She was about to buzz again when finally her nurse walked in the door. Joan turned on her get-me-results smile. "Hi, yes, there you are. I was wondering. What was the doctor's name who was in here?"
"He's not a doctor from the hospital."
"I realize that. I was asking his name."
"His name is Dr. Goodweather."
"Goodweather." She scribbled that down. "First name?"
"Doctor." Her flat smile. "They all have the same first name to me-Doctor."
Joan squinted as if she wasn't sure she'd heard that right, and shifted a bit on the stiff sheets. "And he was dispatched here from the Centers for Disease Control?"
"I guess so, yes. He left orders for a number of tests-"
"How many others survived the crash?"
"Well, there was no crash."
Joan smiled. Sometimes you had to pretend that English was their second language in order to make yourself understood. "What I am asking you is, how many others did not perish on Flight 753 from Berlin to New York?"
"There are three others in this wing with you. Now, Dr. Goodweather wants to take blood and..."
Joan tuned her out right there. The only reason she was still sitting in this sickroom was because she knew she could find out more by playing along. But that ploy was nearing its end. Joan Luss was a tort attorney, "tort" being a legal term meaning "a civil wrong," recognized as grounds for a lawsuit. A plane full of passengers all die, except for four survivors-one of whom is a tort attorney.
Poor Regis Air. As far as they would be concerned, the wrong passenger had lived.
Joan said, talking right over the nurse's instructions, "I would like a copy of my medical report to date, along with a complete list of lab tests already performed, and their results..."
"Mrs. Luss? Are you certain you feel all right?"
Joan had swooned for a moment, but it was just a remnant of whatever had overcome them at the end of that horrible flight. She smiled and shook her head fiercely, asserting herself anew. This anger she was feeling would power her through the next one thousand or so billable hours spent sorting through this catastrophe and bringing this dangerously negligent airline to trial.
She said, "Soon I will feel very well indeed."
Chapter 4
Regis Air Maintenance Hangar
"NO FLIES," SAID EPH.
Nora said, "What?"
They were standing before rows of crash bags laid out before the airplane. The four refrigerated trucks had pulled inside the hangar, sides respectfully canvassed in black to obscure the fish market signage. Each body had already been identified and assigned a bar-coded toe tag by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York. This tragedy was a "closed universe" mass disaster, in their parlance, with a fixed and knowable number of casualties-the opposite of the collapse of the Twin Towers. Thanks to passport scans, passenger manifests, and the intact condition of the remains, identification of the decedents was a simple, straightforward task. Determining the cause of their deaths was to be the real challenge.
The tarp crinkled under the HAZMAT team's boots as the blue vinyl bags were hoisted by straps at either end and loaded aboard their appointed truck with all solemnity.
Eph said, "There should be flies." The work lights set up around the hangar showed that the air above the corpses was clear but for a lazy moth or two. "Why aren't there any flies?"
After death, the bacteria along the digestive tract that, in life, cohabitated symbiotically with the healthy human host, begins to fend for itself. It starts feeding on the intestines, eventually eating its way through the abdominal cavity and consuming the organs. Flies can detect the putrid off-gassing from a decomposing carcass as far as one mile away.
Two hundred and six meals were set out here. The hangar should have been buzzing with pests.
Eph started across the tarp toward where a pair of HAZMAT officers was sealing another crash bag. "Hold on," he said to them. They straightened and stepped back as Eph knelt and unzipped the seam, exposing the corpse inside.
It was the young girl who had died holding her mother's hand. Eph had memorized her body's location on the floor without realizing it. You always remember the children.
Her blond hair lay flat, a smiling sun pendant hanging from a black cord rested against the pit of her throat. Her white dress made her look almost bridelike.
The officers moved on to seal and take the next bag. Nora came up behind Eph, watching him. With his gloved hands, he grasped the girl gently by the sides of her head, rotating it on her neck.
Rigor mortis fully sets in about twelve hours after death, holding for twelve to twenty-four more hours-they were in that middle range now-until the fixed calcium bonds inside the muscles break down again and the body returns to flexibility.
"Still flexible," said Eph. "No rigor."
He grasped her shoulder and hip and rolled the girl over onto her front. He unbuttoned the back of her dress, revealing the flesh of her lower back, the small bulbous nodes of her spine. Her skin was pallid and lightly freckled.
After the heart stops, blood pools inside the circulatory system. The capillary walls, being just one cell thick, soon succumb to the pressure, bursting and spilling blood into the surrounding tissues. This blood settles in the lowest, "dependent" side of the body, and coagulates quickly. Lividity is said to become fixed after about sixteen hours.
They were beyond that time limit now.
From expiring in a seated position, and then being laid out flat, the pooled, thickened blood should have rendered the skin along her lower back a deep, dark purple.
Eph looked out over the rows of bags. "Why aren't these bodies decomposing as they should?"
Eph eased the girl back flat again, then thumbed open her right eye with a practiced hand. Her cornea was clouded, as it should have been, and the sclera, the opaque white protective layer, was suitably dry. He examined the fingertips of her right hand-the one that had been tucked into her mother's-and found them slightly wrinkled, due to evaporation, as they should have been.
He sat back, annoyed by the mixed signals he was receiving, then inserted his two gloved thumbs between her dry lips. The gasplike noise that escaped from her parted jaw was the simple venting of gas. The immediate interior of the mouth was unremarkable, but he wriggled one gloved finger inside to depress her tongue, checking for more dryness.
The soft palate and tongue were completely white, as though carved in ivory. Like anatomical netsuke. The tongue was rigid and oddly erect. Eph manipulated it to the side and revealed the rest of the mouth, equally drained.