Beneath Her Skin by Gregg Olsen (ebook reader for manga txt) 📗

arms. More on her stomach. New ones on her arms,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice that was a mask for her emotions. Among the things that Dr. Waterman loathed above all others was a child on her stainless steel table.

“Cause of death?” asked the assistant, a faux-hawked newbie to the office named Terry Morris.

Dr. Waterman shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “I’m sure you’d like to wrap this up so you can go text someone or something, but here we do things right, methodically, and by the book.” She looked over her glasses with a kind look.

No need to make the new kid hate me. There’s plenty of time for that later, she thought.

“Let’s get there one step at a time,” she said, returning her unflinching gaze back to the dead girl.

She pointed to the cuts on Katelyn’s thigh and frowned. They were the newest. Fresh.

“Not deep at all,” she said.

“The girl was f-ed up,” Terry said.

Dr. Waterman was of the Makah Tribe, with a medical degree from the University of Washington in Seattle; she was a serious woman who thought that death deserved respect one hundred percent of the time. She glared at Terry. He was going to be a challenge. But she was up for it.

“You don’t know me well yet, Terry. But I don’t talk like that. And I don’t want my assistants talking like that.”

“It isn’t like the dead can hear,” he said.

She shot a lightning-fast look at him with her dark eyes and immediately returned her attention to Katelyn.

“How do you know?” she asked.

Terry, a young man with large green eyes, maybe too large for his small face, rolled them upward, but kept his mouth clamped shut—for a change. He was learning.

Death by electrocution is exceedingly rare. Dr. Waterman could recall only two other examples of such cases in the county. One involved a Lucky Jim’s Tribal casino worker who had become electrified when he was working with some faulty wiring that fed power to the slot machines. He had assumed his coworker had cut the power source.

It was, Dr. Waterman had thought at the time, a very unlucky way to die.

The other involved a pretty, young Bremerton woman who was out walking her Dalmatian after high winds pummeled the region, dropping power lines and blacking out half the county. When her exuberant dog ran ahead, the woman used the moment to tie a loosened shoelace. When she bent down, her knee made contact with a thousand volts of electricity from a power line obscured by fallen tree branches.

Katelyn’s case was different, of course. Her death was the result of a household appliance coming into contact with the water in her bathtub.

Dr. Waterman pointed to obvious burns on the right side of Katelyn’s torso. “The contact with the voltage was there,” she said. The burns were severe, leaving the skin so red it was nearly cooked.

“Yeah, I see,” Terry said, not wanting to get slapped down for any editorializing or joke making. It took a lot of personal restraint for him not to say, for example, Watt are you talking about?

Next, the cutting and the sawing. The noise of a human body being violated by steel is horrendous—even for those who do it every day. The saw Birdy Waterman used emitted a noise somewhere between a Sears electric carving knife and a small chainsaw. Some medical examiners pipe music into their autopsy suites, turning them into hell’s concept of a downtown after-hours club. Way after-hours. Others turn up the volume on their playlists during the internal exam. Not Birdy Waterman. She hummed a little and watched her assistant’s green eyes turn a little greener.

“Some fractured ribs here,” she said, indicating faint lines where the bones had mended.

“Abuse?” Terry asked, peering over the pathologist’s shoulder to get a better look.

Dr. Waterman shook her head. “Medical history from the father says that Katelyn was in a bus accident when she was five. No other hospitalizations.”

Katelyn’s heart and other organs were removed from her body, weighed, measured and examined.

What Birdy Waterman saw confirmed her suspicions. Katelyn Berkley’s heart had stopped beating because of trauma resulting from the electric shock.

“So is it a homicide?” Terry asked. “Accidental death? Suicide?”

Dr. Waterman raised the plastic shield that had kept the spatter of blood and tissue from her face.

“The girl had emotional problems,” she said, indicating the scars from the cuts the victim had made on herself. Most were old and faded, but some were quite new. “And while it is highly unlikely that she tried to kill herself with the espresso machine, it appears that’s what happened.”

“So how are you going to rule?” Terry asked.

Dr. Waterman took more photos and removed her green latex gloves and face mask, which were splattered with brain matter and bone chips.

“Accidental,” she said. “The police saw no evidence of foul play at the scene to indicate homicide. And the parents don’t need to live with the added heartache of wondering what they did wrong—even if they did something wrong. She’s dead. It’s over.”

She started toward the door of the shower and dressing room.

“You can close. No staples. Small stitches, Terry. She’s a young girl. I don’t want the funeral home to think we do the work of a blind seamstress. Katelyn…” She paused and looked at the paperwork that came with the body. “Katelyn Melissa Berkley deserves better. She’s only fifteen.”

“So? She’s dead,” Terry muttered under his breath, hoping the woman with the sharp scalpel and soft heart didn’t hear him.

But she did.

“I’ll remember that when I see you on my table,” she said.

If there was a case to be made for waiting out the geekdom that is middle school before writing someone off as a complete loser, Colton James was Exhibit A. During the summer between middle school and high school, Colton had morphed into something of a hottie.

Colton was one-sixteenth S’Klallam, the native people who’d lived in Port Gamble when it was called Memalucet. He had tawny skin, a mass of unusually