Free GRAY MATTER by Gary Braver Page A

basement of Barnstable County Hospital, a former chronic care facility. Joe Steiner’s office was off a labyrinthine hallway, which housed autopsy rooms, a morgue, and storage facilities filled with cadavers and body parts in plastic containers. Greg parked next to some white ME vans.
    He hated the place, for it was where Lindsay had been brought that night two years ago. As he walked down the hall, he could still recall the soupy unreality of moving past these walls and doors to identify her body, knowing that she was dead, while at the same time a tiny part of his brain clung to a candle flicker of hope that it was another woman they had pulled out of the wreckage.
    It had been a clear, cool starry April night—the kind that made you aware of infinity, and just how incidental human life is. He had been at home half-watching a ball game and trying to stay awake until Lindsay returned. She was late because one of the girls at Genevieve Bratton had tried to kill herself, and Lindsay was most of the crisis-management team. Over the years, she had seen girls whose young lives were full of horrors so awful that she had stopped talking about them. And many of those lives she had helped turn around. Her colleagues spoke glowingly of her compassion
and skills in working with troubled kids. At a fund-raising gala three years ago, she was commended for her work. A graduate who had come into the school at age fourteen—a suicidal victim of repeated sexual abuse, an alcoholic, and a drug addict with a rap sheet a yard long—personally thanked Lindsay for setting her on a path of recovery that had led to a college degree, a successful career, and a sense of self-esteem. Greg had tears of pride in his eyes as the. audience gave Lindsay a standing ovation.
    Greg moved down the corridor toward Joe Steiner’s office, and he could still feel the horrid disbelief that clutched him as he walked into Room 55 two years ago to identify her body—how Joe had met him in the hall surrounded by troopers and other officers, including T.J. Gelford. How their faces appeared like a funeral frieze.
    Today Joe Steiner was on his phone at his desk, the sports section of The Boston Herald spread open, and a cigarette burning in an ashtray beside an open bag of Cape Cod dark russet potato chips. An air conditioner in a high window groaned against the sultry ocean air. Through the plastic divider was the autopsy room, occupied mostly by a single white porcelain cadaver table under lights and a butcher’s scale.
    Reluctantly Greg’s job brought him here a few times a year, and the place always looked the same. On the floor sat a stack of large white plastic formaldehyde containers labeled in Magic Marker— heart, liver, uterus, lungs, brain —each with a case number. Nearby was a cardboard carton of small screw-top specimen jars containing slices of different human organs. Also on the floor was a small white refrigerator, containing vials of blood and urine. The place was a human chop shop.
    “Tonight’s my last good night of sleep,” Joe said when he got off the phone. “My daughter Sarah gets her driver’s license tomorrow.”
    Joe was only half-joking. He had been a medical examiner for nearly twenty years, conducting more than a hundred autopsies annually. In his time, he had been host to every conceivable form of human death: by fire and water; in car, boat, and plane accidents; by their own hand and somebody else’s. As he once said, he had seen it all. To him, the deceased’s remains were no longer a human being but a scientific specimen containing information on it or in it—information that would assist the judicial system, public health office, police departments, and surviving families. But what still affected Joe—what still cut through that professional crust—was finding on his table
a teenager who had wrapped himself or herself around a tree. “Such a waste,” he once said with tears in his eyes.
    “I wish they’d up the age