Free The Cobra Event by Richard Preston

use your own knife, I assume.”
    She nodded.
    Kly got her a chain-mail glove. She put it on her left hand and replaced the yellow rubber glove. She opened her prosection pack and removed her steel knife.
    “Glenn will help you with the forensics, and he’ll sign the documents,” Nathanson said.
    Nathanson left to make his rounds in the Pit. He passed by the autopsy tables one by one, stopping to chat with pathologists, having a look at each of the day’s cases. As she watched him walk away, Austen felt that he had been sizing her up from the moment they met. From the beginning, he had been thinking of turning the autopsy over to her, but he had held off making the decision until the last possible moment. She watched him out of the corner of her eye.
    Dudley said to Austen in a low voice, “I never saw the point of Lex’s calling the C.D.C. It was something he wanted to do, not me. You will follow my direction. Is that clear?”
    “Yes.”
    “The last thing we need around here is a C.D.C. trainee who’s carrying on her education in public.”
    Ben Kly pretended not to hear a word of this. He took up a rubber hose and rinsed the girl’s body gently with running water.
    Across the tables, the day’s work had gotten under way. A flash went off on the other side of the room. A photographer was standing on a ladder, taking pictures of a shooting victim, a young Hispanic man who had been caught in a heroin deal gone bad. They had peeled off his bloody clothes and hung them to dry on a hat stand, and a pathologist was writing on tags with a Magic Marker and tying the tags to the clothes, while a New York City homicide detective stood by and watched. Another table was getting a lot of attention. On it lay a naked woman. She was marked with bruises about the chest and head, she appeared to have a fractured skull, and there were deep stab wounds in her belly, which was very large. Eight months’ pregnant, she had been beaten and stabbed to death by her husband. A fetus had apparently died of stab wounds inside her. Someone at another table said, “Who’s got the loppers?” A hot smell of intestinal contents filled the air, a smell that resembled the foulest diarrhea. There was the murmur of voices, as pathologists chatted with one another across the tables. The Pit was one of the beating centers of life in New York City, essential to its daily existence, yet unseen and unimagined by most people who lived in the city. The case of the girl who had collapsed in school was not getting much attention from the other pathologists.
    Dudley called over the photographer, who took a few pictures of Kate Moran. Then Austen and Dudley together did an external examination.
    In the bright fluorescent light, they looked at the skin. They rolled the body sideways and examined the girl’s back, then rolled her so that she was resting on her back again. When a baby is born, the attending pediatrician examines the baby’s genitalia, to check for malformation. At the other end of life, the pathologist performs a similar examination. Austen parted the girl’s legs and looked carefully there. She saw a string and some blood. The girl had been having her menstrual period. Pulling the string, she removed the tampon and looked at it, turning it over in her gloved hands. It bore a few spots of bright red blood.
    An experienced morgue attendant, or diener, can help find things. Ben Kly pointed to the girl’s nose. “Lot of mucus there.”
    Austen looked. Coming out of the girl’s nose, along with the blood, was a slick watery fluid, a fair amount of it. “You’re right,” she said. “It looks like she had a cold.”
    “She
has
a cold,” Kly commented.
    “What?” Alice said, looking at him.
    “You know how a cold survives in a dead body?” Kly said. “I’ve caught colds from bodies. Cadaver colds are the worst. I think that cold gets mean sitting in that body, saying, ‘This guy is dead.
Get
me out of here.’ ”
    “I wonder what