A day out at the morgue
Wayne Deeker
Mikki and I went to the mortuary open day on Saturday. We'd been trying to get in there for years. It was open as part of science week.
A single-storey grey building, it stands alone in a grassy area at the end of a long traffic-less dead-end near the Kingston lake front. Little apart from the discreet sign: "ACT Forensic Medical Centre" distinguishes it from the government fisheries laboratory not far away. It's a building that doesn't brag.
Here there's none of those long wimpy mazes to deter casual visitors bursting in, as in hospital morgues. Through the front door and foyer, it's down a short tunnel, left turn, then you're in.
Around the corner, a stainless steel gurney trolley, draped with white sheet, formed a table holding preserved organ displays. A diseased kidney here, a lung cancer there, and hundreds of others. One of the autopsy tables had a full-size mannikin, but mostly it was jars of preserved organs of pathological interest. Yawn. Hardly a suggestion of homicide, deliberately so. But there was one semi-cool amputated gangrenous hand. Despite the amazing tameness, one kid had to go heave.
We'd finished with the specimens after a few minutes, so I talked for a while with the senior cop on duty about police procedure. Simultaneously, a jolly plump pathologist with red bow-tie and suspenders gave an excited (not exciting) impromptu lecture to the assembled crowd about the specimens on display. "Now zis vas a wery interestink aortic embolism." It was, I must admit.
As we were about to leave, I found Mikki in the foyer talking to a kindly stooped man, 70-ish, the only one wearing a jacket and tie. They were talking about the latin motto on the wall, Mortui Viventes Docent, "The Dead Teach the Living". Mikki knew the translation, and could pronounce it correctly, which surprised him. He gave her his card, Professor Alfred B. Shepherd, Senior Pathologist for the ACT. As he chatted with me his eyes, cataracted and pointing in different directions, darted slightly, perhaps hesitant at the unfamiliar interaction with the living. Though warm, they were eyes that had seen too much.
We hung around for the talk he said he'd be giving, but never did. Back inside the autopsy room, he was talking again with Mikki and left his textbook (Trauma Pathology) on one of the autopsy tables, open at a very interesting page.
He wandered off, forgetting the book, and Mikki started skipping through it at her normal android reading speed. It was fabulous, a detailed technical tome of forensic medicine for the professional pathologist: full of colour pictures. My favourites were the "shotgun suicide cranial exit wound" and the Singapore student head-first jumper suicide (surprising how far apart the eyes ended up, Picasso style). Thousands of full colour prints of everything of interest to the forensic pathologist, and similarly informative text. We skimmed it together, with me occasionally commenting: "Ooh, that must've really hurt."
Now this was more like it! This was what we'd come to see, not boring "ovarian carcinoma" or "cardiac infarction" in jars.
Mikki was slurping it up.
She said, "give me a pen."
I thought she was going to write some poetic tribute to her new friend or some variation on "property of ...". I said, "don't do it," but she did. She wrote a little note in the back. I walked away, went back to the specimens.
Later, she gave me that smile, indicating the door. I said, "I don't want to know."
Alone and carrying her bag, I slipped out through the throng and headed for the car. About ten metres behind me, she just strolled out with the book in plain view in front of her tummy, as a student would hold it. She didn't bat an eyelid.
That's the secret to stealing things, don't look as if you're doing something wrong. Just be natural and calm.
And she stole it from right under the noses of three cops, three medical technicians, two pathologists, and about a hundred kids and other members of the public.
Later I looked it up at Amazon.com: it cost US $225. Our professor was a chapter author. His special subject was bomb-trauma. It was a signed copy.
Later, in the car, a bit down the road, she gave me a guilty grin. "It was fate!" she blurted. "It was meant for me. It was open at that page, just sitting there! And he had a quote from Shakespeare!"
"Rationalise it all you want, if it helps," I said.
The note at the back wasn't a tribute or poem. It was her address and phone number. Even while apparently just reading it, she was already planning to "borrow" it. The contact details were so that when she returned it they'd know who'd borrowed it and why. I told her only a total retard would finish off the perfect crime by returning the evidence with her name in the back.
I said she was already home free, so she may as well just keep it. I was planning to buy a copy anyway.