night, I took my wife to a Chinese restaurant to talk about which direction I should go.”
BOOK: The Circle of Blood
4.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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