“I need time to recover from the shock of talking to you twice in such a short time.”
He next called his brother-in-law. Baker was at work but got off at five thirty. Decker arranged to meet up with him at the OK Corral Saloon at seven thirty.
He had some time to kill and decided to put it to good use.
He pulled out a copy of the pathology report from the postmortem that Walt Southern had performed on Irene Cramer’s remains. He went over it, page by page, line by line. When he got to one sentence, buried in the middle of a long paragraph near the end of the report, he sat up.
Son of a bitch.
He headed out. The rain had stopped falling, but the humidity level was off the charts. He turned left and reached the funeral home a few minutes later. A young man outfitted all in black except for his dazzling white shirt rose from behind a small desk and greeted him. Decker asked for Walt Southern, who wasn’t there. But his wife Liz was.
She came out a minute later. Liz Southern was not dressed in black but rather in lavender. She stood out like a pink flamingo in a desert, and it occurred to Decker even more forcefully how strikingly attractive the woman was. He wondered how happy she was working with dead people. But then again, someone had to do it.
“What can I do for you, Agent Decker?”
“I was hoping to talk to your husband.”
“He’s out of town. Be back tomorrow. Is there anything I can help you with?”
In answer Decker held up the autopsy report. “Had some questions about this.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Questions about the report Walt did?”
“It’s not unusual for detectives to have follow-up questions about a postmortem report.”
“Well, is it something I can help you with? I’ve picked up a lot just being around Walt, and also with the business we’re in.”
He flipped to a page of the report and pointed at one long section.
“Buried in the middle of this it says that her intestines and stomach were sliced open.”
She stiffened. “But isn’t it standard procedure to take out the stomach and slice it open to analyze its contents?”
“Yes it is, only these cuts were not done by your husband. Which is why I need to see her remains. Now.”
She led him into a room where the thermostat was set very low. It felt great after all the heat outside.
Out of the fryer and into the fridge.
Set against one wall were columns of small doors behind which corpses were kept in refrigerated climates.
Southern opened one of the drawers and slid the gurney out.
“There she is,” she said.
Decker nodded and glanced at her when the woman made no sign of leaving. “Thanks, I’ll let you know when I’m done.”
She seemed unsure about this but withdrew from the room.
Decker turned to the body when something suddenly occurred to him.
The room’s not electric blue.
It wasn’t that he missed experiencing this phenomenon. But Decker’s brain had begun to change recently; his memory had hiccups and he had momentarily forgotten some things he thought he never would. And he didn’t enjoy change like that.
Decker lifted the sheet off the corpse and looked down at Cramer.
The first time he had viewed her body, he had known nothing of the woman’s past. Now he knew that she was a teacher and possibly a prostitute/escort, although the jury was still out on that. And he also knew that her past beyond her time here was a mystery.
But what he had always known was that someone had murdered her.
Decker turned to the pages in the report that contained photos of the deceased’s remains. There were pictures of every organ. But Decker focused on the images of the small and large intestines and the stomach. The slices referenced in the report had not been photographed, which was why Decker was here.
He was about to do something he had never done before, something he had never even thought of doing before, but under the circumstances he could see no way around it.
After finding them in a locker, Decker put on gloves, donned a long apron, and settled a surgical mask over his mouth and nose, and a pair of goggles over his eyes. He grabbed short-handled forceps off a tray and pulled out the Y-incision sutures, often called the “baseball stitch” because of its resemblance to that threading. Inside the revealed cavity the woman’s organs had been placed in bags to prevent leakage.
He took out the stomach and looked at it from every angle he could. It had been sliced open on the bottom, revealing the inside of the organ, like a slit balloon. Southern had apparently used this opening to examine the stomach’s contents because Decker could see no other incision. Whoever had made this cut had saved him the trouble. He used an overhead light to peer into the chest cavity once more and opened the bag containing the intestines. They lay coiled inside like a snake sleeping. He saw where sections of them had also been sliced open in multiple locations. He hit these spots as best he could with the light. The slits were large enough to get a hand into them. Decker knew that for sure, because he did so himself. The cuts were jagged and seemed hurried, as though the killer had either been rushed while doing it, or—
Had he gotten frustrated?
Decker took pictures of everything with his smartphone. He bagged the organs, closed the cavity, redid the sutures, covered the body once more, and slid it back into the drawer. Then he disposed of the gloves, apron, and mask in a metal container marked MEDICAL WASTE. He put the used goggles on a metal table. He then washed up in the sink. He let the warm water and soap flood his face and then stared at himself in the mirror attached to the wall above the sink.
I can’t fucking believe I just did that.
He closed his eyes. He felt like he might be sick, but he managed to keep what was in his stomach right where it was.
Too bad Irene Cramer hadn’t been able to do the same.
He left without speaking to Liz Southern. He had nothing to say to the woman and he wanted to get outside. His legs felt wobbly and he was again feeling nauseous.
The heat hit him as he opened the exterior door and, surprisingly, his sick feeling began to dissipate. His body was now probably focused on dealing with the hot environment.
He slowly and gingerly walked back to the hotel.
Decker went up to his room, pulled out his phone, and looked at the pictures he’d taken. They were far sharper with a higher res than the grainy ones provided by Walt Southern.
Decker might have just made a significant stride in the investigation, but the discovery had also led to a great many more questions.
The stomach and intestines shared an attribute that none of the other organs in the body did. If you swallowed something the object would eventually travel to those two destinations. Irene Cramer had been carrying something in her belly or intestines.
And whoever had killed her had taken it from the woman.
“OH MY GOD. You did what?”
Jamison was sitting in the driver’s seat of their rental SUV staring at Decker like he had just told her that he’d been the one who’d murdered Irene Cramer.
“Didn’t you hear me the first time?” he said, looking slightly embarrassed. “The killer was obviously attempting to get something back that Cramer had ingested.”
“Look, despite what you found, that theory seems a little farfetched.”