San Francisco’s newest medical examiner, Dr. Jessie Teska, has made a chilling discovery. A suspected overdose case contains hints of something more sinister: a drug lord’s attempt at a murderous cover-up. But as Jessie digs deeper, she faces unexpected pushback from her superiors—and pressure to stay in her lane, close the case and move on.
For Jessie, San Francisco was supposed to be a fresh start, a chance to escape her troublesome past in Los Angeles. Instead she finds herself overworked and underpaid, working in a dingy morgue and living under the fog in a cramped converted cable car. Now, despite warnings from her colleagues and threats from her boss, she is determined to find the truth.
As more bodies land on her autopsy table, Jessie uncovers a constellation of deaths that point to a plot involving opioid traffickers and San Francisco’s shifting terrain of tech start-ups. Autopsy means “see for yourself,” and Jessie Teska won’t stop until she has seen it all—even if it means the next corpse on the slab could be her own.
PROLOGUE
Los Angeles
May
May
The
dead woman on my table had pale blue eyes, long lashes, no mascara. She
wore a thin rim of black liner on her lower lids but none on the upper. I
inserted the twelve gauge needle just far enough that I could see its beveled
tip through the pupil, then pulled the syringe plunger to aspirate a sample of
vitreous fluid. That was the first intrusion I made on her corpse during Mary
Catherine Walsh’s perfectly ordinary autopsy.
The
external examination had been unremarkable. The decedent appeared to be in her midthirties,
blond hair with dun roots, five foot four, 144 pounds. After checking her over
and noting identifying marks (monochromatic professional tattoo of a Celtic
knot on lower left flank, appendectomy scar on abdomen, well-healed stellate
scar on right knee), I picked up a scalpel and sliced from each shoulder to the
breastbone, and then all the way down her belly. I peeled back the layers of
skin and fat on her torso—an ordinary amount, maybe a little on the chubby
side—and opened the woman’s chest like a book.
I had made similar Y-incisions on 256 other bodies
during my ten months as a forensic pathologist at the Los Angeles County
Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office, and this one was easy. No sign of trauma.
Normal liver. Healthy lungs. There was nothing wrong with her heart. The only
significant finding was the white, granular material of the gastric contents.
In her stomach was a mass of semidigested pills.
When
I opened her uterus, I found she’d been pregnant. I measured the fetus’s
foot length and estimated its age at twelve weeks. The fetus appeared to have
been viable. It was too young to determine sex.
I
deposited the organs one by one at the end of the stainless-steel table.
I had just cut into her scalp to start on the skull when Matt, the forensic
investigator who had collected the body the day before, came in.
“Clean
scene,” he reported, depositing the paperwork on my station. “Suicide.”
I
asked him where he was going for lunch. Yogurt and a damn salad at his
desk, he told me: bad cholesterol and a worried wife. I extended my condolences
as he headed back out of the autopsy suite.
I
scanned through Matt’s handwriting on the intake sheet and learned that
the body had been found, stiff and cold, in a locked and secure room at the Los
Angeles Omni hotel. The cleaning staff called the police. The ID came from the
name on the credit card used to pay for the room, and was confirmed by
fingerprint comparison with her driver’s license thumbprint. A handwritten note
lay on the bed stand, a pill bottle in the trash. Nothing else. Matt was right:
There was no mystery to the way Mary Walsh had died.
I hit the dictaphone’s toe trigger and pointed my mouth toward the
microphone dangling over the table. “The body is identified by a Los Angeles
County Medical Examiner’s tag attached to the right great toe, inscribed
LACD-03226, Walsh, Mary Catherine…”
I
broke the seal on the plastic evidence bag and pulled out the pill
bottle. It was labeled OxyContin, a powerful painkiller, and
it was empty.
“Accompanying
the body is a sealed plastic bag with an empty prescription medication bottle.
The name on the prescription label…”
I
read the name but didn’t speak it. The hair started standing up on my
neck. I looked down at my morning’s work—the splayed body, flecked with gore,
the dissected womb tossed on a heap of other organs.
That can’t be, I told myself. It can’t.
On
the clipboard underneath the case intake sheet I found a piece of hotel
stationery sealed in another evidence bag. It was the suicide note, written in
blue ink with a steady feminine hand. I skimmed it—then stopped, and went back.
I read it again.
I heard the clipboard land at my feet. I gripped the
raised lip of my autopsy table. I held tight while the floor fell away.
Judy Melinek was
an assistant medical examiner in San Francisco for nine years, and today works
as a forensic pathologist in Oakland and as CEO of PathologyExpert Inc. She and
T.J. Mitchell met as undergraduates at Harvard, after which she studied
medicine and practiced pathology at UCLA. Her training in forensics at the New
York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner is the subject of their first book,
the memoir Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical
Examiner.
T.J. Mitchell is a writer with an English degree from
Harvard, and worked in the film industry before becoming a full-time
stay-at-home dad. He is the New York Times bestselling co-author of Working
Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner with his
wife, Judy Melinek.
SOCIAL:
TWITTER:
·
Judy: @drjudymelinek
·
TJ: @TJMitchellWS
FB: @DrWorkingStiff
Insta:
·
Judy: @drjudymelinek
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