Working Stiff : Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner (9781476727271) by Melinek Judy; Mitchell T.j

Author:Melinek, Judy; Mitchell, T.j.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

* * *

The door to the apartment in Queens was ajar, the jamb torn off, pieces of splintered wood with protruding nails scattered across the threshold. Andres Garcia had been decomposing in there for days, maybe a week, before the stench drove the slum’s other tenants to call the cops. The MLI’s written report told me Garcia’s body was found on the floor of an interior hallway, in a semi-prone position. An electrical cord was wrapped tightly around his neck and tied at the other end to an exposed ceiling pipe. A second electrical cord bound his ankles; his hands and arms, however, were free. There were conspicuously visible cuts on his wrists and forearms, on the inside only, all the way up to the elbow. The report noted that plastic food wrap was wound tightly over his nose and eyes. Black fluid—maybe blood, maybe the products of decomposition—had puddled under the corpse.

The television in the living room was on. A wallet on the bedside table held Bolivian currency. A single knife, apparently clean, sat on the kitchen counter. By the sink someone had smeared a word in blood—either “Pato” or “Bato,” the investigator wrote. Something also appeared to be scrawled in blood on the bathroom door, but it was illegible. A pair of latex surgical gloves floated in the toilet. Though paramedics had visited the scene in order to pronounce Garcia officially and extremely dead, they swore up and down that they hadn’t entered the bathroom, and certainly hadn’t dumped any gloves in the john. The adjective the MLI had used in his written report to describe the apartment’s overall condition was “ransacked.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Detective Fournier told me in the Queens morgue, while I was unwrapping the corpse from its body bag. “Some people live that way.”

I asked him what the word scrawled in blood meant. “It depends. ‘Bato’ means ‘homeboy,’ but ‘Pato’ is ‘faggot.’ We can’t tell which one it is.” Beyond this, Fournier didn’t have much to say. The MLI’s report didn’t contain any photographs, so I couldn’t judge the state of the scene for myself. I had to rely on the body—and the body was in a state of stinking, sloughing decomposition.

When Andres Garcia came out of the body bag and onto my autopsy table, the plastic food wrap wasn’t binding his eyes and nose anymore; it had fallen around his neck like a scarf, taking much of the skin with it. What remained of his face hung off in greenish-gray rags. The corpse was covered in a shiny slime and mottled in patches of brown, green, white, and yellow. The outer layer of epidermis slid off in my hand like the rind of a rotten fruit. His entire torso, including the genitals, was bloated, his belly stretched to bursting. When I cut into it to make the Y-incision, the bacterial gas escaped with a whoosh and reeked up my corner of the morgue. Detective Fournier retreated to the far end of the room.

The electrical cord had dug a deep ligature furrow in the cadaver’s neck.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.