Free VC01 - Privileged Lives by Edward Stewart Page A

at him prettily and consulted a clipboard hanging at the side of her desk. “He’s expecting you. Do you know the way?”
    Cardozo nodded. He couldn’t help thinking she was awfully young to be working in a morgue.
    He took the stairway to the subbasement with its depressingly familiar banks of overhead fluorescent lights and walls of latched stainless-steel body lockers. Drains dotted the cement floor at six-foot intervals.
    This level was full of scurrying figures in white lab coats. Many of them, Cardozo knew, were medical students on the prowl for pregnant Jane Does. The city let them take the dead fetuses.
    As he pushed through a door with heavy green rubber lips his nose was assaulted by a sudden stench of formaldehyde and human decay.
    He saw at a glance that four of the tables in the cutting room were occupied. Three of the bodies, two white males and a black female, had had their rib cages split open, exposing the lungs and viscera. The fourth was covered. Beside each table stood a scale for weighing organs.
    “Hey, Vince.” Dan Hippolito crossed the room. He was wearing a surgical smock and a rubber apron. He had pushed a curved Plexiglas face shield up over his receding hairline. “We just finished draining him and he’s ready. Right over here.”
    Hippolito led Cardozo to the necropsy table where John Doe lay beneath a white sheet, his one leg jutting out with the foot at a slant. Hippolito gave the sheet a nudge and let it spill to the floor.
    “The incisions on the chest are superficial, don’t mean anything. The skin coloring and neck contusions indicate asphyxia. Like I said before, looks like he was strangled. We’ll know for sure when we get to the lungs. The leg was cut off an hour, two hours after his heart stopped beating. The shear marks on the femoral bone were made by a rotary blade.”
    “Dan, I don’t get it. Why take a dead leg?”
    “That’s your field. I’ll tell you what happened, you figure out why. The left testicle, on the other hand, was cut off before death.”
    Cardozo couldn’t believe he had missed it. “He lost a ball?”
    Hippolito lifted the scrotum sac. Now Cardozo could see it. One testicle.
    “How long before death?”
    “Figure at least a year—it’s completely healed.”
    “Did a doctor do it?”
    “Either a doctor did it or a doctor stitched it.”
    “Why would you take a ball off?”
    “A lot of reasons. Like cancer maybe.”
    “A guy this young?”
    “The environment’s not healthy, Vince. You see pathologies developing early in a great many mammals. The reproductive organs are especially vulnerable.”
    Hippolito pulled on a pair of heavy latex gloves. He removed the suction catheters from the dead man’s wrists. He angled the overhead light and began speaking into a microphone suspended over the table.
    “The body is that of a young male Caucasian, twenty to twenty-two years of age, height approximately six feet, body weight prior to drainage one hundred forty-nine pounds, light weight due to absence of right leg, which has been severed at the midpoint of the femur. Left testicle missing. Superficial cutaneous cuts.”
    He opened the dead man’s mouth and peered in.
    “One filling, upper left second molar.”
    Hippolito moved to the foot of the table, took hold of the ankle, and rotated it slowly.
    “How is your little girl?” he said. “Still a real charmer?”
    It made Cardozo uneasy to discuss his daughter in a room full of dead bodies. It seemed like inviting bad luck. “Fine, thanks. Terri’s just fine.”
    Hippolito walked to the other end of the table and lifted the head, testing the resistance of the neck muscles. He reached up to the microphone. “Rigor mortis is pronounced, indicating death occurred at least thirty-two hours before examination.” He lifted each eyelid in turn and gazed down into the unseeing eyeballs. “She must be beginning school now, your little girl?”
    “Sixth grade.”
    “A prodigy.” Hippolito