June 27 1998 Raccoon City
Edwin Thomas leaned forward and pushed his bifocals further up his nose. His eyes flicked from the fax clamped to his clipboard to the wound he was studying.
He licked his lips. His mouth had a tacky feel to it that had nothing to do with the autopsy room's cloying smell of bleach disinfectant.
"Good Lord,"
His heart sped up and thumped against the walls of his thin chest. Of course he recognised the palpitations for what they were. His sympathetic nerve system was simply triggering a small release of epinephrine into his bloodstream. It was an adrenaline rush, not some underlying cardiac concern, but that was small comfort at the moment.
He glanced down at the fax, fresh from the good folks at the State Crime Lab in Portland. "Forensic Dentistry, Methods of Comparison in Bite Mark Identification."
His eyes flitted once again from the detailed schematics on the pages, to the marks on the Erin Hawthorne's right forearm.
- Elliptical shaped injury, check. Eight rectangular incisions, check. Four triangular incisions, check-
He bent forward with a stainless-steel ruler and held it up to one the wounds.
-Injury diameter ranging from between twenty-five to forty millimetres, check-
"I can't believe I missed it."
"Excuse me, Doctor Thomas?" Miss Hutchens asked behind him.
He ignored her interruption.
-The same physiology of attack as the Connor cases, the same absence of necrophagous insect activity. Likely the same cause of death, total hypovolemia due to massive trauma-
He recalled the old adage "ignoring the elephant in the room." It effectively summed up what he had done. He should have recognised those bite marks on the Connor bodies, and instead he obsessed over the lack of insect activity on the corpses, the bizarre fluids and tissues taken at the scene. He had been suspicious with the defensive wounds on the young Connor girl, but suspicious wasn't good enough. Any coroner worth his salt would have noticed that elephant right away.
The young woman on his autopsy table was covered in human bite marks. No doubt the Connors were as well.
"Doctor Thomas?" Miss Hutchens asked again.
Edwin dropped the steel rule and turned to his assistant. In all honesty, he had forgotten that Elaine Hutchens had been in the same room as him.
"Y-yes?" he asked.
"You said something earlier, I didn't quite hear you." Miss Hutchens was a serious woman with a serious face. She was also an outstanding assistant, the best he had ever worked with.
"I…I was talking to m-myself," he admitted with a sheepish grin. "I…I…um…p-please get me the camera, I…b-believe Sergeant C-Carlson was doing some…work on it."
"Yes doctor." With a quick turn and a swish of plastic sheeting she was at the autopsy room doors, slipping out of her gloves and examination smock.
In reality, it was too early for photographs. He would finish his initial examination of Erin Hawthorne's corpse before he would need to take photos. However, he knew that the autopsy room camera was in the Ident Room upstairs, having a lens replaced. Miss Hutchens would need to retrieve it, and as a result he would be grated a merciful fifteen minutes of solitude.
Fifteen minutes, enough time to banish the childhood stutter that would invariably return to haunt him when he was stressed. Fifteen minutes to quell the tempest raging in his head: frustration, self loathing, confusion, his ordered thought processes all a disarray. It was precisely the same sensation he had suffered though during the Connor autopsies.
He was known by everyone on RPD staff, first by his nickname, Geezer (an unfortunate sobriquet bestowed early in his career due to his stooped posture, bald pate and thick glasses), but secondarily (and much more importantly) as a studious professional who was committed to the forensic and scientific processes. He had spent twenty-one years culturing the image of a judicious man, dedicated to logic and procedure.
The Connor investigations, now this Hawthorne girl, and likely the Albrecht boy, were black marks on his otherwise untarnished reputation. That he had yet to explain why corpse-eating insects had shunned these bodies was now glaringly less significant to the fact that he had missed crucial evidence proving that the three Connors were likely attacked by human beings. That human teeth may have caused the horrific trauma which had ended their lives.
That he had not noticed until now.
-I'm getting ahead of myself-
He shook his head and reset his glasses. There was a process to be followed here, he had begun Erin Hawthorne's autopsy, and would surely finish it before he would revisit the Connor bodies. He had clearly overlooked some monumentally important details with the Connor autopsies, and would not allow himself to make any more with Erin Hawthorne's.
Edwin turned away from the corpse on his examination table and gazed unseeing at the autopsy room's porcelain walls, gleaming like the heavens themselves.
He couldn't be entirely faulted for mistaking the wounds on the Connor bodies. The vicious storm which had passed through that evening had destroyed much of the physical evidence to lead him to believe that a murder had taken place. Logic stated that an animal attack was much more likely in the Arklay Forest than a homicide, involving nothing more than the teeth in the murderer's mouth. Besides, forensic dentistry was still in its nascent stages, and carrion eating birds had distorted many of the wounds. The one reason he had noticed the nature of Erin Hawthorne's injuries so quickly was that she had been submerged in nearly one hundred feet of water. Water which had been cold enough to slow the process of putrefaction. Water free of any carnivorous fish. Her corpse had been perfectly preserved, an ideal specimen for examination.
He let out a long breath.
-I'm also rationalising. I need to stop trying to deflect the blame, from where it belongs-
Edwin closed his eyes and let his mind digest the implications of his discovery. He would need to verify his findings, write up a death report for Hawthorne. He would autopsy the Albrecht boy and re-examine the Connors before informing Chief Irons and Detective Silverman.
It seemed as though the Raccoon Police Department was going to be investigating five homicide cases with the same, very unusual MO.
-And that means it will be a very long day, and it will be longer if I keep wasting time-
He opened his eyes and turned back to his subject: Erin Renae Hawthorne, Caucasian female, date of birth April thirteenth nineteen eighty one, one hundred and sixteen pounds at time of examination, naked as the day she was born, as lifeless as the surgical steel table on which she rested.
He refused to allow himself to see her as a person. She had stopped being a person the moment her heart, a heart that he would soon remove, weigh and dissect, had stopped beating. The corpse that had once been Erin Hawthorne was now simply a very complex puzzle. It was essential that he provide an accurate analysis of what had happened to her. He must solve the puzzle contained within her remains, for her family's sake, for the sake of his damaged reputation, and most important, for Erin Hawthorne's sake.
He sighed once more, walked to the shelf attached to the wall nearest the examination table and clicked on the video camera.
He returned to the body, tilting the head to the left and exposing the damage done to the anterior sternomastiod musculature. A large mass of flesh was missing. The trauma had been severe enough to shear through the external carotid artery.
Edwin shook his head, still struggling to accept what it was that he was seeing. The wound was elliptical in shape, and roughly forty five millimetres in diameter.
-A human bite mark-
In what was surely a moment of weakness, he permitted one hand to float up, and he gently stroked the top of her head, brushing the hair away from her alabaster face.
Just as he had done with Madison Connor.
"You…you p-poor thing."
Author's Note. Hopefully this chapter comes off as realistic. I have never been in an autopsy room, and suck at Biology, so I'm sort of winging things here. All you sciencey types reading this can let me know if I got anything wrong and I'll be sure to change it.
Stay tuned!
-C
