The Stone Serpent, page 2
“Even in a place this beautiful,” she said, “I’m sure Victor would have found something to complain about.”
Booker grinned. “Complaining was one of the few things that made Victor happy.” He paused. “That and the drugs.”
Laura laughed, but was interrupted by her phone ringing in her purse. She pulled it out and saw Elena Morales’s name on the screen. The smile faded from Laura’s face. Booker noticed the shift in her mood and gave her a quizzical look. She answered the call.
“How are you, Chief Morales?”
“Dr. Powell, I need you to come in and perform an autopsy right away.” Sakima’s new chief of police wasn’t one for pleasantries.
Laura bristled. The previous chief, her good friend Ralph Gorney, used to request her help. Morales ordered it. Still, as Sakima’s part-time medical examiner, Laura didn’t have much choice in the matter. There wasn’t a lot of crime in their little portion of the Hudson Valley, especially not violent crime, but every once in a while, duty called. When it did, it rarely chose a convenient time.
“I can be there in an hour.” She saw the resignation in Booker’s face that their outing had been cut short. She squeezed his hand by way of apology. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“A car accident on MacLeod Avenue,” Chief Morales said. “Thankfully, there was only one casualty. The driver.”
“I take it you need a tox screen to see if they were drunk or under the influence?”
“No, it’s not that. There’s…something else.”
She didn’t like how that sounded. “What is it?”
“It’s better if you see for yourself, Dr. Powell,” Chief Morales said. “I’ll expect you in one hour. Don’t be late.”
3.
* * *
True to her word, Chief Morales was waiting for Laura when she arrived at the morgue an hour later. A black body bag lay on the stainless-steel autopsy table. Its zipper was secured with a police seal to show that no one had tampered with the body inside after its removal from the scene of the accident.
“Dr. Powell,” Morales said with a curt nod. At five-foot-three, she was a shorter than Laura but carried her diminutive size with the confidence of a bulldog. Every one of her forty-nine years showed in the lines of her face. She had the sharp, probing eyes of someone who didn’t take shit from anyone. She glanced at her wristwatch, as if to check that Laura hadn’t taken one minute longer than the hour she’d promised.
To say that Laura didn’t like Chief Morales was an understatement. The first time they’d met, workmen had still been in the process of removing Ralph Gorney’s name from his office door and replacing it with Morales’s. The pain of Ralph’s loss was still raw then, just a few weeks out from his death, and the sight of his name being sanded off the door only made it worse. Still, walking into that room, Laura had done her best to maintain her professional composure. She needn’t have bothered. Morales was cold and standoffish from the start, giving her little more than a quick, cursory glance from behind the desk. No Nice to meet you, no I’m looking forward to working with you, nothing. She didn’t even offer her condolences on Ralph’s death. Just a quick handshake with half her attention on the papers in front of her. It was only when Laura made the mistake of calling her Elena that she got the woman’s full attention. You are to address me as Chief Morales, she said. Things hadn’t gotten any warmer since.
“Is this the crash victim?” Laura asked, looking over the body bag. It bulged curiously at the sides.
“Direct from the crash site,” Chief Morales confirmed. “The responding officers apprised me of the victim’s unusual condition, but I haven’t seen it for myself yet.”
“Condition?”
Morales only nodded, offering no further details. Laura took that as her cue to get to work. In the adjoining bathroom, she put on her scrubs, a fluid-resistant lab coat, a surgical mask, safety glasses, a hair net, and a pair of nitrile gloves. Back in the morgue, she broke the police seal on the body bag and pulled down the heavy nylon zipper. The bright LED overheads shone down on the protruding shoulder of a male body. He was lying on his side, curled in the fetal position, which explained the odd bulges in the sides of the bag. If lifted upright, he would have looked like he was still sitting behind the steering wheel of his car. Strange. It was standard procedure to position the bodies lying supine, face up. Why had the EMTs bagged him like this instead?
She pushed the heavy folds of the bag away to get a better look. The face of the dead man was oddly discolored, a grayish brown, the color of rock. Laura touched his cheek with her gloved finger, but the skin didn’t dimple no matter how hard she pressed. It didn’t even feel like skin. It was as hard as stone.
“What on Earth?” she muttered.
Chief Morales moved closer for a better look. “When they told me, I had trouble believing it. I wanted to see for myself.”
“This has got to be a hoax,” Laura said. “This man wasn’t driving a car this morning. I would guess he’s been dead for years. It’s why he’s stuck in this one position. Judging by the lack of decomposition, I’d say he was kept somewhere with the right environmental conditions to preserve the body.”
Chief Morales consulted a field interview notebook she had with her. “According to the officers at the scene, there were a dozen witnesses who all said the same thing. Only seconds passed between the crash and the discovery of the body. If it’s a hoax, someone would have had to get out of the car and put this corpse behind the wheel without being seen, either while the car was moving or right after the crash. No one saw anything like that.”
Laura shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense. This man is a fossil.”
She examined the body’s stony, discolored face. He still had hair on top of his head—a buzz cut, short enough that she’d almost overlooked it. She touched the hair gently. Even through her glove, it felt soft. Real. It still had pigmentation, too; a dark brown. Fossils were rarely found with hair, let alone hair that was still soft and retained its color. The keratin made it too difficult to preserve. Strike one for her theory.
Then there was the matter of his eyes. If he really had been dead for as long a time as his condition seemed to indicate, his eyes would have sunk into the sockets. Though his eyelids were closed, she could tell from their rounded shapes that the eyeballs were still present underneath. That was strike two. She didn’t need a third to know something else was going on here.
“My first thought would be metastatic calcification,” Laura said. “If he had a condition like primary hyperparathyroidism—a tumor in the parathyroid gland—it’s possible elevated levels of calcium in his blood serum could cause calcium salts to be deposited in otherwise normal tissue, which would result in hardening. The only problem is that metastatic calcification usually occurs in blood vessels or organs like the kidneys, the lungs, or the stomach. I’ve never seen it on a scale like this. It’s his entire body.”
She took a scalpel off the instrument tray, bent over the body, and scratched the blade’s flat end across the hardened skin of his cheek. It sounded so much like scraping stone that she was half convinced again that this had to be an elaborate hoax.
“Then there’s dystrophic calcification,” she continued. “Deposits of calcium salts can occur in dead tissue, usually caused by the presence of hematomas, blood clots, or fat necrosis following acute pancreatitis. Only, the same problem applies. It just doesn’t seem possible on this big a scale.”
“Then what could cause it on this big a scale?” Morales asked.
Laura forced out a breath. “Maybe fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, sometimes known as FOP or Münchmeyer disease? It’s an extremely rare genetic disorder that affects the body’s repair mechanism. If any of the fibrous connective tissues like muscles, tendons, and ligaments is damaged, instead of repairing the tissue, the body replaces it with new bone growth. Sometimes it can even happen spontaneously. Joints can become permanently fused. Patients can form entire secondary skeletons, which leads to them losing the ability to move altogether. It’s the only known medical condition where one organ system changes into another. There’s no cure or treatment. Even if you try to remove the extra bone growth surgically, it’s just replaced by more bone. It’s awful.”
“Do you think that’s what he had?”
“Right now, I’m not so sure,” Laura said. “First of all, it would be too painful to sit behind the wheel of a car with Münchmeyer disease. Second, the new bones form inside the body, not outside. Third…” She paused and scraped his cheek with the scalpel again. “I don’t think this hardened tissue is bone. Who was he?”
“According to the ID in his wallet, his name was Malachai Applewhite,” Morales said. “He wasn’t from Sakima. His home address was in Valley Grove.”
Laura knew the name. A small village just east of Sakima, Valley Grove was home to a fundamentalist religious sect known as the Church of the Divine Chariot. Back when she was in high school, a man from Valley Grove gave a guest sermon at the church she and her mother used to attend. His sermon was all fire and brimstone, warnings about a wrathful God, and how a man’s role was pious leadership while a woman’s role was total submission. Bored, Laura tuned it out, but her mother was furious. Afterward, she told their minister if he ever had that man or anyone else from the Church of the Divine Chariot back again, it would be the last time she and her daughter attended services there.
As it turned out, they stopped attending soon after anyway, when Laura’s mother went off her meds and her depression sent her spiraling. It was a common cycle for her, starting her meds and stopping them, until finally, while Laura was away at college, her mother took her own life. That long-ago Sunday at church with her mother was only a hazy memory now, but there was one thing Laura definitely remembered about the man from Valley Grove. He wore a crisp white polo shirt identical to the one on the dead body in front of her.
“You can see why I wanted an autopsy,” Morales said. “I don’t think the car crash is what killed him.”
“I don’t either.” Laura took his jaw lightly in one hand and tried to move his head to the side. It wouldn’t budge. She might as well have tried to turn the head of a statue. “I’ll get started. I should have a report for you in an hour. Should I bring it to your office?”
“No need,” Morales said. “I’m staying right here.”
Laura turned to her. “I prefer to do autopsies alone.”
“Not this time,” Morales told her. “This is a high-profile case, Dr. Powell. The crash happened downtown on a busy street. It’ll be all over the news by tonight. I want to make sure everything goes smoothly.”
Smoothly? Laura had been Sakima’s medical examiner for nearly five years now. She didn’t need to be observed like some first-year med student.
“Have you ever seen an autopsy, Chief?” she asked, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. “It’s more than most people can handle.”
“Proceed, Dr. Powell,” Morales said impatiently. The bulldog was showing her teeth.
“Fine.”
Laura lowered the blinds over the observation window that looked in from the hallway.
“What’s that for?” Morales asked.
“An autopsy is an intimate procedure,” Laura explained. “The deceased deserves some privacy.”
Morales was unmoved by her compassion for the dead. “We’re wasting time, Dr. Powell. Let’s get on with it.”
Laura bit her tongue before she said something she would regret. Morales stepped up to the autopsy table, hovering over the body as if she could force it to give up its mysteries if she glared at it hard enough.
“If you’re going to observe, you’ll have to move back,” Laura told her. “I also need you to put on a mask and a hair net. I don’t want you contaminating the body.”
Inwardly, she winced. She meant to say she didn’t want anything contaminating the body, but her anger got the better of her. Morales stepped back and put on the protective equipment without comment. Laura smiled to herself. At least the chief listened to her sometimes. She would take that as a win.
Laura unzipped the body bag the rest of the way and photographed Malachai Applewhite’s curled body inside. An external examination revealed some light damage to his clothing, presumably from the crash. A scuff here, some torn cloth there. Aside from the white polo shirt, he wore crisply pressed black slacks, dark socks, and black dress shoes. She examined the exposed skin of his face, neck, and arms for bruises and lacerations from the crash, but if there were any, they were camouflaged by the discoloration and stonelike texture of his flesh.
From the corner of her eye, she noticed Morales glance at her watch.
If you have somewhere to be, Chief, don’t let me stop you, she thought.
Unfortunately, Morales stayed put, watching intently as Laura cut the clothing off Malachai Applewhite’s body and put everything in an evidence bag. Like the hair on his head, his chest hair and pubic hair remained intact, sprouting from the hardened skin like normal. Did that mean the follicles underneath were still intact? Why hadn’t they fossilized along with the rest of him?
She filled out the exam form as she inspected the body: race (Caucasian), sex (male), hair color and length (brown, short), height: (five feet, eight inches), age (Morales informed her the birthdate on his ID made him twenty-seven), and whether he had any identifying features like tattoos (none), scars (none), or birthmarks (impossible to tell with the skin discoloration).
She needed to record his eye color to make sure it matched his ID, but when she tried to lift the eyelid, she couldn’t. It was fixed in place, as unyielding as the rest of him. She tried cutting it open, but the tip of her scalpel wouldn’t penetrate the hardened skin no matter how much pressure she exerted. It was like trying to cut into granite. She felt the weight of Chief Morales’s gaze on her the entire time, judging her, waiting for her to slip up.
“Is there a problem, Dr. Powell?” she asked finally.
“I can’t make an incision in the skin,” Laura said. “It’s too hard for the tools I’ve got here.”
“If you can’t cut into the body, how will you perform the autopsy?”
“I would need something stronger, like a mechanized saw, but I would be hesitant to use one. It could damage the body too much.”
“This is unacceptable,” Morales said. “I need to know what happened to this man.”
Facing away from her, Laura closed her eyes and took a deep breath to keep herself from exploding. Morales was insufferable. Laura didn’t think it was possible to miss Ralph more than she already did.
“I want answers as much as you do, Chief,” she said. “I’ll just have to think of another way to get them.”
“Make it quick.”
Morales looked at her watch again. Laura took another deep breath, but it didn’t calm her much this time. Why did it feel like her job was on the line?
She closed her eyes. She needed to stop worrying about Morales and focus on the autopsy. If she didn’t have the tools on hand to open up the body, there had to be something else available to her. Some other way to look inside him.
Her eyes popped open. “The X-ray machine.”
“You have one?” Morales asked.
“No, but the forensics lab does.”
Laura picked up the phone on the wall and dialed the proper extension.
“Forensics lab,” a male voice said. “Dae-jung speaking.”
Park Dae-jung was the new lab tech Sakima PD had hired after Sofia Hernandez’s death. He seemed nice enough and was good at his job, but so far Laura had kept him at arm’s length. She’d grown close to Sofia and wasn’t ready to form a friendship with her replacement. She was still mourning so many lost friends, it felt like she didn’t have room for any new ones.
“Dae-jung, it’s Laura,” she said. “If you’re not using it at the moment, I’d like to borrow the portable X-ray machine.”
“Is this for the stone man?” he asked.
“How did you hear about that?”
“I went to the scene with the responding officers. I saw the body myself. Guy looks like he had a run-in with Medusa.”
“Not quite,” Laura said. “His tissue has hardened, but it’s not stone. I don’t know what it is yet. An autopsy would help, but I’m having trouble opening him up.”
“Ah, hence the need for the X-ray machine. Got it,” Dae-jung said. “I’ll wheel it over. I’d like to see what’s going on inside that body, too, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind. Thanks.” She hung up and turned back to Morales. “The machine is on its way. The forensics lab is just down the hall, so it won’t be long.”
Morales nodded and looked at her watch again.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Laura ventured, “is there somewhere you need to be? You’ve been checking your watch a lot.”
Morales looked up at her sharply. “Where I ought to be, Dr. Powell, is City Hall, briefing Mayor Sutherland on why a car almost plowed into a crowd on a busy sidewalk this morning, and why, exactly, the driver of said car looks like a goddamn statue. Except I can’t give him the report he needs until you perform your autopsy.”
The morgue door swung open not a moment too soon. Dae-jung backed into the room, wearing a lead apron over his clothes and rolling the portable X-ray machine on its wheeled base. It looked almost like a miniature crane, four and a half feet tall with a three-foot-long articulated arm. At the end of the arm was a rotating head that housed the X-ray tube. A control panel and digital monitor console were attached to the base.
“One portable X-ray machine, as requested,” Dae-jung said. A Korean man in his late twenties, he looked as clean-shaven and fresh faced as someone half that age. His round, wire-rimmed glasses didn’t do much to shatter the illusion.
