Fatal Reaction

already had enough dead bodies for one day. Besides, I’d never seen an autopsy and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to, especially not so soon after dinner.
    “Dr. Gordon says come on down. The more the merrier. I think she figures this is a good way to keep your boyfriend and his well-connected friends off her back.”
    “Great,” I replied miserably, huddling down into the folds of my cashmere wrap.
    Unfortunately we didn’t have far to go, and soon we were pulling into the parking lot behind the Robert J. Stein Institute for Forensic Medicine. A ten-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire had been erected around Sarrek’s trailer, and the entire area was lit up like a prison yard. Elliott explained that double-deck tourist buses had taken to stopping there, and they’d erected the fence to keep out souvenir hunters.
    We parked the car and I followed him into the building, feeling ridiculous in my evening clothes. The attendant at the desk told us that Dr. Gordon was in autopsy suite three and that she was expecting us. With a growing sense of dread I followed Elliott down the hall.
    “Are you okay with this?” he asked with an inquiring look as we approached the door.
    “I can hardly wait,” I replied, determined not to disgrace myself. Elliott smiled and took my hand. I was so nervous about where I was going that I did not protest.
    “It’s about time you two showed up,” said Joe Blades by way of greeting from the far side of the room. He looked like he’d put on weight since I’d seen him last and his skin, always pale, had taken on a pasty fluorescent-induced pallor that I suspected was from too much time at his desk doing paperwork on the Sarrek victims and not enough time on the basketball court.
    “Dr. Gordon,” said Elliott. “Thanks for the invite.”
    “Are you kidding? The mayor himself called me this morning and told me to give you every cooperation.” While Stephen may not have been talking to me, I reflected that he’d certainly wasted no time in getting on the phone to everybody else. “Besides, you know I always do my best work with an audience,” she continued, turning back to her work. On the metal table in front of her lay the now thawed body of Michael Childress. His major organs had been removed and his empty center yawned at us grotesquely.
    On the ceiling above the body was an overhead camera mounted on tracks so that it could be moved and focused over different regions of the corpse. A microphone dangled somewhere above Childress’s chest with a foot pedal to turn it on and off as the pathologist dictated her findings. On a clipboard beside Childress’s head I could see a predrawn diagram of a generic body on which Dr. Gordon had already begun scribbling notes.
    To the pathologist every body tells a story and as queasy as I felt in my high heels and evening dress, I intended to stick around to hear how this particular one turned out.
    “Where are Rankin and Masterson?” asked Elliott, casually taking a seat beside his friend. “I can’t believe they’re so busy they can’t show up for their own case.”
    “They just ran across the street to grab dinner. They’ll be back in a couple minutes. Why don’t you tell them what you’ve told me so far, Doc?” suggested Blades.
    “As long as you understand that all of this is preliminary and so far off the record that it doesn’t even exist,” she warned us.
    Elliott and I chorused our agreement.
    “Do you know how he died yet?” I asked.
    “So far all the evidence points to hypothermia, most likely some time during the day on Sunday. I can’t pin the time down any better until I get the rest of the lab results back.”
    “Can you tell whether he was alive when he went into the freezer?” inquired Elliott.
    “Most definitely,” replied Gordon, setting the lungs on an electronic scale and making a note of their weight. “I’ve noted swelling in the extremities—ears, nose, etc.—also, focal ulcers of the gastric mucosa and evidence of pancreatic hemorrhage, all of which are consistent with death caused by hypothermia.”
    “But if he was freezing to death, why was he naked?” I asked. “His clothes were right there beside him....”
    “I’d say it was a textbook case of paradoxical undressing,” replied the medical examiner matter-of-factly as she made an incision at the back of Childress’s head and began to pull his scalp down over his face.
    “What is paradoxical undressing?” I