Riverwatch

Chapter Nine - A Death Explained?

Edward Strickland, Medical Examiner for Porter County, stepped into the chill confines of the morgue and switched on the lights. Though it was late in the evening, Strickland was preparing to perform one last task for the night, a task he had saved until the end, so that other duties would not prevent him from giving it his complete attention.

Strickland was an agreeable man in his early sixties, and had been M.E. for the last sixteen years. Despite his constant joking that the only reason he'd been able to retain his post was due to the fact that nobody else wanted it, he was a competent professional who got the job done and got it done right the first time. He was nearing retirement, but was in no way ready for it.

His work was a constant intrigue to him, and he pursued it with an almost fanatic devotion. To find him working far into the night, as he planned on this occasion, was not an unusual occurrence. The silence in the morgue after-hours was deep and peaceful, soothing, vastly different from the hectic pace that enveloped the facility during regular hours.

Brilliant fluorescent lights illuminated the room in which he was working, washing across the institutional green walls and slick linoleum floor. A body lay on the mortician's table before him, its flesh a sickly shade of gray, the color of death. A wide white tag was tied to the big toe on the corpse's left foot, giving the deceased's name, age, and proximate cause of death. Strickland gave the tag a quick glance.

"Halloran, Kyle, Caucasian male, age 26, probable overdose," he read to himself, humming aloud to the strains of Mozart that wafted through the room from the speakers set in the ceiling above, just loud enough to be heard.

His rubber-soled shoes made barely a sound as he circled the body before him, carefully looking it over for any obvious telltale injuries, dictating his findings aloud so the microphone above the table could pick them up for transcription.

When he thought he'd seen all there was to see, he moved to the tray of instruments that was set up alongside, and picked up a scalpel. The cool metal of the blade glinted sharply in the light.

"Now, my dead, young friend, " he said to the corpse as he reached out and made the first incision in the slightly rubbery flesh, "let's see what secrets you're hiding."

Three hours later he was finished. When he'd first read the tag, Strickland had expected the post-mortem to be a rather straightforward piece of work. But now that he was finished, he realized that this was anything but a straightforward case. He discovered a number of things that just didn't make any sense, and while they bothered him, they also sparked his professional curiosity; something that didn't happen all that often anymore. In over thirty years of forensic medicine, he thought he'd seen it all. The body on the table before him proved him wrong. Determined to get to the bottom of things, he dialed Detective Wilson's office extension.

"Hello?"

"Damon, its Ed. Figured I'd find you there. Don't you ever go home?"

Wilson laughed. "Sure, right around the same time you do." The two men had known each other for years, from before Damon had gone off to Chicago. They'd gone to the same high school together, had even dated some of the same women. Their friendship had picked up again once Damon had returned home.

"What's up?" Damon asked.

"I just finished that autopsy on the young fellow you pulled out of that crypt over on the Blake family plot."

"Halloran. Kyle Halloran."

Ed grunted. "Yeah, that's the one. Thought you should know that it wasn't your everyday, run of the mill experience. Some of the results I got are pretty strange."