Spiral Read Free Page B

penis was shriveled amidst thick black pubic hair, and the glans was almost entirely hidden by the foreskin. The member was incredibly small, almost cute, given the robustness of the body. Ando found himself wondering if Ryuji and Mai had been able to have normal sexual relations at all.
    He took up the scalpel and inserted it below the jaw, slicing the thick muscle in a straight line all the way down to the abdomen. The body had been dead for twelve hours and was completely cold. He broke the ribs with bone-cutters, removing them one by one, and then took out both lungs and handed them to his assistant. In med school Ryuji had been a diehard anti-smoker, and from the look of his lungs, he'd remained one to the end. They were a handsome shade of pink. With practiced movements, the assistant weighed and measured the lungs, announcing his findings to the recorder, who wrote them down. All the while, the room was bathed in flashes of light as photos were taken of the lungs from every angle. Everybody knew his job well, and everything went forward without a hitch.
    The heart was enveloped in a thin fatty membrane. Depending on the light it looked either whitish or yellowish, and it was a bit larger than average. Eleven ounces. The weight of Ryuji's heart. Point thirty-six percent of his total body weight. Just looking at the outer surface of the organ, which a mere twelve hours ago had still been pumping life-blood, Ando could tell it had suffered severe necrosis. The left part of the heart, below the fatty membrane, had turned a dark reddish-brown color, darker than the rest of the heart. Part of the coronary artery, branching off the surface of the organ to coil around it, was blocked, probably by a thrombosis. Blood had been unable to flow past that point, and the heart had stopped. Classic indicators of a heart attack.
    Based on the extent of the necrosis, Ando had a pretty good idea where the blockage had occurred: in the left coronary artery, just before it branched off. With a blockage there the chance of death was extremely high. The cause of death, then, had pretty well been established, though he'd have to wait for test results, which wouldn't come in for a day at least, to know what had caused the blockage. Ando pronounced with confidence a case of "myocardial infarction due to blockage of the left coronary artery" and moved on to extracting the liver. After that, he checked for abnormalities in the kidneys, spleen, and intestines, and examined the stomach contents, but nothing caught his eye.
    He was about to cut the skull open when his assistant craned his neck suspiciously.
    "Doctor, take a look at that throat."
    The assistant pointed to a spot inside the throat where it had been split open. Part of the mucus membrane on the surface of the pharynx had ulcerated. The ulcer wasn't large, and Ando might have overlooked it had it not been for his assistant's alertness. Ando had never seen anything like it before. It was probably unrelated to the cause of death, but he cut out a piece of it anyway. He'd have to wait until they ran tests on the tissue sample before he could tell just what it was.
    Now, he made incisions in the skin around Ryuji's head, and peeled back the scalp from the back to the forehead. The man's wiry hair now covered his face, his eyes, nose, and mouth, and the white inner surface of the scalp was exposed to the overhead light. Anyone who saw it could tell that the human face was constructed out of a single slab of flesh. Ando removed the top of the skull and lifted out the brain.
    It was a whitish mass covered with innumerable wrinkles. Even among the elite students who were assembled at their medical school, Ryuji had stood out for his brains. He was good at English, German, and French, and he'd ask questions in class that you couldn't follow if you weren't reading the latest foreign bulletins. That managed to intimidate even the lecturers. But the deeper he'd gotten into medicine, the more Ryuji's