Reprisal Read online



  Reprisal

  Colin T. Nelson

  Rumpole Press of Minneapolis, MN

  Copyright @ 2010 by Colin T. Nelson

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 10: 0-87839-385-4

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First Edition: June 2010

  Second Edition: February 2017

  Cover art by Jeff at Loose Paint

  Rumpole Press of Minneapolis, MN

  Dedication

  For my wonderful wife, Pamela

  Also by Colin Nelson

  Flashover

  Fallout

  The Amygdala Hijack

  Up Like Thunder

  Short Stories

  Taste of Temptation

  Acknowledgments

  The creation of a story is always the result of a writer who is helped and supported by a number of others. In my case, I’m particularly thankful to my wife, Pam, for her ideas, editing, and encouragement. To Christopher Valen for his friendship and editing. Mary Logue gave her review and helpful comments. To Mary Stanton and Carol Epstein for the time they took to read and critique the manuscript. Finally, to my parents, Vern and Sherry Nelson, long gone but never forgotten, for their support of me and for always telling me to “just try it.”

  Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.

  —G.K. Chesterton

  Reprisal

  Prologue

  After making a cut from just above the left ear across the forehead to just above the right ear, she rolled the skin up over the top of his head to expose the skull. She smiled at the beautiful, glistening glow of young bone.

  This was her favorite part.

  The skull was such a distinct color and a Divine feat of perfect engineering. The pieces came together in thin, jagged lines as tightly as those of the ancient Greek architects who had sculpted the marble in the Parthenon. If her assistant wasn’t standing next to her, she’d love to take off her glove and stroke the smooth, cool surface.

  Although a small woman, Dr. Helen Wong was proud of her strength, particularly in her fingers. She reached for the Stryker saw and spoke into the microphone hanging above her head. “I am preparing to separate the skull laterally to expose the brain.” On a boy this young, the skull should come apart easily; she could always resort to brute force if necessary.

  She sighed. It was a pity to destroy the beauty before her. The saw whined and Dr. Wong started her cut.

  Even though she had the most modern of tools, Dr. Wong knew that fingers were often just as effective. And what difference did it make to this lifeless body? Because murder was alleged, Dr. Wong, as the chief Hennepin County medical examiner, had to perform an autopsy. Her job was to determine the medical cause of death. She felt pressure from the local law enforcement, the FBI, and the prosecutor to expedite her findings.

  She had read the police report summary and knew about the case from the media. More than a dozen young Somali men had disappeared without explanation from Minneapolis and St. Paul. A few had turned up in Somalia as “freedom fighters” and had been killed there. The rest were still missing. The victim in this case had returned for some unknown reason, only to end up dead in Minneapolis. At least the police had caught a suspect, who was in custody and had been charged with first-degree murder.

  As to the body slanting down on the aluminum table before her, there wasn’t any doubt, really, as to the cause of death. Anyone who had viewed the body could tell easily. The young man’s throat gaped open like a quartered watermelon from a cut that started from below one ear and slashed across to a spot below the other ear. The laceration extended down through all the tissue and muscle in the throat to reach the spine. If not for the bone in the spine stopping the weapon, the killer might have severed the head.

  Unusually deep, she pondered. Strange. Why? What kind of person would do that? Dr. Wong momentarily felt sorry for the lawyer who would have to defend someone capable of inflicting this kind of damage and destruction.

  “Turn in the tox results yet?” she barked at her assistant and instantly regretted her tone. She’d ordered the minimum tests to be run. “The FBI has been hounding me to get the data.” The assistant nodded in response. Dr. Wong hurried to finish, mindful of her appointment with the dean of the University of Minnesota Medical School later in the afternoon. That caused her to be impatient with her assistant.

  Dr. Wong also felt she’d been cheated. Her male predecessor had filled the medical examiner’s position for the county government and, at the same time, was a professor at the medical school. It meant a double salary and much more professional visibility. When first hired, she had not been offered the same arrangement. Dr. Wong was determined to change that at her appointment.

  Prior to opening the skull, Dr. Wong had completed the external exam quickly and noted that she found no identifying marks on the body. No other trauma presented itself except for the lacerated neck. Since the cause of death was clear to her, she scanned the body quickly. She studied the young black boy’s skin that had turned a shade of gray, like ashes.

  The young man’s feet were heavily calloused, unlike most other people who lived in Minnesota and wore shoes twelve months of the year—or at least until summer, when everyone switched to flip-flops. The feet seemed to be tinged the color of a rotten eggplant. Hard to tell what that meant since the blood had been drained from his body earlier. She preferred performing autopsies on lighter-skinned bodies since trauma to the underlying tissues was easier to spot.

  One thing bothered her: the same eggplant discoloration covered both his palms. Unusual. What would cause that? she wondered.

  Dr. Wong was in a hurry, and she decided they were simply abrasions, which she noted, speaking into the microphone hanging above her. She thought they could have been the result of a struggle. But it didn’t matter much since it had nothing to do with the cause of death.

  After the exterior exam, she hurried to perform the usual Y incision in the chest. To assist the team, the autopsy table had a body block, a plastic brick which rested under the body. It lifted the chest area in a high curved arc while the arms and neck fell away. The incision traveled down the length of the body. Dr. Wong preferred to use a good pair of garden pruning shears instead of the expensive autopsy equipment. The shears were stronger and cheaper. A small sheen of perspiration popped out from her forehead as she worked, since this aspect of the exam took simple, brute strength.

  She measured the subcutaneous fat of the abdomen and looked at the peritoneal surface. She found both lungs adherent to their respective pleural cavities. After her visual check, Dr. Wong used her fingers to feel around inside the opened cavity. She began to remove the organs. They would be observed, weighed, and sometimes sliced thinly, like a loaf of bread, for further analysis. In this case, she saw no need for any further analysis beyond weighing.

  The contents of the stomach revealed the remains of onions, tomatoes, meat, and what looked like pie crust. Dr. Wong and her assistant had become pretty good at guessing what the person had eaten prior to death. It was like a game to them.

  “Gyro sandwich?” the assistant said.

  Dr. Wong chuckled. “I don’t know.” She sifted through the contents with a scalpel. “There’s no pita bread. This is a new one, I guess.”

  “Yeah. Not as easy as Big Macs that congeal into a glob of fat. You can tell right away.”

  She spoke into the microphone again while examining the heart. “The atria and auricular appendages appear normal. The
valves appear normal in circumference and are thin.” She droned on until the exam of each of the organs was completed, including the kidneys, prostate, coronary artery, spleen, liver, pancreas, and thyroid.

  Dr. Wong could do this part in her sleep. While speaking, she thought ahead to the meeting with Dr. Johnson at the university. When Dr. Wong set her sights on a goal, she seldom missed. Still, her success wasn’t guaranteed.

  As she lifted the brain out of the skull, she said, “The vessels at the base of the brain appear to be intact. I detect a very subtle contusion of the right temporal tip in an area measuring one and a half centimeters.”

  Dr. Wong wondered which outfit she should wear for the meeting with Dr. Johnson. What color would be best? Something serious but not too formal. She glanced at the digital clock on the wall. “Come on, Henry. We’ve got to finish up here.”

  “If you have to run, I’ll sew it up and clean things,” he offered.

  “Thanks.” She raised up on her toes, spoke loudly, and indicated the time they’d finished the autopsy.

  Outside the exam room, she stripped off the gown, face mask, protective glasses, and latex gloves, throwing them all in the cleaning receptacle. Into the bathroom for washing and a quick check on her hair and makeup; then she’d go home and change.

  Dr. Wong climbed the stairs from the basement lab where the exam rooms were to the modern complex that housed her office. Outside, sunshine warmed her face. From the sun’s heat, a layer of snow melted away on the ground to reveal secrets from underneath, abandoned there since last fall. Someone’s worn sock, a crushed cigarette package, a broken pair of glasses with a missing lens—each looked lifeless and gray and carried a story that was now an old mystery.

  Dr. Wong climbed into her Lincoln Navigator and scrunched over the gravel as she left. Like the dirty clothing she’d dumped in the cleaning bin, she left any thoughts of the routine autopsy behind.

  Later, of course, she recognized her mistake.

  But then, how could she be blamed? The year she started medical school, it didn’t even exist.

  Chapter One