Rogue Wave Read Free Page B

soap-and-Clorox mixture off his hands. He hadn’t noticed the din in the autopsy theater when he’d been working, but now the babble of pathologists dictating their findings, the sloshing of fluids, the metallic clanking of instruments hitting the porcelain tables, and the whir of a saw cutting through the frontal bone of a skull seemed deafening.
    He looked back at the corpse on the gurney. He’d done the autopsy last week. It had been a relief to leave it to someone else to close—or at least to sew up as much as any autopsy assistant could manage to do. Five days in the ocean—not a pretty way to go. Despite the air-circulation system installed to pull up bacteria that might harbor contagion, the autopsy room still reeked with the sharp odor of body fluids, of bleach and burning bones, and of dead flesh gone rotten.
    It had been twelve years, but he could still recall his own first day here. He wouldn’t have wanted a corpse like Delaney’s then. But twelve years had changed a lot of things. The bloat didn’t bother him the way it would have, nor the head that the crabs had eaten down to the bones. You couldn’t be squeamish in this line of work. And it wasn’t the exposure cases that got to him, it was the ones who looked as if they might get up off the table and go home for dinner. The ones a doctor might have saved—that he might have saved if he’d stayed with internal medicine rather than opting for forensic pathology.
    But he’d been such a damned coward. He’d made a mistake, and he’d flagellated himself year after year for it. But there was no sense in going over it again and again. After all, he’d picked up the pieces, stuck to forensic pathology, and here he was: acting coroner. Not bad for a guy who’d regretted his choice the moment he’d applied for the residency.
    He was a good administrator. That had surprised him. It had surprised everyone. Marc Rosten, the guy who couldn’t keep his mouth shut, who couldn’t slow down enough to plan, who trusted his smarts and played his hunches, who spent the last quarter of his internship in bed with a knockout brunette when the other guys could barely muster enough energy to get out of bed after a thirty-six-hour shift. … Who would have pegged him for an administrator? And if he proved himself as acting coroner this month, he’d be getting offers from all over the country. He’d be in a position to negotiate, to sign on with the people who were committed and willing to come up with the money to make their departments tops. He wouldn’t have to spend his time fighting to stay within budget in some small county, making do with outmoded equipment, missing subtle indicators of death because there wasn’t enough staff or equipment, thanks to a board of supervisors who knew they wouldn’t get votes by allocating money to the dead. This time next year he’d be running his own first-class coroner’s department.
    If he kept things going smoothly here. He’d already had a call about this drowning. But there was nothing unusual about it. Nothing but the eyes, and however abnormal they might be, they hadn’t killed the poor bugger. No, it was asphyxia due to drowning that had done this guy in. The blood chloride levels in the chambers of the heart weren’t the same, so Delaney hadn’t been dead when he entered the water; he had indeed drowned.
    He took a final look at the body and rolled the gurney back into the freezer. Besides, this ex-cop who’d called about Delaney was off the force for a reason. And it wasn’t because of a better offer. He’d called the department to check on the guy. He hadn’t gotten the whole story, but he’d heard enough to know that Olsen was not going to be a problem, not if Olsen was relying on cops to help him out. Olsen didn’t matter. The postmortem was fine. Everything was under control. And would be for another two weeks.
    Rosten stepped into the changing room, stripped off the scrub pants and stood thinking.