Learn to Have Been
September 2014
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Lanie had a fresh one.
Well, fresh for her, judging by the warning phone call she'd gone from Javi, not so fresh for the dead body found in Central Park. Had a smell, the victim did, and good thing for Lanie that her sense of smell had gone dead long ago, sometime during her second year of med school.
Still, it wasn't going to be pretty. Preemptively, she swiped a little vicks and put it under her nose.
Then she texted Kate Beckett that she'd have to cancel their lunch date, and she set about getting her autopsy suite ready. She arranged the equipment, aligned the sterilized trays, plugged in the bone saw, set out the rib spreader - Perlmutter tended to scrupulously reorganize her suite, annoying her to no end by putting things away wrong. But he was senior, and she was paying her dues, and she just adjusted things back to how she liked them, tried to do the sterilizing herself.
Knowing the body would be unidentified when it came in, Dr Parish punched up the automated chart on the computer at the desk, started filling in the things she did know to speed up the process. The system generated a number, printed it out in triplicate, and the ME peeled the stickers off from the label maker, pasted one onto the clipboard where she would mark time of delivery and eventually the cold storage number.
The second sticker she smoothed neatly over the hospital ID bracelet they used for toe tags, being sure not to unstick the bracelet from the clipboard, waiting for the body to arrive.
Finally, Lanie gowned up and slid the plastic safety glasses over her face, but something made her wait on the blue gloves.
Her phone vibrated at the computer station, and she headed over to view the message alert before it could fade.
Want me to bring us both something?
Lanie grinned and picked up her phone, glad she'd waited on the gloves, and texted her back. A Caesar salad would be divine. But I'm warning you, might wanna eat yours before you get here.
She wondered if Castle would come in with Kate. Probably not, all things considered. Too bad; Lanie enjoyed their harmless flirting, his flattering charm. And it'd been entirely too long since Rick Castle had been deviously, adorably charming.
She worried about him. She never used to worry about Richard Castle, and now look - the things he drove her too. Lanie was pretty sure that Kate Beckett couldn't be pried away from that man with a rib spreader, but just what was she clinging to, the ME couldn't say.
Rick Castle wasn't entirely Rick Castle any more.
The body came in, attended only by Javier who had apparently left his partner on scene to organize a canvas of Central Park. Javi flirted too, but in a much more aggressive and presumptuous way, like he was staking claim, and today - no, not-uh, Javier Esposito - that was not going to fly today. She hadn't even eaten lunch yet.
Dr Parish pushed him out of her autopsy suite, and she snapped on her blue gloves and pulled down the black zipper.
Whew. Bad one.
Lanie cleared her throat and started the digital recorder, making sure the light was red on the computer at the desk. She picked up the clipboard from where she'd put it down when Javi had started in on her, and then she went back to the body and pushed apart the sides of the black bag.
As she spoke towards the mic, Dr Parish gave a cursory exam of the victim, noting anterior damage, animal markings, even bone in some places.
She peeled the ID bracelet from the clipboard, but she merely stuck the tag to the body bag, not yet willing to interrupt her visual inspection. She made notations on the human figure on the clipboard, anterior for now, posterior later when she could get a look, and she quickly fed that information to the recording.
Perlmutter came in on her in the middle of it; he had three techs with him to move the body. He identified himself to the recording and then gestured at the body. "Are you finished?"
"I'm finished," she said. Crotchety old man, she thought. "Let's move him."
The techs untangled the black body bag from the victim and then lifted him from the gurney to the stainless steel table. They held the body up so she could inspect his badly decomposed skin, and she made note of the multitude of abrasions and lacerations, not to mention predation.
Coyotes, she thought, but she didn't say it. Not until she had teeth marks and proof.
Perlmutter and the techs left her to it, and Lanie began to dictate detailed notes to the digital recording, moving carefully about the body until she was certain she'd been thorough. They said she and Kate Beckett were polar opposites, that Lanie was loud and Kate was not, but in the work - no, in the work, they were the same.
And Lanie was bone deep in the chest cavity when Detective Beckett showed up. Kate took a stumbling step back, nose wrinkling, and Lanie nodded towards the empty stainless steel table.
"Really?" Kate asked her. "You want me to leave it there?"
"Please, honey. It's the most sterile thing in here. Cleaner than your kitchen table."
"I don't want to think about that," Kate muttered. "Especially since it's Castle's kitchen table." And by that look on her face, the things they'd done on that kitchen table.
Lanie laughed at her friend but she was gowned and gloved and the protective glasses were slipping down her nose. Gonna be like that, the way this body looked, one of those days.
"What've you got?" Kate asked her, staying away from the body and nearer to the plastic bag with their salads in it.
Lanie sighed. "No ID. Found in Central Park."
"He's been out there a while," Kate remarked.
"Months," she agreed. "I'll have a better time frame, but honey, this is Javier's case. Not yours. You are here to serve me lunch."
Kate chuckled. "True, not my case. I have enough on my plate anyway."
With Castle. That was for sure. "So talk to me, Kate Beckett. Cause I'm going to need to figure out how to ID this guy without any fingerprints or even a face - even his teeth have been rearranged by animals - so you talk to me. Distract me."
"No fingerprints?"
"No fingers," she complained. "In fact, look at this." She stepped back and indicated the John Doe's right arm. Which was mostly gone. Left arm not much better, though the palm remained. "It's bad."
And of course Kate Beckett wasn't going to let that kind of thing go; of course it wouldn't be harmless chitchat about a Kate Spade clearance sale or the latest scary thing the occupational therapist had said about Castle. Nope, all about the job.
"Wild animals?"
"Possibly," Lanie admitted. "I haven't finished my initial findings though."
"Huh."
"No, not-uh," Lanie said to her, pointing a gloved finger. "Not your case, Kate Beckett."
Kate smiled, turned her head away. "Are you going to finish the autopsy or stop and eat with me?"
"Give me fifteen minutes, and then I'm all yours."
Kate picked up the bag with their salads and went back through the doors of the autopsy suite, waving her fingers as she headed for Parish's office.
It struck Lanie then that they were lucky. If Castle had still been missing, a John Doe like this would have wrecked Kate Beckett. Thank God he was safely at home, if not completely, all the way, really with them.
Rick Castle had all his fingers though, and that was good.
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