Hardscrabble Road(39)

3


The order to run fingerprint checks on any and all corpses that had been delivered to the morgue since January 27 had come down more than two hours ago, and everybody in the facility had been ignoring it ever since. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to be helpful, Dr. Ramarcharadan thought. It was just that there was so much to do that nobody could handle their real workload, never mind all these calls for fingerprint checks. Dr. Ramarcharadan was from the Punjab. He’d been in America a total of fifty-two months. He was the most conscientious of men, but there was only so much he could do with a facility that was short-staffed in the best of times, and now—with this cold and the people dying from it—so outclassed that it might as well have been doing nothing at all.

Except that that wasn’t true, and Dr. Ramarcharadan knew it. He was managing six autopsies a day these days. He was beginning to see corpses in his sleep. In India, he had not been a pathologist, and hadn’t expected to be. Here, he’d had no other choice. In a few years, he might be able to get all his certifications in order and be allowed to perform surgery again, which was what he was trained for.

At the moment, he was all suited up and ready to go on one more corpse. His back hurt, his legs hurt, his feet hurt, and everything in his head was humming. He’d been at it since six o’clock this morning. He thought his wrists were about to fall off.

The good thing about pathology was that you didn’t have to worry about finesse. Unless there was some overriding reason, and he couldn’t think of what one might be, you could just go ahead and do what you did without worrying about the patient’s feelings. This patient was on the chart as a homeless man picked up on one of those nights when just taking out the garbage could give a man frostbite. Dr. Ramarcharadan didn’t think there was much to be preferred in the Punjab over the United States, but the weather was definitely something. He tapped into the chest bone, made a long cut, and began to peel away the skin. They were getting to them far too late these days. They always left the homeless ones for last, because nobody was waiting to take possession of them. They should get at them right away. There was something wrong about leaving them here for so long, even frozen, even knowing they could not deteriorate.

Dr. Ramarcharadan’s wife sometimes said she didn’t like him to touch her when he came home, because she knew he’d had his hands on dead bodies, and that was the work of untouchables—but he didn’t believe that. She was not a religious woman, any more than he was a religious man, and she didn’t approve of the caste system either. He thought it was an excuse, the way other women might get a headache. Ah, well. She’d borne him three sons in four years, all American citizens. Maybe she was just tired.

If he hadn’t been thinking about the sons—good sons, too, strong and healthy, and intelligent—he would have noticed sooner. As it was, he was peeling back bone before it struck him, and for a long moment he didn’t understand what he was seeing. It was the intestines he noticed first. What were the chances of that? He should have seen the obvious, but he hadn’t.

He took a deep breath and told himself to calm down. He thought about the newspaper headlines and the television news stories and the editorials in magazines over the last few weeks. He tried to remember what he did and didn’t know about how the law worked in the United States of America. The problem was, he mostly didn’t know. He wasn’t even sure that this would not, somehow, turn out to be his fault.

He looked at the intestines again, just to make sure. They were still twisting in the wrong direction. Then he looked up the torso and checked that, too. It had not miraculously become something it was not.

He stepped back away from the table and motioned to the nurse. When they were both outside the swinging doors in the waiting area he said, “We must call the police now, right away. We must not touch this body again until they come. Do you understand that?”

She nodded frantically and then took off at a run.

Dr. Ramarcharadan didn’t remind her that there was a phone on the wall not fifteen feet away.

He didn’t blame her for her panic.





EIGHT



1


For the Philadelphia Police Department, the real problem with the cold was that engines wouldn’t start. There had been some talk about constructing a heated garage for police and emergency vehicles, and the ambulances were parked in underground hospital garages that were never allowed to get cold enough to stall them, but in the end fiscal responsibility won out over common sense and shared history. Besides, it was an election year, and in an election year it never did anybody any good to suggest something that might require raising taxes. It did do whoever suggested it some good to propose new products and services, but this wasn’t 1957 anymore. If you suggested the service, your opponent would bring up the taxes.