Free The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters Page B

her work, I look up and inch forward and watch her do it. And it is a glorious thing to watch, the cold and beautiful precision of the autopsy, Fenton in motion, a master moving meticulously through the steps of her craft.
    The perseverance in this world, despite it all, of things done right.
    Carefully Dr. Fenton cuts free the black leather belt and slips it off Zell’s neck, measures the width of the band and the length from end to end. With brass calipers she takes the dimensions of the bruising beneath the eye, and the bruise from the belt buckle, digging up beneath the chin, yellowish and dry like a patch of sere terrain running up on either side toward his ears, an angry ragged
V
. And she’s pausing, moment to moment, to take pictures of everything: the belt while it’s still on the neck, the belt alone, the neck alone.
    And then she cuts away the clothes, rinses off the insurance man’s pallid body with a damp cloth, her gloved fingers moving rapidly over his midsection and his arms.
    “What are you looking for?” I venture, and Fenton ignores me; I fall silent.
    With a scalpel she tucks into the chest, and I take another step forward, now I’m standing beside her under the bright halo of the mortuary light, peering wide-eyed as she makes a deep Y-shaped incision, peels back the skin and the flesh beneath. I’m leaning way over the body, pushing my luck, as Fenton draws the dead man’s blood, piercing a vein near the center of the heart, filling three vials in quick succession. And I realize at some point during all this that I’m barely breathing, that as I’m watching her go point by point through this process, weighing the organs and recording their weights, lifting the brain from the skull and turning it in her hands,I’m waiting for her impassive expression to sharpen, waiting for her to gasp or mutter “hmm” or turn to me in astonishment.
    To have found whatever it is that will prove that Zell was killed, and not by his own hand.
    Instead, at last, Dr. Fenton puts down her scalpel and flatly says, “Suicide.”
    I stare at her. “Are you sure?”
    Fenton doesn’t answer. She’s moving rapidly back over to her cart, opening a box containing a thick roll of plastic bags, and peeling the top one off.
    “Wait, ma’am. I’m sorry,” I say. “What about that?”
    “What about what?” I can feel myself growing desperate, a heat building in my cheeks, a squeak sneaking into my voice, like a child’s voice. “That? Is that bruising? Above his ankle?”
    “I saw that, yes,” Fenton says coolly.
    “Where did it come from?”
    “We shall never know.” She doesn’t stop bustling, doesn’t look at me, her flat voice glazed with sarcasm. “But we do know he didn’t die from a bruise to the calf.”
    “But aren’t there are other things we
do
know? Just in terms of determining the cause of death?” I’m saying this and I’m fully conscious of how ridiculous it is to be challenging Alice Fenton, but this can’t be right. I scour my memory, flipping frantically in my mind through the pages of the relevant textbooks. “What about the blood? Do we perform a toxicity screening?”
    “We would if we’d found anything to indicate it. Needle marks, muscles atrophied in suggestive patterns.”
    “But we can’t just do it?”
    Fenton laughs dryly, shaking open the plastic bag. “Detective, are you familiar with the state police forensic lab? On Hazen Drive?”
    “I’ve never been there.”
    “Well, it is the only forensic laboratory in the state, and right now there is a new person running the show over there, and he is an idiot. He is an assistant to an assistant who is now chief toxicologist, since the real chief toxicologist left town in November to go study life drawing in Provence.”
    “Oh.”
    “Yes. Oh.” Fenton’s lip curls up with evident distaste. “Apparently it’s what she’s always wanted to do. It’s a mess over there. Orders getting left on the table. It’s a