Cruel and Unusual - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 3

“The burn to the back of his calf is four by one and a quarter by two and three-eighths,” I dictated to Fielding. “It's dry, contracted, and blistered.”

Marino lit a cigarette. “They`re raising a stink about him bleeding,” he said, and he seemed agitated.

“His rectal temp is one hundred and four,” Susan said as she removed the chemical thermometer. “That's at eleven-forty-nine.”

“You know why his face was bleeding?” Marino asked.

“One of the guards said a nosebleed,” I replied, adding, “We need to turn him over.”

“You saw this on the inner aspect of his left arm?” Susan directed my attention to an abrasion.

I examined it through a lens under a strong light. “I don't know. Possibly from one of the restraints: “ “There's one on his right arm, too.”

I took a look while Marino watched me and smoked. We turned the body, shoving a block under the shoulders. Blood trickled out of the right side of his nose. His head and chin had been shaved to an uneven stubble. I made the Y incision.

“There might be some abrasions here,” Susan said, looking at the tongue.

“Take it out.”

I inserted the thermometer into the liver.

“Jesus,” Marino said under his breath.

“Now?”

Susan's scalpel was poised.

“No. Photograph the burns around his head. We need to measure those. Then remove the tongue.”

“Shit,” she complained. “Who used the camera last?”

“Sorry,” Fielding said. “There was no film in the drawer. I forgot. By the way, it's your job to keep film in the drawer.”

“It would help if you d tell me when the film drawer's empty.”

Women are supposed to be intuitive. I didn't think I needed to tell you.”

“I got the measurement of these burns around his head;” Susan reported, ignoring his remark.

“Okay.” - Susan gave him the measurements, then started work on the tongue.

Marino backed away from the table. “Jesus,” he said again. “That always gets me.”

“Liver temp's one hundred and five,” I reported to Fielding.

I glanced up at the clock. Waddell had been dead for an hour. He hadn't cooled much. He was big. Electrocution heats you up. The brain temperatures of smaller men I had autopsied were as high as a hundred and ten. Waddell's right calf was at least that, hot to the touch, the muscle in total tetanus.

“A little abrasion at the margin. But nothing big time,” Susan pointed out to me.

“He bite his tongue hard enough to bleed that much?”

Marino asked.

“No,” I said.

“Well, they're already raising a stink about it.”

His voice rose. “I thought you'd want to know.”

I paused, resting the scalpel on the edge of the table as it suddenly occurred to me. “You were a witness.”

“Yeah. I told you I was going to be.”

Everybody looked at him.

“Trouble's brewing out there,” he said. “I don't want no one leaving this joint alone.”

“What sort of trouble?” Susan asked.

“A bunch of religious nuts have been hanging out at Spring Street since this morning. Somehow they got word about his bleeding, and when the ambulance drove off with his body they started marching in this direction like a bunch of zombies.”

“Did you see it when he started bleeding?” Fielding asked him.

“Oh, yeah. They juiced him twice. The first time he made this loud hiss, like steam coming out of a radiator, and the blood started pouring out from under his mask. They're saying the chair might have malfunctioned.”

Susan started the Stryker saw and no one competed with its loud buzzing as she cut through the skull. I continued examining the organs. Heart was good, coronaries terrific. When the saw stopped, I resumed dictating to Fielding.

“You got the weight?” he asked.

“Heart weighs five-forty, and he's got a single adhesion of the left upper lobe to the aortic arch. Even found four parathyroids, in case you didn't already get that.”

“I got it.” I placed the stomach on the cutting board. “It's almost tubular.” “You sure?”

Fielding moved closer to inspect. “That's bizarre. A guy this big needs a minimum of four thousand calories a day.”

“He wasn't getting it, not lately,” I said. “He doesn't have any gastric contents. His stomach is absolutely empty and clean.”

“He didn't eat his last meal?” Marino asked me.

“It doesn't appear that he did.”

“Do they usually?”

“Yes,” I said, “usually.”

We were finished by one A.M., and followed the funeral home attendants out to the bay, where the hearse was waiting. As we walked out of the building, darkness throbbed with red and blue lights. Radio static drifted on the cold, damp air, engines rumbled, and beyond the chain-link fence enclosing the parking lot was a ring of fire. Men, women, and children stood silently, faces wavering in candlelight.

The attendants wasted no time sliding Waddell's body into the back of the hearse and slamming the tailgate shut.

Somebody said something I did not get, and suddenly candles showered over the fence like a storm of falling stars and landed softly on the pavement.

“Goddam squirrels!” Marino exclaimed. Wicks glowed orange and tiny flames dotted the tarmac. The hearse hastily began to back out of the bay. Flashguns were going off. I spotted the Channel 8 news van parked on Main Street. Someone was running along the sidewalk. Uniformed men wed stamping out the candles, moving toward the fence, demanding that everyone clear the area.

“We don't want any problems here,” an officer said. “Not unless some of you want to spend the night in lockup -” “Butchers,” a woman screamed.

Other voices joined in and hands grabbed the chain-link fence, shaking it.

Marino hurried me to my car.

A chant rose with tribal intensity. “Butchers, butchers, butchers…”

I fumbled with my keys, dropped them on the floor mat, snatched them up, and managed to find the right one.

“I'm following you home,” Marino said.

I turned the heater on high but could not get warm. Twice I checked to make sure my doors were locked. The night took on a surreal quality, a strange asymmetry of light and dark windows, and shadows moved in the corners of my eyes.

We drank Scotch in my kitchen because I was out of bourbon “I don't know how you stand this stuff,” Marino said rudely.

“Help yourself to whatever else there is in the bar,” I told him.

“I'll tough it out.”

I wasn't quite sure how to broach the subject, and it was obvious that Marino wasn't going to make it easy for me. He was tense, his face flushed. Strands of gray hair clung to his moist, balding head, and he was chain-smoking.

“Have you ever witnessed an execution before?” I asked

“Never had a strong urge to.”

“But you volunteered this time. So the urge must have been pretty strong.”

“I bet if you put some lemon and soda water in this it wouldn't be half bad.”

“If you want me to ruin good Scotch, I'll be glad to see what I can do.”

He slid the glass toward me and I went to the refrigerator. “I've got bottled Key Lime juice, but no lemon.” I searched shelves.

“That's fine.”

I dribbled Key Lime juice into his glass, then added the Schweppes. Oblivious to the strange concoction he was sipping, he said, “Maybe you've forgotten, but the Robyn Naismith case was mine. Mine and Sonny Jones's.”

“I wasn't around then.”

“Oh, yeah. Funny, it seems like you've been here forever. But you know what happened, right?”

I was a deputy chief medical examiner for Dade County when Robyn Naismith was murdered, and I remembered reading about the case, following it in the news, and later seeing a slide presentation about it at a national meeting. The former Miss Virginia was a stunning beauty with a gorgeous alto voice. She was articulate and charismatic before the camera. She was only twenty-seven years old.

The defense claimed that Ronnie Waddell's intent was burglary, and Robyn's misfortune was to walk in on it after returning home from the drugstore. Allegedly, Waddell did not watch television and was unfamiliar with her name or brilliant future when he was ransacking her residence and brutalizing her. He was so hopped up on drugs, the defense argued, that he didn't know what he was doing. The jurors rejected Waddell's temporary insanity plea and recommended the death penalty.