Inheritance: A Novel Part 20

Then she nodded.

"Thank you," he said.

There was another loud thud from the table as Xavier dropped one of Ram's arms onto the plastic bin.

"Jesus," he said. "This guy's huge, man. Must weigh a f.u.c.king ton."

Anderson winced.

"Xavier!" Mise said sharply, and shook her head at him meaningfully when he gave her a what did I do? look. To Anderson she said, "I'm sorry. I didn't know he was a friend of yours. This must be terrible for you."

"Thanks," he said.

She nodded.

She walked over to the body and looked at Bobby's right arm. Anderson watched her lift it, turn it over, and feel down the length of the ulna and radius. It looked like she was trying to squeeze the last bit of toothpaste from the tube.

"He saw it coming," she said. "That's for sure."

"What do you mean?"

"Look at his arm," she said. She held it up, and he could tell that the bone was busted up inside. "That is a Grade Four comminuted fracture," she said ominously. Then, by way of further explanation, "A spiral break."

He had a blank expression on his face that said she had left him at the starting line.

"We usually see fractures like this in skiing accidents," she said. "The foot gets planted and rooted in one direction by the blade of the ski, but when a sudden force twists the rest of the body you apply torsion, like this." She made a motion with her hands like she was twisting a towel into a snake. "You end up corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the bone. You see?"

Sort of, Anderson thought. "It looks like it hurt."

"I'll say," Mise answered. "Now look at this." She held up Bobby's arm to his face, so that it looked like he was shielding his eyes from the sun or trying to block a blow. "He had his arm up like this. You see?"

"I think so. What? He got grabbed, where, by the wrist?"

"Looks like it from the bruising. And the arm was twisted to cause this break."

"Okay," he said, and felt like he was supposed to be understanding something that he wasn't even aware of yet.

"You don't get it, do you?"

"I guess not," he said.

"Do you have any idea how much torsion it takes to break a bone?"

"A lot?" he said.

"Yeah," she said, and snorted. "A whole freakin' lot. It's not something you just do-" she snapped her fingers "-like that." She said, "A skiing accident I can understand. A full grown man breaking a baby's arm...yeah, I've seen that, too. But look at your friend here. He's a huge guy. You have any idea how strong you'd have to be to do this to a man his size?"

"Hmm," he said. "Good point."

Anderson's feet started to hurt midway through the autopsy. He watched with mounting irritation and restlessness as Ram was stripped and poked and prodded and photographed and washed off and cut open and washed off again.

Jimmy Buffet was on the radio now singing "Son of a Son of a Sailor," one of Anderson's favorites, and one he never heard on the radio. But not even the wistful contentment that Buffet's music usually brought him could penetrate the malaise that had formed in his mind.

It all seemed so disgusting, so cheap. He watched as they flipped Ram's nude corpse over and stuck a thing that looked like a T-square over him, one end over the head, the long end wedged into the crack of his b.u.t.t. Then they flipped him over again and worked at the rib cage to open it further than whoever had killed him already had.

Xavier hummed to himself as he reached into the chest with a ladle and started scooping out organs into a plastic iced tea pitcher, stopping every so often to ask permission from Dr. Mise to continue.

Anderson closed his eyes and waited for it to be over.

"Hey, Doc," Xavier said.

Anderson opened his eyes.

Mise crossed the tiled floor and stood next to Xavier, the two of them looking into the open flesh canoe that was Bobby Cantrell like two boys who have just found a coral snake in the bottom of a hollowed out tree stump.

"What is that?" Xavier said. "It feels gritty."

"It's the same stuff he had on the outside of him, too."

"What is it?" Anderson said, coming closer, standing just behind them.

"It looks like transfer, don't you think?" Xavier said.

"Has to be," Mise said.

"What is it?" Anderson said again.

Mise moved to one side. "Here look," she said, and grabbed the flap of Cantrell's chest wall and pulled it down so Anderson could have a look. "See here, around the heart? All that black stuff. It's the same stuff he had on the outside."

Anderson thought of the junkie in the interview room, the black, waxy stuff he had spent a long time washing off into the sink.

"What is it?" he asked again.

"I don't know," Mise answered. "Carbon soot maybe, mixed with some kind of wax."

"How did it get there?"

"I don't know," she said, and then stopped. She leaned forward and said, "Oh my G.o.d." She ran her finger around the bulge of the heart. "Oh my G.o.d."

"What?" Anderson said.

Mise looked at Xavier. "You didn't notice this?" The heat in her tone was unmistakable.

"What?" Xavier said. And then he looked, and for a moment he didn't see what she was talking about. And then he did and his eyes bulged.

"What is it?" Anderson said.

Mise reached in and wrapped her hand around the heart and scooped it out. She held it up and said, "I can't believe this."

"What?" Anderson said. "Tell me."

"This is not a human heart."

That stopped him. He looked at the heart in her hands and then at her. She looked back at him.

"How can you tell it's not human?"

"Here," she said, and put the heart down on a cutting board that rested across the sink at Bobby Cantrell's feet. She led him to one of the other tables, where the tall, sunken-eyed kid named Billy was cutting into a fat white woman with tattoos all over her arms and neck. Billy stepped aside and Allison Mise reached into the chest cavity and pulled out the heart. "See this beard of fat that's hanging on here?"

He did. It looked like yellow candle wax.

"You only see that on human hearts. Other mammal species, no fat. But on every human heart, you see this little beard of fat."

He turned away from the human heart and looked at the heart on the cutting board at Bobby's feet.

After a long silence he said, "What is it?"

"You mean, what kind of animal did it come from?"

He nodded.

"Can't be sure just looking at it. Only that it came from a mammal, one about the size of a man."

"A goat?" he said.

"Could be," she said. "That'd be about the right size. Could also be a big dog or a-"

"It's a goat," he said.

Out came the white, knotted, sausage skin-looking snake that was the colon. The smell of s.h.i.t was overpowering, and Anderson had to shake his head to void the smell from his nostrils as the ball of guts was dropped into the sink.

The hits just keep coming, he thought.

Xavier had a white, circular saw in his hands, similar in size and shape to what Anderson, who sometimes watched cooking shows on the Food Network with Margie, had heard celebrity chefs refer to as a stick blender. He turned it on and began to cut into the scalp over the top of the head, working from ear to ear across the ash symbols on the forehead. AC/DC was doing "Back in Black" on the radio, and Xavier seemed to be happy again, shuffling his feet and moving his shoulders to the beat while he worked.

Then he put the saw down and started working the skin back from the skull, over the face, helping it along by slicing it from the bone with a scalpel.

He turned to Mise as the song faded out and said, "Permission to cut?"

"Go ahead," she said.

Xavier picked up the circular saw again and it started to whine and scream as metal dug into bone. White powdery bits of dust flew from the saw, and Anderson couldn't believe that the man didn't use a face shield. Somehow, it seemed even less sanitary than Mise walking around in her Birkenstocks.

Xavier turned to Anderson while he was sawing away and, smiling, said, "f.u.c.k, this guy's sure got a hard head."

His smile was meant to be breezy but looked obscene to Anderson.

And then, thankfully, the whine of the saw stopped. Anderson looked away. Mise was at the sink, using a huge knife to slice the liver into thick steaks.

"He's got rocks," she said.

"Excuse me?" Anderson said.

"Rocks," she said again. "Gall stones."

Anderson nodded. Ram had never been one to turn down a beer.

A few minutes later, they bagged all the organs into a black trash bag and stuffed them back down into the body cavity. Xavier wheeled him over to the walk-in coolers on the side wall nearest the door.

"Well, that's that," Mise said. "Just forty-five more to go."

Anderson groaned inwardly.

"Relax," she said. "I got six more doctors coming in at four. Things'll speed up pretty fast from here."

He nodded, but he was thinking, G.o.dd.a.m.n it, I hate my job. I really, really do.

It was past midnight when Anderson finally walked back to his car. The night air was hot and close and dry, but at least it didn't smell like the air inside the morgue. He reached in and turned the ignition over without getting in. Waves of heat were pouring out of the car, and he wanted to give the AC time to do its thing.

While he waited, he took out his cell phone and dialed Deputy Chief Allen's home number.

Allen picked up on the second ring.

"I didn't wake you up, did I, sir?"

"h.e.l.l no," Allen said, and Anderson believed him. The man sounded sharp as ever. "What did you find out?"

Anderson told him about the autopsy. He told him about the spiral fracture to Bobby Aaronson's right arm, and about the strange, carbon-like soot that was all over the inside of his chest cavity, and lastly, he told him about the goat's heart. Then he waited to hear what Allen had to say.

"I can't f.u.c.king believe that. A f.u.c.king goat's heart. What is that, some kind of devil worshipping stuff?"

"I don't know, sir. Maybe."

"It's f.u.c.king obscene is what it is."

Anderson climbed into his car, held his hand up in front of the AC vents to make sure it was blowing cold air, and closed the door.

Allen said, "And what about this black s.h.i.t you told me about? You said the kid from the train yard had it all over him, too?"

"Yes, sir."

"But we don't think he was ever at the Iron Works?"