With one swift sweep of the blade Garcia laid open the scalp, cutting from behind the left ear, up over the crown of the head, and down to the back of the right ear. Laying aside the scalpel, Garcia worked his fingers under the front flap of scalp, then gave a strong tug. With a wet, ripping sound, the scalp peeled free of the crown and forehead, and Garcia folded the flap down over the face. Behind me, I heard Emert gasp and whisper, “Christ.” I could scarcely imagine his reaction to some of the sights and smells he would encounter later in the autopsy. Garcia peeled the other half of the scalp backward, folding it down to the nape of the neck into a sort of gruesome collar, so that the entire top of the skull was now exposed.
Garcia studied the bone in the region beneath the contusion, then stepped back and motioned to Miranda and me, inviting us to look. The bone—the frontal bone, near where it joined the parietal—showed no sign of damage, not even a hint of compression. “Well, I don’t think he died of blunt-force trauma,” I said.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Garcia. “Maybe just scraped his head when he fell. There’s no scabbing, so it’s perimortem—around the time of death. Hard to tell, though, since he was in the water, whether it’s antemortem or post.”
“How could you tell?” asked Emert. “I mean, if he hadn’t been in the water?” He leaned closer, but only a few inches closer.
“If he were still alive, the wound would have bled,” said Garcia. “But not if his heart had already quit pumping when he fell.”
“Or got dumped,” said Miranda.
“Or dumped,” echoed Emert. “But if there’s water in the lungs, that’ll mean he drowned in the pool?”
“Or somewhere,” Miranda pointed out.
“Not necessarily,” said Garcia. “Water can seep into the lungs after death. Or be absorbed from the lungs after drowning. Don’t believe everything you see on television.”
Emert sighed, though I couldn’t tell whether it was because people kept complicating the scenarios or because he was having trouble with the sight of the scalped skull. His gaze, I noticed, kept straying toward the peeled bone, then flinching away.
Next Garcia took a Stryker autopsy saw from the shelf along the wall. The saw’s motor was about twice the size of a hand blender—a kitchen gadget whose name had always struck me as a marketing department’s worst nightmare. When he switched on the motor, a fan-shaped blade on the end of a shaft began to oscillate back and forth, its strokes so rapid and tiny as to be almost invisible. I never ceased to marvel at the ingenuity of the Stryker saw: if Garcia accidentally grazed his hand with the blade, his skin would simply vibrate in time with the blade: it might tickle, but it wouldn’t cut. If he pressed down hard, though—on his own finger, or on one of the corpse’s—the blade would chew through flesh and bone in seconds.
Starting at the center of the forehead, Garcia eased the blade into the skull, going slowly to make sure he didn’t cut into the brain. When the pitch of the motor rose, telling him the blade had penetrated all three layers of the bone, he began cutting horizontally, just above the left brow ridge, across the left temple, and around toward the back of the skull. Once he was nearly there, he shifted back to the forehead again and made a mirror-image cut around the right side of the skull, so that the top of the skull—the calvarium—was attached to the lower part of the skull by a one-inch bridge of bone at the back. Then, with two deft dips of the saw, he cut that bridge into a V-shaped tab.
I heard Emert whisper to Miranda, “Why’d he do that?”
“Because it’s so stylish,” said Miranda. “And because it keeps the top of the skull from sliding around when the pieces are put back together. Helps hold things together, which is particularly good if there’s an open-casket funeral.”
“Ah,” said Emert. “Good idea.” His words sounded casual, but his tone sounded strained.
With one hand Garcia gripped the corpse’s face, clamping his fingers hard around the zygomatic arches of the cheekbones; with the other, he gripped the calvarium and tugged. As the top of the skull pulled free, I heard a wet sucking sound from the vicinity of the brain, and a horrified gasp from the direction of Detective Emert.
Garcia made a few cuts with the scalpel to sever the spinal cord and a few membranes, then gently removed the brain from the skull. It always surprised me to see how much more easily the brain could be disconnected than, say, a femur or a rib, which took some determined cutting and tugging. After weighing it in the meat scales used to weigh organs—it tipped the scales at 1,773 grams, or a bit shy of three pounds—he laid it on a tray and nodded at Miranda. Miranda tied a loop of string around the bit of spinal cord dangling down, then suspended the brain upside down in a large jar of formalin, a weak solution of formaldehyde. Marinating for a couple weeks in the formalin would “fix” the brain: not as in “repair,” but as in “preserve and harden.” Garcia pronounced the appearance of Novak’s brain as normal, though from what little I’d heard about the scientist’s work, his brain sounded better than normal, at least during his working life.