Free The Trials of Nikki Hill by Dick Lochte, Christopher Darden Page A

way through the corpses. Although she kept her eyes straight forward, her peripheral view took in the bodies. Male. Female. Fat. Thin. Black. White. Brown. Yellow. Stabbed. Shot. Beaten and bruised. Blood draining off in troughs along the sides of the gurneys.
    She realized she was holding her breath. She paused, eyes on the ceiling, then continued on to the operating room.
    The scene before her was worse than any nightmare she could have imagined. Surgeons in powder blue casually making “Y” incisions on corpses. Faces being pulled back. The top of one head being cut off, like opening a can of tuna. Brains being scooped out for analysis. Organs being removed, bagged, weighed, and labeled.
    One of the masked men approached a body with an instrument resembling a bolt cutter. Nikki stood rooted to the floor, unable to look away as, with a crack as loud as a gunshot, he broke and lifted the breastplate of some hapless corpse.
    Onward she moved, faster now. Passing organs being weighed. Blood being measured by a ladle. A brain being set aside for dissecting.
    Nikki stopped at a table where a fleshy black woman was humming peacefully through her powder-blue mask while her latex-gloved fingers sewed up a long, gray male corpse with an instrument that looked like a thick crochet needle. “Excuse me,” Nikki said to her.
    The woman looked up from her work and nodded. “Minute,” she said. She finished a stitch, and then, instead of merely setting the needle aside, she stuck it into the dead body’s stomach as if it were a pincushion.
    She yanked down her mask and said, “Now. How can I help you, sister?”
    “The autopsy of Madeleine Gray?”
    The woman gestured with a gloved hand. “Down that hall, the first door on your left. Dragon Lady’s there, herself, so make sure you get suited up,” she added, offering Nikki a wink as she adjusted her mask and withdrew her needle.
    In the hall the prosecutor was struck by a wave of dizziess. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
Damn you,
she cursed herself,
toughen up right now!
    It seemed to help. The wooziness passed and she entered the autopsy room, already crowded with powder blue people. In spite of their surgical masks she easily identified Ray Wise, Detectives Morales and Goodman, and the coroner, a bland, emotionless Asian-American named Ann Fugitsu, who stood back a pace, observing the pathologist and his assistants as they hovered over the remains of what had once been Madeleine Gray.
    Nikki lifted a scrub suit from a hook near the door. One of the assistants got her a mask.
    Dr. Fugitsu brought them up to speed in very little time. “It is our preliminary opinion that death was due to skull fracture causing injury to the brain,” she stated without emotion. “There appears to have been a significant brutalizing of the body. Then a solid object, smooth rather than sharp, did the final job, cracking the back of the cranium.”
    Judging by physicochemical changes of the body and bodily fluids and the residual reactivity of muscles to electrical and chemical stimuli, she explained, they had narrowed the window of death to approximately three hours. “Between eight and eleven P.M. The body was, of course, in rigor when it was first examined in the alley.”
    The deceased had been legally inebriated. “Blood showed an alcohol content of point-one-four. There was some drug residue. Cocaine or some other coca derivative. We will send the usual sample to the forensic toxicologist. The vagina showed some irritation, and vaginal fluids were present but no semen was found.”
    “Meaning what?” Wise asked. “That she hadn’t been schtupped?”
    Dr. Fugitsu’s normally unreadable face showed a flash of annoyance. “She apparently had been sexually stimulated prior to her murder. The stimulation did not go as far as orgasm. If she was with a man, he must have used a contraceptive, and one that left no traces of latex or lubricant.”
    Dr. Fugitsu noted that no