aware of none of this. Two more people arrived in the department during the time he had taken to examine and treat the previous three patients. After that, an ambulance had shown up with a moderately severe asthmatic, and four more people checked in to triage.
In most jobs, when something horrible and traumatic happens to an employee, they are instructed to take the rest of the day off and are possibly sent for counseling. There is time to process what has happened, to remove oneself from the environment. There is time to take a breath, to discuss the incident with your spouse, or to simply get wasted at the local pub. In medical training, you are instructed to notify the medical examiner and to get back to work. You are given the helpful advice ‘Try not to kill the next one,’ and you are desperately afraid that you will. Recovery from such events occurs on your own time, in private, once you’ve fulfilled all of your other duties and obligations. And in medicine, those duties are never truly fulfilled. There is always another patient, another conference, another presentation, another emergency in the middle of the night, another fire to be put out. Always.
The night’s precipitation continued to fall on the darkened street ahead. Xenon headlights cast their artificial glare on a hundred tiny rivers of water racing desperately toward the town’s sewers, and wherever they might lead beyond that. Four miles from here, Nat was preparing the body of a young boy for his final medical examination. It was going to be a long and exhausting night, and Ben was pretty sure there would be more to follow. Things would get worse before they got better. Things like this always did. He didn’t want to be here, driving away from his family on a night like this. It didn’t feel like the right thing to do, and he wondered to himself, not for the first time, exactly where his allegiances were. He could feel the storm tugging at the hole inside of him, another chunk of earth pulled loose by the water’s greedy fingers. He imagined himself being swept away into the sewers, one nearly imperceptible piece at a time. What will it feel like when there’s nothing left? he asked himself. And will I even know when that moment comes? Within the car there was only silence, except for the steady thrum of the rain falling all around him.
Nat had been right about one thing. The press was going to have a field day with this one – a regular three-ring circus. Ben could make out the congregation near the front entrance to the Coroner’s Office from a quarter mile away. The usually dimly illuminated front steps of the CO were now bathed in bright artificial light as at least three different television crews jostled for position. Two patrol cars were parked just across the street, and a third one blocked the left lane of traffic to allow room for the news crews to set up their equipment without running the risk of being plowed over by a distracted motorist. Ben quickly decided that there was no way he’d attempt to enter through the CO’s front entrance; instead, he turned left on Broadway and right on Oregon Avenue, hoping to sneak in through the building’s rear delivery access.
He parked the car on Oregon and hopped out. Shielding himself from the downpour with his jacket as much as possible, he trotted the half block through the gathering puddles toward Brady Circle. The rear of the CO stood mostly in darkness. The parking lot behind the building was vacant except for two vehicles. One was the coroner’s van that Nat had used to transport the body. Beside it, a second van, which Ben didn’t recognize, sat idling, a white plume of exhaust rising up in a dissipating cloud from its tailpipe. As he approached, the side door of the vehicle slid open and two men stepped out, making their way toward him across the parking lot.
‘Dr Stevenson?’ one of them asked from the darkness.
‘Yes?’ he replied cautiously.
Ben was suddenly bathed in the bright light of a television camera.
‘Dr Stevenson, is it true the victim was stabbed forty-seven times? Has a positive identification been made yet?’ asked the reporter, thrusting a microphone in his face.
‘I haven’t examined the victim yet. That’s what I’m here to do now.’
The man with the microphone didn’t seem to appreciate the finer points of Ben’s statement, for he continued to fire off questions one after the other. ‘Is the victim a resident of the town, Dr Stevenson? Someone you happen to know? Was there any weapon found at the scene?’
‘How am I supposed to know that? You should be talking to the police.’ Ben fumbled for the keys in his pocket.
‘What was the last homicide of this nature that you investigated, Doctor? Have you spoken with the County Coroner’s Office or the state police?’
‘I haven’t spoken to anyone except my assistant.’ Ben turned the key in the dead bolt and swung the door open just wide enough to step inside. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me …’
‘Dr Stevenson, you have a son of your own that attends Indian Creek High School. How did he take the news of a murder only a few blocks away from the school?’
‘He seems to be handling it much better than you are,’ Ben replied, then closed the door against the deluge of questions from the overzealous reporter. He flipped on the light in the back hallway. It was blessedly quiet inside the building. He could hear the faint sounds of Nat moving around in the autopsy room beyond the door at the end of the hall. His assistant had the habit of humming softly to himself as he went about the task of laying out the equipment and preparing the body for examination. It was mildly endearing, although Ben could never recognize the melodies, which belonged to a musical generation that was not his own. Ben hung up his jacket on the coat rack to his left and proceeded down the hallway.
‘Hi, Nat,’ he said as he entered the room.
‘What’s up?’ Nat responded cheerfully. ‘Did you get hit by the reporter brigade on your way in?’
‘Of course,’ Ben replied. ‘I thought that I might outsmart them by coming in the back way, but they had their sentries waiting for me.’
‘No doubt, no doubt. They were on me like flies on sh –, like flies at a picnic, you know, as soon as I pulled the wagon into the back parkin’ lot. “Tell us this! Tell us that!” Those guys are pretty damn …’
‘Importunate? Unremitting?’ Ben offered.
‘Pretty damn annoying, if you ask me. Hell, I don’ know the answers to any of those questions. Might as well be askin’ me who’s gonna win the Kentucky Derby. And if I did know, I wouldn’t be tellin’ ’em nothin’ anyway. Just like you said, Dr S: “No muthafuckin’ comment!” Right?’
‘I think that was actually you who said that.’ Ben glanced at the shape on the examination table, still zipped up inside of the black cadaver bag. ‘How are we doing?’
‘I just got back about ten minutes ago. Fog’s gettin’ thick out there, and the wagon’s front windshield defroster ain’t workin’ so hot. Rainy days – and rainy nights especially – you’ve got to drive slow, or else you might find yourself joinin’ the gentleman in back, if you catch my meaning.’
His assistant continued to move about the room as he spoke, laying out instruments and checking connections. He was a study in controlled chaos: his light blond hair eternally tussled as if he had just recently climbed out of bed, the tail of his shirt tucked into his pants in some places but left free to fend for itself in others, one shoelace frequently loose and on the brink of coming untied – and yet within the autopsy room he was highly organized
