On the whole, Emma tried to avoid spending too much time in morgues.
It wasn't just the cloying smell of formaldehyde, which clung to her clothes for the rest of the day. Or the thermostat set at a chilly 40 degrees. It wasn't even the idea of being trapped in a windowless basement with a whole bunch of dead people. Though, gross.
For your garden variety deaths, your heart attacks and car accidents, the body was usually farmed out to the funeral parlor the next town over, who would handle everything. For the more interesting cases though, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner would get involved, transferring the body down South for an autopsy.
Kathryn Nolan's was an interesting case.
Which meant if Emma didn't want to wait a month for the official autopsy report, she would have to get in good with the Medical Examiner. The Medical Examiner who was currently dodging her calls.
"I'll flip you for it?" she pleaded, as Graham rummaged in the break room cabinet in search of more coffee filters.
"You already owe me for the press conference," he pointed out, emerging from the cabinet empty handed and scowling. "Do we still have that paper towel in the storage closet?"
"They have a Dunks in Augusta…" Emma cajoled.
She sensed a flicker of interest from him, but only a flicker. In the end, his principles won out, and he shook his head defiantly. "I've been pulling doubles for you all week. I'm not driving to Augusta and back just because you want to avoid seeing one of your old hook ups."
She really needed to stop telling him things.
She held his gaze for a long moment, but his resolve didn't break. Son of a bitch.
"Fine!" Emma relented, reaching over to grab the keys for the patrol car off their hook. "I'll go. But don't think I'm bringing you back any Boston Kremes. You've shown where your loyalties really lie."
Graham seemed to realize his grave error then, face contorting in pain at the very mention of his favorite treat.
"Nuh, uh," Emma warned, waggling a finger in front of his face. "You had your chance. I hope you like jelly, you traitor."
To call Dr Victor Whale an old hook up was pushing it. It was a one time thing, ages ago. A darkened bar, two counties from home. He was just a charming smile after a long line of shots. It wasn't her fault he worked at the State Police Crime Lab. It wasn't like he'd volunteered that information at the time. There hadn't been a whole lot of talking, from what she remembered. Though if she was being honest, that wasn't a lot.
He must've remembered at least a little, though, because a definite look of panic crossed his face when he saw her standing by the door to the laboratory, file in hand.
"Relax, Doctor," she said with a roll of her eyes. "I'm not here for a paternity suit."
He chuckled, but the way his shoulders relaxed underneath his lab coat convinced Emma she'd been right on the money with that one.
"Emma Swan," she said, reaching over to shake his hand, saving him the trouble of having to remember her name. "I'm actually here about a dead woman."
"No shortage of those here," Whale said, breaking contact to stretch his arms wide. "We've got every make and model. Cheerleaders. Housewives. Grandmas. Society queens. Or if you're looking for something a touch more exotic, our night time receptionist is of the walking, talking, bloodsucking variety. So, what can I do you for, Sheriff?"
He'd clocked her badge at her hip, then. Always a good sign to have a medical examiner who noticed the little details.
"You'll remember mine. Kathryn Nolan? She had her heart missing. I heard you were the one who did the autopsy?"
It was almost comical, how fast his devil-may-care grin slid into a grimace.
"Kathryn," he nodded solemnly. "Of course."
"Great. Feel like answering some of my questions?"
He hesitated, running a hand through his short platinum hair. "I feel like I should warn you my full report won't be ready for a couple weeks. The labs are still backed up from Christmas, and…"
"And I've got someone in my town who likes to carve out women's hearts," Emma interrupted. "I'll take your work-in-progress."
He blinked. Just once.
"Alright then. She's down in the freezer. Follow me."
The building was labyrinthine, and Emma quickly lost her bearings amidst the institutional grey speckled walls, and rows of identical white doors. But as they descended the stairs down into the sub-basement, she came to understand why they called it "the freezer." She hugged her arms more tightly around herself as the good doctor led her into a pristine white examination room that had never known the joys of central heating.
Probably for the best, all things considered.
"Kathryn Nolan," Whale repeated to himself, picking up a clipboard and running his finger down the page. "Seems to be behind door number 3. You want a look at her?"
In Emma's mind, want didn't really come into it. Fighting her better instincts, she nodded, then stood back as Whale tucked the clipboard under his arm and pulled open the nearest cold storage locker. With a small grunt of effort he slid the steel drawer free until the figure under the white sheet lay between them.
Dragging her eyes from the shape beneath the sheet, Emma looked up to see Whale watching her. Waiting for some sign of distress, maybe. She figured this was probably the juncture where most people would start with the hyperventilating and the vomiting. Fortunately, Emma was not most people. This wasn't her first rodeo. And even it is had been, she would never give him the satisfaction.
She held his gaze firmly as he pulled back the sheet.
"This your girl?"
Kathryn looked better than the last time Emma had seen her. Not that that was all that hard. But someone had definitely cleaned her up, removed all the river debris and brushed her hair out.
"I'm guessing you've established cause of death, Doctor?"
His grin was wry. "Well, I might've gone to a State School, but even I couldn't miss the gaping hole in her chest where her heart used to be."
Emma blanched. "They took out the heart while she was still alive?"
"That's my working theory. Massive chest trauma. She was definitely dead before she hit the water, anyway. The condition she arrived in made it a little hard to determine whether her other injuries were sustained before or after her swim in the river, but I didn't spot anything else that looked particularly lethal."
Seeing the look on Emma's face, Whale hurriedly continued.
"Of course, there's every chance she wasn't conscious at the time. We're still waiting on the toxicology to come back, but she might've been drugged. There weren't any ligature marks on her wrists or ankles, and that's rather telling. I doubt your girl would've just kept still while someone hacked into her."
Emma remembered the woman who outpaced her on the treadmill, week after week. No, that didn't seem like Kathryn's MO.
"So they used a knife? Like a hunting knife?"
"That's probably a good bet. I've taken some moulds of the grooves left in the ribs. I might be able to narrow that down for you. But my best guess at the moment is you're looking at a substantial blade. 10 inches maybe. They weren't fucking around."
Emma wondered if that was the medically appropriate term.
"Good news is," Whale pointed out, "whoever your killer is, they probably aren't too smart, and they're definitely not medically trained. I did some reading about this. It isn't easy to rip out a human heart directly from the chest. There's the sternum and the ribs to contend with. It takes a lot of strength to cut or break through them, and a lot of time. It's messy. The victim doesn't die right away. Compare that with, say, the Aztecs, who practised heart-extraction as part of some rituals. They'd slice below the ribs with a sharp rock, and rip the heart out from below. It's fast, efficient, and relatively easy to accomplish with little more than a scalpel and your hand."
He indicated the angry wound marring Kathryn's chest. "That's not the route your killer chose to take. Ergo, not too bright."
Or maybe they just appreciated the spectacle of it.
"You get anything I could use to find this guy?"
Whale shrugged, lifting the sheet back over Kathryn's face. "After a couple of days in that river, you'd be lucky to find any useful trace evidence. We sent everything we had off for analysis, but I don't like your odds. "
Emma frowned. "You think she was in the water the whole time, then? She was killed the day she disappeared?"
"That's my opinion. It's hard to say for sure. The decaying process is delayed when the body is submerged in water, especially when it's this cold. But the body was already showing signs of putrefaction, so she'd probably been out there the full five days. That's not forgetting the lack of ligature marks, which suggest she wasn't held for any length of time. If you're thinking this was a kidnapping, then I'd say they used some kind of drug to incapacitate her, in the short term. Unfortunately, the condition of the body makes it hard to determine how it might've entered her system. You'd have to wait for the tox screen to know what you're dealing with."
"So you're saying it could be anyone?" Emma sighed, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand.
"Well," Whale considered. "Anyone with a hunting knife and a certain amount of patience. They didn't do this by accident. They meant to rip her heart out. If you consider how much strength it would take to saw through the sternum, you're probably looking at a male, or especially strong woman. Hard to gauge height by the angle of grooves in the ribs, because she was probably on her back at the time, but the marks definitely skew left. So he was probably right-handed."
"So he's strong, right-handed man, then?" Emma summed up.
It didn't really narrow down the field much, and the apologetic look Whale shot her way said he knew it.
"And he probably knew her," Whale added. "Or surprised her. I didn't spot a lot of obvious defensive wounds. So whoever they are, they must've gotten pretty close before they incapacitated her."
A strong, right-handed man, who was familiar to her, then.
As if that didn't describe nearly the entire male population of Storybrooke to a T.
Swallowing back her disappointment, Emma extended her hand again. "Thanks for your time, Doc. I look forward to your full report."
He looked at her hand, but he didn't accept it. Instead he let his lips curve into what could only be described a salacious grin. "I get off in an hour. I don't suppose you-"
"I think that would be a spectacularly bad idea," Emma said firmly, snatching her hand back and cutting him off before he could dig himself any further. And then, because she couldn't help herself, "Do you normally try to seduce the police officers investigating the deaths of your patients?"
"Only the hot ones," he replied, maybe a little too honestly. "And I seem to remember we had fun together."
Emma doubted he remembered that much. She certainly didn't.
"Yeah, I'm not really interested in jeopardizing my murder investigation with a repeat performance."
Whale held a finger to his lips, letting loose what she was sure someone had once told him was a panty dropping smile. "I won't tell if you won't."
The next time Emma got it into her head to take a man to bed, she was going to make sure she was across state lines first. Hell, maybe even across the border. Anything to ensure she never, ever found herself in this situation again.
"As tempting as that sounds," she said, with forced sincerity, "I think I'm gonna pass. No," she said, holding up a hand as he moved closer. "It's okay. I can see myself out."
Twenty minutes and a few wrong turns later, Emma was back in the patrol car again, heater blasting, scrolling through her contacts with numb fingers.
"Graham, hey. Bad time?"
"Is there any other time?" he drawled.
Emma stifled her eye roll. "You're funny, you know that? I knew I kept you around for a reason."
"That and my charming personality," he pointed out.
"Of course," she agreed. "Can't forget that. Any chance you put those charms to work and got Michael Tillman to open the garage for you?"
"Yeah, but I don't know what I'm looking for. Didn't we already dust and bag everything in Kathryn's car?"
"We thought so, but back then this was just a disappearance. Now it's a murder. Check again. Especially the backseat."
"The backseat?" Graham repeated.
"Kathryn was driving from home to the office when she disappeared. It's a straight line, and she had no reason to deviate. So either she stopped for someone, or they were already in the car when she got in. Check the backseat."
"If I find anything, do I earn myself a Boston Kreme?" he asked hopefully.
"You find anything, I'll buy you a whole box."