“Such as?”
“Skin color, for one. Instead of the waxy, blue-white skin typical of a postautopsied corpse, I was looking at what appeared to be normal skin tone.”
“Normal for a dead man, you mean?”
“No, normal for a living person. There were no signs of pallor, the skin was pink as if flushed with blood. Even the lips seemed red and swollen. Because of the apparent lividity I decided to check for trace amounts of blood in the skin.”
“I thought you said the corpses had been totally drained of blood.”
“They had,” Weinstock said. “They had. But when I cut into Jimmy Castle’s skin that morning, real blood welled out of the wound.”
Ferro frowned. “Welled out, you say?”
“Yes. Not drained out. It welled out of the surface of the skin.”
“But…how can that be? If the heart has stopped pumping…”
“Right, there’s not going to be any blood in the surface of the skin, especially on elevated sections of the body, no hydrostatic pressure in the veins. The place I made my incision was just below the navel, just off center of the big Y-incision I made during the previous night’s autopsy.”
“And blood came out.”
“A lot of it.”
“That isn’t possible,” Ferro said, shaking his head.
“No,” said Weinstock, “it isn’t. Nor is the fact that when I cut through the sutures holding my autopsy incision together the wound itself had nearly sealed itself shut. It was sealed enough to become watertight, so to speak. I reopened the incision, and saw something else that defied all logic or explanation.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this,” murmured LaMastra.
“In an autopsy we cut away a section of the rib cage and then remove each of the internal organs, weigh them, do some tests on them to determine the presence of toxins, trauma, that sort of thing. After we’re finished, we pack them in a plastic bag and more or less just cram them back into the body cavity, lay the cut-away sections of rib on top of them, and just sew the whole mess together so that the body is as intact as it needs to be when it sent to the mortuary for funeral preparation. There’s no reason to arrange the internal organs in any kind of order, especially since they’d each been severed from the connective tissue that had held them in place. When I’d done my autopsy on Jimmy Castle, I’d done just that. I’d been pretty thorough about it since I was on the hunt for the blood that I never found. So his internal organs should have been a jumble of dead tissue inside the body cavity.”
LaMastra was looking green; Ferro unwrapped a stick of gum and chewed it slowly, the muscles in the corners of his jaw flexing.
“That morning, when I reopened Castle’s body, the internal organs—each and every goddamned one of them—was in the right place.”
Ferro’s face was a stone. LaMastra looked like he’d just taken a mouthful of sour milk.
“It was as if I’d never performed that autopsy. Only the presence of the Y-incision showed that I had even opened the body. Plus, the body—every vein, every artery, every organ—was gorged with blood. Not just filled, but filled nearly to bursting.”
LaMastra was slowly shaking his head. He really did not want to hear this.
“I assume,” said Ferro dryly, “that you did some kind of examination on the blood? Typed it, that sort of thing?”
“Of course. I had to try and determine what had happened. I mean, here was a corpse I know damn well was dead. A corpse I had autopsied in the presence of a registered nurse, and now it was as fresh as if it had died just that moment.”
“It was actually dead, I trust?”
“I checked all the vitals again and again. Castle was dead, no doubt about it. His BP was zero, which doesn’t explain how the blood remained in the veins or had the pressure to bleed out.” Strain was making Weinstock’s voice hoarse. “Castle was your basic O-positive type, but the blood in his veins was a soup. Mostly O-positive, but a bunch of other types mixed in.”
“I don’t want to know this,” LaMastra said to the ceiling.
Ferro glanced at Val and Crow, who sat on the doctor’s couch, holding hands, saying nothing. To Weinstock he said, “Is that what’s on the tape? Your examination of the body?”
“No.”
“Then why are we watching a video of an empty morgue? How is this going to corroborate what you’re trying to tell us?”
“Frank, Vince, try to put yourselves in my shoes for a minute. Imagine how I felt during all this. I was shocked and scared and I didn’t know where to turn. I had to sit down and think about it for a while. While I was trying to work it out, I just happened to catch sight of the security camera and suddenly I realized that whatever had happened to the two bodies must have occurred the previous night, after Barney and I had left. Understand, I was still at this point trying to convince myself that somehow someone had come in and tampered somehow with the bodies, filling the bodies with a mixture of blood for some reason, maybe a prank, maybe some kind of weird fraternity stunt. I don’t know what I believed at the time, but I knew that the event had to have been recorded on the cameras. So I called security and got the tape.”
“How do we know this is the legitimate tape?” asked LaMastra.
“The ID number is hologram-stamped into the case, the case itself is sealed with a tamperproof label that changes color if the seals are broken, and the time signature on the tape itself cannot in any way be altered.”
Ferro said, “We can check on that.”
“By all means check. Double-check. But for right now, just watch the tape.” Weinstock raised the remote and pointed its electric eye at the VCR. “Nothing happens for the first forty minutes, so I’ll have to fast-forward. It’ll take some time, so bear with me.”
“Why not stop it and fast-forward?” asked LaMastra irritably. “It’s faster that way.”
“No,” said Ferro, “I see what he’s doing. Fast-forwarding visually will show us the continuity, will show that there are no breaks where other footage could have been spliced in.”
“Plus, you can see the timer in the corner. It’s progressing normally, and you can see that even when I fast-forward.”
The video image of the empty morgue rolled on, minutes transformed into seconds, with the shadows remaining constant except for the distortion caused by the enhanced speed. Except for the constant unreeling of the chronometer, the image might have been a still photograph. Then, abruptly, the image changed.
Ferro and LaMastra watched the video image with faces that had become white, not just from the reflection of the black-and-white video image, but from shock and a growing, gnawing horror.
Chapter 27
The image on Weinstock’s TV showed an unreal world of flat grays and whites and blacks. The stainless steel gleamed without twinkling; the shadows were precise and unchanging geometric shapes; the dim security lights were surrounded by frozen clouds of light. Only the inexorable count of the digital clock at the lower right-hand corner of the screen argued the reality of the passage of time. The stillness of the scene was ordinary at first, just a reflection of an event as detached from the present as something recorded on a cave wall twenty-five thousand years ago.
Dr. Weinstock raised one hand, finger extended, and pointed. His whole arm trembled. In a whisper he said, “There.”
The detectives looked at him briefly and then back at the video image and saw nothing. At first. Then there was a brief moment of vibration; then a muffled thud from somewhere offscreen, then a long silence broken by a second thump.
Nothing happened for nearly a full minute. Then there was another movement. It began as a tremble, a hesitant shift of the left-hand door that led from the autopsy suite to the adjoining cold room. The door shifted as if pressed, but it did not open, as if the pushing hand were uncertain, or confused. It began to open, dropped closed, began again to open. Closed again. Then abruptly it banged open hard and fast, reeling away from a powerful blow. The swinging door flew to the end of its closer, jolted to a halt, and then began to fall back toward the frame, but now something was blocking the way, and the closing door bounced off the hard shoulder of something that moved in a slow and plodding way.
LaMastra gasped out loud, leaning sharply forward.
“Oh my…God!” breathed Ferro.
In the doorway, blocking the close of the door, stood a man. He was naked and tall. Fair hair stuck out in all directions, tacky with fluids. He stood there, swaying slightly, staring with eyes that seemed to be dazed from sleep. His skin was milk white, turned to a luminescent blue by the videotape. The door hid half of his body, but the center of his torso was clearly visible, and both detectives could see the long lines of lightly stitched incisions. One stretched from shoulder to shoulder all the way across the chest in a lazy line that sagged toward the middle of the breastbone, where it met the longer cut that dropped all the way down past chest and stomach to the groin. The horrible Y-shaped ventral incision was held together only with temporary stitches, and in the gaps dark and unsavory shapes of organs and muscles bunched and shifted in their plastic bag with each step. The throat was the worst thing, though. The flesh there was a mass of torn strips of skin, ripped and shredded, held in place only by thin lengths of surgical tape.
With slow and uncertain steps, the figure moved into the autopsy suite, staggering a bit as it walked, as if uncertain how to use its legs. The milk-white hands twitched as if stung by live electrical wires, and the figure’s mouth hung open, lips slack and rubbery. The eyes stared as if newly awakened, a bulging fixity of focus, but as the figure moved closer to the camera, those eyes seemed almost artificial, like the glass eyes of a stuffed deer.
“Dear sweet God,” murmured Ferro. “That…that’s Jimmy Castle!”
Someone made a gagging sound, and Weinstock looked over at LaMastra, who had his hands clamped to his mouth. Crow rose and handed him a plastic trash can. LaMastra took it without comment and wrapped both arms around it, holding his head over it, eyes fixed with manic concentration on the TV. He did not throw up, though he gagged again and again.