But it was the skull films that stopped me cold.
“There’s our round,” I said, pointing.
The bullet was clearly visible on the lateral view—a small, bright white object lodged just behind the frontal bone. It had entered at the base of the skull, traveled upward through the brain stem and cerebellum, and come to rest against the inner table of the frontal bone without enough energy to punch through.
“Single projectile visible in the anterior cranial fossa,” I recorded. “Consistent with a small-caliber round that traversed the posterior fossa and brain stem before lodging against the inner frontal bone. No fragmentation visible.”
“It bounced around inside,” Lily said quietly.
“It didn’t need to bounce. The trajectory took it straight through the brain stem.” I traced the path on the film with my finger. “Instant incapacitation. He was dead before he hit the ground.”
The skull films also showed the accumulated history, old fractures to the temporal and parietal bones, barely visible, shadow patterns consistent with repeated impact over time.
“Years of fighting,” I said. “This is the kind of damage you see in boxers or MMA fighters. He started young and kept at it for a long time.”
His bones told the story of nearly a decade of punishment. Whatever had gotten him into fighting in the first place, he’d committed to it fully.
“Let’s open him up.”
I positioned the body block beneath his shoulders, arching his chest upward to give me better access. The scalpel felt familiar in my hand—the weight of it, the way the light caught the blade. I’d done this thousands of times. It never became routine. Every first cut was a conversation. The moment I stopped reading the outside of a person’s story and started reading the chapters they’d hidden beneath their skin.
“The Y-incision,” I said quietly.
I made the first cut from shoulder to sternum, then the second from the other shoulder, the two lines meeting in the center of his chest. The final cut ran from the sternum to the pubic bone, completing the Y. Skin and subcutaneous tissue parted beneath the blade, and Dre Washington opened up to me the way the living never could, honestly and completely, with nothing left to hide.
The bone saw came next, that grinding whine that never failed to set my teeth on edge, no matter how many times I’d heard it. I cut through the ribs with practiced efficiency, lifted away the chest plate, and there he was. The inside of a man who should have had at least fifty more years of living ahead of him.
The music had shifted while I worked, Bon Jovi giving way to Frank Sinatra. It filled the silence without demanding attention, and I let it carry me into that place I went during autopsies. The place that was focused and steady, the part of my brain that felt things turned down low enough to function but never all the way off. Never that.
“Examining the thoracic cavity,” I recorded. “Lungs appear normal. No evidence of fluid accumulation, no signs of disease.”
I removed each organ systematically—weighing it, examining it, taking samples for analysis. His lungs were healthy and pink, the lungs of a young man who’d run miles and sparred rounds and pushed his body to its limits. No smoking, no disease, nothing but clean healthy tissue that had been doing its job right up until the moment it didn’t need to anymore. His liver was pristine. Kidneys unremarkable.
And his heart.
“Heart weighs three hundred forty-two grams. Within normal limits. No coronary artery disease, no structural abnormalities.”
Three hundred forty-two grams of muscle that had pumped blood through a body built for fighting, for surviving, for living. Strong and undamaged, the heart of an athlete in his prime.
It hadn’t failed him. Someone else had.
I set it down gently. You’d think after all these years I’d stop feeling the weight of a healthy heart in my hands, the cruelty of an organ that was still perfect inside a body that had been destroyed from the outside. But I never had. And I hoped I never would. The day I stopped feeling it was the day I needed to find another line of work.
“Stomach contents show minimal food material,” I continued. “Consistent with a subject who hadn’t eaten in the twenty-four to forty-eight hours prior to death.”
They’d starved him while they tortured him. Or maybe he’d simply been too terrified to eat. Either way, this man had spent his last days hungry and in pain, and that was another thing I’d carry out of this room and into whatever came next.
I used the bone saw to open the calvarium, the pitch changing as it bit through the thicker bone of the skull. Lily held the head steady while I worked. We’d done this enough times that she anticipated every movement, every angle. The skullcap lifted away cleanly, and I set it aside.
The brain told the rest of the story.
The wound track was visible immediately—a narrow channel of destruction that carved through the cerebellum, up through the brain stem, and into the frontal lobe. Tissue that should have been smooth and gray was pulped and hemorrhagic along the bullet’s path, the damage radiating outward in concentric waves like a stone dropped into still water. Devastating and precise, exactly as the x-ray had predicted.
“Wound track extends from the posterior fossa through the brain stem and cerebellar tissue, terminating in the anterior cranial fossa,” I recorded. “Extensive hemorrhagic damage along the entire trajectory. Brain stem destruction is consistent with immediate loss of consciousness and rapid death.”
He hadn’t suffered from the bullet, at least. Everything before it—the beatings, the burns, the fingers—that had been suffering. But the shot itself had been instant. A small mercy in a story that had very few of them.
The round was right where the films said it would be. A small, deformed slug resting against the inner table of the frontal bone like it had run out of momentum and simply stopped. I extracted it carefully with forceps, turning it under the light. Misshapen from impact but intact enough to matter.
