The Ghosts That Haunt Me by Steve Ryan

Author:Steve Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn Press

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After getting the gist of what had happened from the duty officer, I hung up the phone with a heavy heart. Katelynn Sampson was younger than my youngest child.

I walked outside my home, got in my car, and put the keys in the ignition, turning the air conditioning on high as sweat trickled beneath the collar of my shirt. In the sky, every star seemed visible on this extremely humid night.

It was now my job to determine whether or not Katelynn’s death was a homicide. If her injuries contributed to or caused her death, and Donna Irving had inflicted them or failed to provide the girl with the necessary medical intervention to treat them, then Donna was liable for culpable homicide. An autopsy would uncover the truth.

At that time, officers had to attend autopsies as witnesses. We’d stand in suits and ties and leather shoes as the pathologists and their assistants in full surgical garb opened up the bodies of the deceased to find causes of death.

The coldness, the stench, the way human beings, once loving, living, and breathing, lay pale and lifeless on a steel slab was something I never got used to. I’d worked in Homicide for nearly five years at that point and had witnessed countless autopsies, but each night I’d wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming about one.

I’d never been interested in medicine, the human body, or how it worked. If I’d never known what the layers of muscles, fat, and organs that keep us alive looked like underneath our skin, I’d have been happy. Seeing the human body weighed and measured like meat in a butcher’s shop made my skin crawl as though it were covered with cockroaches, though I never showed what I was really feeling. Throughout the procedure, I’d stand stoically unblinking as the doctor’s saw buzzed.

Of course, the worst to witness were the autopsies of children. Sadly, I’d been present at many children’s autopsies, and every time I wished I could have saved the child from whatever course of events had put them there.

Babies, being especially fragile and prone to sudden death, comprised many of the suspicious deaths monthly in Toronto. They often pass away in their sleep, and Homicide is required to attend their autopsies to ensure there were no nefarious causes of their deaths. On autopsy tables, babies seemed like baby dolls, lying still in a way no squirming infant does in life, the rosy pinkness of a newborn absent from their skins. Staring at a baby lying lifeless always reminded me of how unfair life truly is, how it can be over before it even starts.

That night I wished I could have kept driving until the sunlight peeked over the horizon, driving past the city so I never had to see Katelynn lying in a morgue. But I did; it was my job.

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