Free A Deeper Darkness by J.T. Ellison

all day long and well into the night.
    The staff was more extensive, as well. Nocek murmured names to her as they passed, each person finding a reason to swing by and see the pathologist who’d been called in to question, or affirm, their work.
    Sam nodded and half smiled a few times, but her mind was captivated by Donovan.
    The moment she saw him, she had to force back the tears that sprang into her eyes. He was so…dead. She saw death on a daily basis, but this, this ripped out her heart.
    She swallowed, surprised to feel her stomach roiling.
    She shouldn’t have come. She didn’t want her last memory of him to be this. This abomination of him. Of them. He wasn’t supposed to die like this.
    Breathe, Sam. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three …
    She shut her eyes. Disassociated. She could do this. She owed it to him.
    Her heart rate dropped, and her clinical mind took over at last. She looked on Donovan as objectively as she could.
    It was him, and yet it wasn’t. Her Donovan had never looked so slack, so pale and insubstantial. Her Donovan didn’t have wide black stitches holding his tender flesh together, one on each side of his chest, another above his groin, tied in the middle, nor the quickly apparent scars on his torso and arms. Shiny, knotted, tightly stretched flesh. Burns. No one told her he’d been burned in Iraq. Or shot, for that matter.
    Damn Eleanor. Glossing over the truth. As if Sam wouldn’t have been able to handle the news.
    Damn her eyes. And damn Donovan, too.
    She resisted the urge to brush his hair back from his blanched forehead. He had a bit less of it now, a slightly receding hairline that she was sad to see. When they’d sewed him up they’d gotten it slightly crooked. Only she would notice it, though. Or maybe Susan.
    Nocek was looking at her strangely, his insect head tilted to one side as he tried to decide what was wrong with the situation.
    She swallowed and met his eyes.
    “Shall we?”
    Nocek nodded. He stepped to the body and cut the twine that held Donovan’s Y-incision together. Snip. Snip. Snip. The fancy stitching that closed the flesh entirely would be done by the undertaker after the embalming. For their purposes in the M.E.’s office, to send the body to the funeral home, they simply threaded the needle through in the three places: midsternum right and left, plus a stitch from the bottom of the incision, spots that pulled the flayed flesh back together, then tied the twine in a knot. Brutal and utilitarian. The first time Sam had seen it done she watched in horror, sure the twine would tear and the skin would fly back open, but flesh was surprisingly tough and the method quite effective.
    The field was quickly revealed, and Nocek pulled the slimy plastic bag that contained the victim’s organs from the abdominal cavity.
    The victim. Good girl, Sam. Maintain your distance. Do not personalize this.
    Nocek gestured to the bag. “Do you wish to redissect? I can do it if you’d like to observe instead.”
    “No, that’s all right. I’d like to get my hands on everything, if you don’t mind.”
    “Not at all. I will read to you the measurements that were taken as we go through the organs.”
    Sam ignored the little voice screaming in the back of her head and settled into work, the routine. A secondary postmortem was not easy. Decomposition had begun in earnest. And without seeing the organs in situ, having the standard reference points to go on, it was slow, sloggy work. The previous M.E. had been good, though; the remaining organ sections were large enough to work with, hadn’t been chopped into little pieces. Sam had been at this a long time; once she started, she found everything she needed without too much trouble.
    His liver wasn’t enlarged. His heart looked beautiful, with only the barest minimum of cholesterol plaque lining the valves. She sectioned off a fresh piece of lung from the upper lobe, cut it into a triangle—a trick she’d been taught to