I immediately thought about Jack the Ripper, one of the earliest recorded serial killers. He tore his victims apart so viciously that most of them were barely recognizable.
Had Jeb Jolley been attacked by a serial killer? It was certainly possible, but which kind? The FBI split serial killers into two categories: organized and disorganized. An organized killer was like Ted Bundy—suave, charming, and intelligent, who planned his crimes and covered them up as well as he could afterward. A disorganized killer was like the Son of Sam, who struggled to control his inner demons and then killed suddenly and brutally each time those demons broke free. He called himself Mr. Monster. Which kind had killed Jeb, the sophisticate or the monster?
I sighed and forced myself to discard the thought. This wasn't the first time I'd been eager to find a serial killer in my home town. I needed to get my mind back onto the body itself, and appreciate it for what it was rather than what I wanted it to be.
Margaret opened the body's abdomen, revealing a large plastic bag containing most of its internal organs. These were normally removed during the course of an autopsy anyway, though of course in Jeb's case they were removed at or slightly before the time of death. Even if they'd been removed, though, we still had to embalm them—we couldn't just throw part of your loved one away because we didn't want to deal with it, and we weren't equipped with a crematorium. Margaret set the bag on a cart and wheeled it over to the wall to work on the organs; they would be full of bile and other junk, stuff that the embalming fluid couldn't deal with, so it all had to be sucked out.
In a normal embalming this is done after the formaldehyde gets pumped in, but the nice thing about an autopsy body was that you could do the embalming and the organ work at the same time. Mom and Margaret had been doing this together for so many years that they moved smoothly, without need to talk.
"You help me, John," said Mom, reaching for the disinfectant— she was too much of a perfectionist not to wash a body before she embalmed it, even one as clean as this. The body cavity was wide and empty, though the heart and lungs were mostly intact, and Jeb's midsection looked like a deflated, bloody balloon. Mom washed it first and covered it with a sheet.
A thought came unbidden to my mind—the organs had been piled up at the scene of the crime. Very few killers remained with the bodies after the fact, but serial killers did.
Sometimes they posed it, or defaced it, or simply played with it like a doll. It was called ritualizing the kill, and it was a lot like what had happened to Jeb's organs.
Maybe it had been a serial killer. I shook my head to clear the thought away, and held the body while mom sprayed it with Dis-Spray.
Jeb had not been a small man, and his limbs were even plumper now that they were filled with stagnant fluid. I pressed my finger against his foot and the impression held for a few seconds before rebounding slowly, It was like poking a marshmallow.
"Stop playing," said Mom. We washed the body, and then look the sheet back off of the main cavity. His insides were marbled with fat. There was still enough of his circulatory sysrem in place to use the pump, but a lot of open wounds and leaks would make the pump lose fluid and pressure. We had to close those up.
"Get me string," said Mom. "About seven inches long." I took off my plastic gloves and threw them in the trash, then began to cut lengths of string. She reached into the cavity and probed for severed major arteries, and each time she found one I handed her a piece of string to tie it off. While we worked,
Margaret turned on the vacuum and started sucking all the gunk out of the organs, one by one; she used a tool called a trocar, which was basically just a vacuum nozzle with a blade on the end. She punched it into an organ, sucked out the gunk, then moved on to another.
Mom left one vein and one artery open in the chest cavity and began connecting them to the pump and the drain-tube; there was no need to open the shoulder when the killer had already opened the chest for us. The first chemical in the pump this time was a coagulant, which seeped slowly through the body and helped close the holes too -small to seal by hand.
Some of it began to leak out into the empty torso, but this flow soon stopped as the coagulant contacted the air, hardened, and; sealed up the body. I used to worry that it would seal the exit tube as well, but the opening was large enough that it never got the chance.