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question.
    The tech was busy at the sink, and so the doctor asked if I would get him the turkey baster from the cart. He always recognizes me but never remembers my name. Once he called me Stormy. I thought, hey, not half bad.
    â€œCould I get you to aspirate here?” He pointed to a pool of bright blood in the lower cavity. “Give me some of that in the vial there, will you? Flush the rest.”
    I didn’t really want to do it, but I did, and would have even if Doug weren’t watching. I put the baster down on the counter and stepped back as though that was enough of that while the doctor dictated, lifting out a 60-gram ovary distended with chocolatey fluid. Then he removed the 7- by 6- by 5-centimeter, 132-gram uterus, laying it in the scale. A woman named Mai Lu who stood at the erasable board at the end of the room wrote this information on it as the doctor recited.
    â€œPresence of papillations suggests neoplasm,” the doctor said. Then to Doug, whom he didn’t know, “Likely cancer.”
    Maybe the woman knew she had a malignancy and decided not to go through with the rigors of treatment, driving her car off a cliff. It crosses one’s mind: Not long ago I worried about the same thing. My mother took a drug called DES. It kept me in the womb when I was in my first restless mood to move on. In my case there was no cervical dysplasia, no precursor of cancer, but because of other chronic problems, my doctor rid me of the pear-shaped organ similar to the one now in the scale. If today I have regrets, they pass soon. On whom should I inflict these renegade cells? I used to wonder what a child of my union with my dead husband would have been like, but that’s a don’t-think zone.
    I asked, “What would you say is the age of this victim, Doctor?”
    His glasses were on the tip of his nose. The fluorescent light gave his olive skin an unhealthy green glow.
    â€œBy the look of the hipbone,” Dr. Margolis said, “and the involvement of suspicious uterine tissue, I’d say this victim was thirty-five or forty.” He put the tip of his knife on the bone. “In the public symphysis we see residual ridging. Older than middle-aged, these ridges would be gone. Also, the edges would be worn and the bone material fairly porous under microscopic examination. Now, over here,” he said, shimming more tissue away from the hipbone, “we see a slight concavity. In a youngster, this area is furrowed. Later it becomes flat, and later still concave. There’s no remarkable arthritic degradation, though I see here by this grainy area at the major muscle attachment that she may have had some occasional inflammation.”
    I stopped making notes because there was no way I could keep up with him, and we’d get the transcribed report later.
    Doug said, “How tall, would you say?”
    â€œFemur measurement indicates she was five six to five ten. On X ray, no sign of trauma to the ribs or shoulder blades. Has not borne children, either.” He pointed out a barely visible groove in a bone near the lower spine. “This groove would be wider and deeper. In some women after childbirth, what we call dorsal pits form on the front of the pelvis.”
    I asked, “Did X ray show any wound damage, gun—”
    He shook his head no. “Lungs are clear.”
    My gaze went automatically to the chest, which lay open, with the ribs folded back and the two bean-shaped organs already removed.
    â€œShe was dead before the car burned, then.”
    â€œNo smoke inhalation,” Dr. Margolis said. Then he added, moving forward to the chest area and folding back a chest flap, “We have implants in both breasts.” With his scalpel, he probed the base of the charcoal weld, exposing a rubbery flap that resembled a brown mushroom petticoating a tree.
    Doug gave me a look, and I lifted my shoulders to say don’t ask me.
    â€œX rays show no fractures of