10
Forensic pathologist Chris Huizinga silently contemplated the body of William Barstow Grooms, the dressing gown having been removed and sent off to the lab for further examination. It always helped Huizinga to take a couple of moments of quiet before each procedure. To connect with the victim. To pay his respects. To stand witness to the timeworn lines of each individual that came before him—the wrinkles and furrows that had been grooved into them by a lifetime of hopes and sorrows, pleasure and pain—not to mention the perpetual pull of gravity. Each feature held clues to what kind of life they had lived. To memorialize these particulars before cutting into them, taking them apart, and destroying them forever. He was always curious how each person chose to present themselves, from acrylic nails, to facelifts, to carefully curated muscles from years at the gym. Even after they had been stripped of their clothing, their belongings, their personality—and their very lives—each cadaver told a different tale. Huizinga silently dipped his head in honor of the shriveled body that lay on a stainless steel table under the bright lights of the forensic pathology lab at CBI.
Grooms was wiry and fit, the body excessively clean, evidently done postmortem. Even so, he had visible cavities, a deeply lined face, and rough hands pointing to a lifetime of physical labor. But he also had deep smile lines of a life well lived. He might have been crazy, but he had been happy. Huizinga felt sadness for the man work its way through his heart. He pushed it aside as he prepared himself for the upcoming autopsy. The body was now ready for external examination and, then, the Y incision.
His assistant stood by, quietly, waiting for a signal from Huizinga that the show was about to begin. She was a new hire, a tall young woman with long black hair now gathered under a scrub bouffant cap and a nervous expression on her face. This wouldn’t be her first autopsy, Huizinga knew, although it was her first at CBI. It wasn’t going to be a particularly challenging one, at least from the point of view of decomposition or mutilation. Huizinga had been introduced to her, but the name was complicated and he’d forgotten it, as he so often did. He was terrible with names—maybe it was why others seemed to find him difficult or distracted. But he never forgot a face, and he knew he’d remember Grooms’s expression until the day he died. It was so peaceful, almost beatific. And yet he could see, as plain as day, that the man had been horribly tortured, his foot cut and crushed by some implement, the bones fractured. He’d done some research the night before on possible torture instruments, and it seemed that what had been used on Grooms might have been a device known as the “Spanish boot,” employed by the Inquisition to elicit confessions of apostasy. It was a boot made out of iron that could be tightened in such a way as to compress the foot, while also driving spikes into the soles—cutting and crushing at the same time. In addition to that horror, he had confirmed that the embalming fluid had been started while the heart was still pumping blood. That would have caused death as soon as the formalin, injected into the carotid artery, reached the brain—within seconds. But it must have been a terrifying and painful few seconds.
He turned to the assistant. “Ms.—? I’m so sorry. I’m bad with names.”
“It’s Zubriski,” she said, “Ellen Zubriski.” She then patiently spelled it out, making Huizinga feel a bit like a dolt.
“Ms. Zubriski, thank you.” He wondered what to say to put her at ease. She appeared rather tightly wound. He knew he could also be a bit stiff and formal at times, and he often seemed to make people nervous. “I have a weird last name too,” he said, “and I’ve had a lot of practice spelling it out. So I can appreciate the difficulty of your last name as well.”
“Yes, Dr. Huizinga,” Zubriski said formally.
Huizinga, realizing once again he might have said the wrong thing, cleared his throat and pulled up his mask. “Please start the recording.”
“Yes, Doctor.” She turned on the video camera, tested it, and nodded to him that it was working.
Huizinga went through the preliminaries, identifying the body, himself, the assistant, date and time, and the rest. Then he did a slow walk around of the body, commenting on the general appearance. He directed particular attention to the insertion and drainage points in the neck, through which embalming had been done. He hadn’t performed an autopsy on an embalmed corpse since medical school, but it presented no particular challenge. Why the body had been embalmed was outside of his purview. In his comments as a pathologist, he rarely speculated, only observed. But he couldn’t turn off the conjecture meter in his brain, and it was running riot with this strange corpse.
Now he did a closer inspection of the externals with a headband magnifier. As he went over the body, inch by inch, he described what he saw, in particular swelling on the internal and external hemorrhaging around the insertion and draining sites at the base of the neck. The wounds around the umbilicus, where a trocar had been inserted to drain and inject preservative in the abdominal cavity, did not show hemorrhaging, which meant the victim’s heart had stopped beating by that point.
He next minutely described the external injuries to the misshapen and lacerated foot.
“Ms. Zubriski, please make a note to order up a CT scan of the left foot.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
Zubriski, at his request, then took a number of macrophotos.
His examination now circled around to the face. The eyes had been removed while the victim was alive, scooped out with something—Huizinga suspected a spoon. Ms. Zubriski appeared to be a little shaken by this, but she was covering it up well. Dr. Huizinga supposed he would have been shaken too when he was a newish MD.
He opened the subject’s mouth and right away noted superficial lacerations to the oral cavity and residues of a starchy substance on the carious teeth.
“Ms. Zubriski, could you please take some samples of that?” he said, fixing a retractor holding the mouth open.
She was ready with the tweezers and evidence tubes, and plucked out a few sodden crumbs, placing them in.
“It appears the victim was consuming some sort of starchy substance when he died,” Huizinga noted.
“Yes, Doctor.”
Finally, closing the mouth, he said, “Ms. Zubriski, would you take a look at the face and give me your impressions?”
Zubriski, also wearing a headband magnifier, leaned over and examined the face for some time. “Doctor, it seems to me the expression on the face was fashioned postmortem. And the corpse was shaved postmortem as well.”
Huizinga nodded. “My thoughts exactly. It’s the sort of professional manipulation you might see in a funeral home, preparing a body for viewing.”
“I would agree.”
He wondered if at least one of the killers hadn’t been a mortuary scientist, given that the body had been worked on with such assurance and skill. That speculation would go into his report. Beyond that, he wondered why the killers had gone to the trouble of not only embalming the body but also arranging the face. Was it to send some kind of message? Was it a sign of respect? But how could you show respect to someone you’d just tortured to death?
“Now for the Y incision,” he said. “Ms. Zubriski, could you please roll over the instrument table?”
The assistant fetched it with smooth professionalism. She handed him the correct scalpel, without his having to ask for it. He made the incision, clean and deep, then peeled back the skin and tissue until the chest flap lay over the face. Using a Stryker saw, he made two cuts on either side of the rib cage, dissected the tissue behind it, then pulled it open to expose the organs.
He worked quickly and easily, describing out loud every step of the process. Zubriski proved to be a most able assistant, handing him the correct tools, taking samples, and following his instructions with skill and precision. She was good—very good—and it made Huizinga a little embarrassed that he’d forgotten her name. His previous pathology assistant had not exactly been stellar. He hoped they could keep her.
