Deep Lacerations: Chapter 12
Sonja Gracy took a deep breath as she stood just outside the doors to Autopsy, willing her feet to carry her forward through those doors and into the cold, stainless environment just beyond. Ducky had found her a pair of scrubs that fit her tall, athletic frame—they were actually Palmer's—and someone had even dug up a pair of old tennis shoes from someplace she didn't want to contemplate, so her usual sensible-yet-stylish shoes—the shoes that cost enough to make the part of her that remembered being a married medical student making forty thousand a year between two people wince—wouldn't be damaged by whatever happened inside that Autopsy suite.
"Are you coming, Dr. Gracy?" Jimmy Palmer asked, sticking his head out from inside.
"I'm still thinking about it," she admitted. With a sigh of resignation, she followed him in.
It was exactly like it had been a couple of days before, when she burst through those doors to examine Officer Chase's body, and exactly like every Autopsy suite she had ever been in. Some were larger than others, some better—although never well—lit, some had soft music playing in the background, but they were all the same. There were only so many ways to decorate a room that was required to have stainless steel tables and refrigerated body drawers. Yet somehow, now, knowing what she was going to be doing and what she was going to be looking at, it was different. "Ducky," she finally called out, forcing herself into the moment.
"Ah, yes, Sonja. Right this way, please." She followed the older pathologist with her eyes, but didn't move her feet as he headed toward the one body out, the sterile white light leaving him on display for the world to see. In her mind's eye, it wasn't a cold Autopsy suite she saw, but a warm dining room complete with landscapes of the Florida coast; the table under the body wasn't stainless steel, but a deep red cherry that Scott insisted on splurging on after his promotion to captain; and instead of Jimmy Palmer watching with curiosity in his eyes, it was a dark man with a thick beard and a six-cylinder revolver held to her daughter's head.
"Who are you?" she demanded angrily after getting over the shock of seeing an unfamiliar man standing just inside the entry way to her Alexandria townhouse. He gave an enigmatic smile in reply.
"We have a surprise for you," he replied, his accent thick and not quite familiar.
"How did you get in?" she asked, still not moving, wishing she had had some reason to take her issue 9mm to work every day, instead of leaving it in the gunsafe by her bed.
"Do not worry about that now," he replied, his smile cold. "You have other things to worry about. Like what will happen to your beautiful daughter if you do not cooperate. Come. Follow me." Not even giving her time to shrug out of her winter coat or pull off the tan combat boots, he grabbed her arm and roughly pulled her through the kitchen toward the dining room, her black beret fluttering to the ground as she released it out of shock at the motion.
She barely stifled a scream at the sight of her husband of ten years lying on their dining room table, his skin all but shredded from the force of what appeared to be countless cuts. "Du meine Güte," she breathed, her clinically trained mind instantly taking over to protect her from the horrors of what she was seeing. Some of the cuts were more erythematous than others, telling her that it wasn't all done at once, that somebody had taken their time—maybe days, maybe longer—on making him look like that. Since his last phone call, to tell her he was going outside the wire and didn't know when he would be back, had been fifteen days ago, she had an upper limit on when they had begun.
The click of a revolver forced the clinical part of her back to where she left it as she walked out of the office earlier that evening. She reluctantly tore her eyes away from Scott's body to see that man standing behind Maddie, a silver gun pointed at her head. The five-year-old's blue eyes, so similar to her father's, were filled with tears.
"Do what we tell you, Dr. Gracy—or is it Major Gracy?—and nobody will get hurt," the man said, his voice almost venomous.
"What do you want me to do?" she asked shakily, internally swearing at the Army for training her to be a doctor more than they trained her to be a soldier. The man gestured toward the body on the table with his free hand.
"Nothing more than you do every day, Doctor. An autopsy."
"I'm having some difficulties analyzing these lacerations." The Scottish accent of NCIS's medical examiner brought Gracy back to the moment, away from that cold November night. "I attempted to use the protocol outlined in your paper—Sonja?" He turned to see her still standing just inside the doors to Autopsy, her eyes fixed on the body of Captain Hawke, a look of horror on her face.
"I need a punch biopsy, a scalpel, and fixative," Gracy said, snapping herself out of her reverie before giving Ducky the chance to voice any concern. She strode over to the body with that same military bearing ten years in the Army drilled into her.
As Palmer rushed off to get her what she requested, she quickly donned an autopsy apron, booties, gloves, and a facemask. She leaned over the body, a frown of concentration barely seen through the glare on the plastic cover. "Here you go, ma'am," Palmer said, sounding almost out of breath as he handed her what she requested. She nodded her thanks, pulling the biopsy probe from its sterile cover and attaching the scalpel blade.
With one deft motion, she punched a hole through a laceration near the ankle, slicing it cleanly away from the remaining skin with the scalpel. She examined the small circle for a second before dropping it in the fixative. "Mr. Palmer, do you prepare slides?"
"Uh, yes, Doctor. Uh, Agent. Uh—"
"I need transverse and longitudinal sections," she said, interrupting his stammering. "Make sure the transverse includes the laceration, and the longitudinal should be right alongside it. If you can, put both on the same slide. I'm also going to need slides from a lac on the bottom of the foot, the thigh, torso, wrist, the palm of the hand, and the face," she continued. Not waiting for a reply, she set aside the instruments and picked up a clear plastic ruler, measuring random cuts with a frown on her face.
She continued to work in silence as Palmer scurried around the body, preparing the biopsies and slides she requested. Ducky watched curiously, occasionally opening his mouth to ask a question before closing it again without saying anything.
"These aren't the same," she finally said, looking up at the senior medical examiner. "I mean, they are the same, which means this isn't the same." She shook her head slightly. "I don't even need to look at those slides. I mean, I will, because that's why I'm here, but I know that this isn't the same."
"Maybe you should start at the beginning, my dear," Ducky said gently. She nodded her head and reached for the handlens.
"All of these lacerations show similar levels of erythema," she pointed out, indicating the red skin around each cut. "That indicates that they were made roughly the same time, maybe an hour or two before death. He started at the bottom of the feet and worked his way up to the face. It's different."
"Different than what?" Palmer asked from the doorway, a slide tray in hand. Both Gracy and Ducky turned to face him briefly. Neither responded.
Sonja stared down at the body for a long moment before she spoke again. "I need to see the file," she said softly.
"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Ducky asked gently.
"No!" she exclaimed, startling everyone with her outburst. "No, I'm not damned sure if that's a good idea, but you called for a consult, and that's what your consult says needs done." She paused. "And it's not like it's nothing I haven't seen before. For Christ's sake, Ducky, I wrote the damned thing!"
"Sonja—"
"Twenty hours, Ducky!" she shouted, her voice hysterical, the sound drowning out the ding of the elevator doors opening. "I spent twenty hours on that autopsy, seven of which were on the gross examination, listening to Maddie's sobs as some bastard held a gun to her head and made her watch her mother cut up her father. I spent four hours on the external examination alone, marking every single one of one hundred and seventeen lacerations, taking biopsies of one hundred and seventeen lacerations. When I close my eyes, I can still see each one of those, can see exactly how much edema, how much erythema surrounds each cut, can see exactly what those bastards spent over a week doing to my husband. So when I say I need to see the autopsy file of Major Scott Jaser Gracy, I'm not saying it because I want a pleasant stroll down memory lane. It's because I need to see the damned file!"
Wordlessly, Ducky handed her the thick folder that had been sitting on his desk since that morning. She frantically flipped through the opening pages, not even trying to hold back her tears, now falling silently down her cheeks. "Come on, come on!" she urged the pages, as if it were their fault she couldn't find what she was looking for. "The diagram sheet, Ducky! Where is the verdammt diagram sheet?"
"Calm down," a level voice said, steady hands covering hers. She looked up from the file to a pair of reassuring blue eyes.
"I need the diagram sheet," she said, her voice small. "I—I can't find it."
As if knowing where it would be, Gibbs guided her hands back to the front of the file, where the offending paper rested. "This?"
She nodded slowly, pulling the sheet from the folder. Her eyes went from paper to body several times, her hands shaking slightly. "They're the same," she breathed. "How are they the same? Every cut, every angle—." She cut herself off, looking up at Gibbs with an expression of panic. "They're copying Scott. They want us to know—Scheisse!" In a fit of blind fury, she knocked the file to the ground and ran from the room.