Read Trace for Free Online Page B

than one rude hour, and she detects a warning in his tone. She wanted to intrude and now she may get an exposure she will find decidedly unpleasant. Dr. Marcus is a politician and not a good one. Perhaps when he was appointed, those in power had deemed him malleable and harmless, the antithesis of what they thought of her, and maybe they were wrong.
         He turns to the woman directly on his right, a big, horsey woman with a horsey face and closely shorn gray hair. She must be the administrator, and he nods at her to proceed.
         "Okay," says the administrator, and everyone looks at the yellow photocopies of today's turndowns, views, and autopsies. "Dr. Ramie, you were on call last night?" she asks.
         "I sure was. "Tis the season," Dr. Ramie replies.
         No one laughs. A pall hangs over the conference room. It has nothing to do with the patients down the hall who await the last and most invasive physical examination they'll ever have with any doctor on earth.
         "We have Sissy Shirley, ninety-two-year-old black female from Hanover County, history of heart disease, found dead in bed," Dr. Ramie says, looking at her notes. "She was a resident of an assisted living facility and she's a view. In fact, I already viewed her. Then we have Benjamin Franklin. That really is his name. Eighty-nine-year-old black male, also found dead in bed, history of heart disease and nerve failure ..."
         "What?" Dr. Marcus interrupts. "What the hell is nerve failure?"
         Several people laugh and Dr. Ramie's face heats up. She is an overweight, homely young woman and her face is glowing like a halogen heater on high.
         "I don't believe nerve failure is a legitimate cause of death," Dr. Marcus plays off his deputy chief's acute embarrassment like an actor playing off his captive audience. "Please don't tell me we've brought some poor soul into our clinic because he allegedly died of nerve failure."
         His attempt at humor is not meant kindly. Clinics are for the living and poor souls are people in hard times, not victims of violence or random, senseless death. In three words, he has managed to completely deny and mock the reality of people down the hall who are pitifully cold and stiff and zipped inside vinyl and fake fur funeral home pouches, or naked on hard steel gurneys or on hard steel tables, ready for the scalpel and Stryker saw.
         "I'm sorry," Dr. Ramie says with glowing cheeks. "I misread my notes. Renal failure is what I have here. Even I can't read my writing anymore."
         "So old Ben Franklin," Marino starts in with a serious face as he plays with the cigarette, "he didn't die of nerve failure after all? Like maybe when he was out there tying a key to his kite string? Anybody on that list of yours happen to die of lead poisoning? Or are we still calling it gunshot wounds?"
         Dr. Marcus's stare is flat and cold.
         Dr. Ramie goes on in a monotone, "Mr. Franklin also is a view. I did view him already. We have Finky . . . uh, Finder ..."
         "Not Finky, oh Lordy," Marino keeps up the straight-man charade in that huge voice of his. "You can't find her? I hate it when Finky does that, damn her."
         "Is that the proper name?" Dr. Marcus's voice has the thin ring of a metal triangle, several octaves higher than Marino's voice.
         Dr. Ramie's face is so red that Scarpetta worries the tortured woman is going to burst into tears and flee from the room. "The name I was given is what I just stated," Dr. Ramie woodenly replies. "Twenty-two-year-old black female, dead on the toilet, needle still in her arm. Possible heroin O.D. That's the second in four days in Spotsylvania. This was just handed to me." She fumbles with a call sheet. "Right before staff meeting we got a call about a forty-two-year-old white male named Theodore Whitby. Injured while working on a tractor."
         Dr. Marcus blinks behind his small wire-rimmed glasses. Faces