Backblast, Candace Irving [i love reading books .TXT] 📗

tends to proceed at a slower pace. And, yes, I have also seen an equally accelerated pace following a simple gunshot. A rather creative bludgeoning too. Neither is it entirely unusual that Mr. Hachemi's body had also passed almost completely out of rigor by the time I opened the morgue drawer shortly after I arrived aboard this ship a mere hour and a half ago. As I said, mysteries clearly abound. Shall we open the man up and see what others we find—and, perhaps, solve them?"

This time, she and Riyad nodded in unison.

Tarrington failed to notice. The colonel had already retrieved a glistening scalpel from his instrument tray and leaned over the translator's chest to begin the initial leg of the Y incision at the crest of the man's right shoulder. Within moments, that enviably steady hand had carved the second leg and drawn the tail of the Y all the way down to the man's genitals. Skin and muscle layers peeled to the sides, Tarrington started in on the chest plate, carefully cutting through the ribs and pulling them away as one piece so that the inner organs could be examined in place.

She and Riyad watched in mutual silence as those steady hands poked, prodded, shifted and snipped. Regan caught the colonel's preoccupation with the translator's heart—along with the odd ballooning of blood that appeared to fill the sac surrounding it—but she was lost amid the stream of medical jargon that poured out of Tarrington's mouth and into the recorder.

The ME briefly paused his stream as he retrieved a syringe and filled it with blood taken directly from the heart, then resumed his steady professional spiel as he removed the organ from the body. Moving over to a separate workspace, the heart was weighed and then carefully dissected. Whatever the colonel saw as he sliced off tiny sections of tissue to send back to the lab appeared to give him pause.

Fortunately, the spook held onto his curiosity and maintained his silence alongside her.

Her silence and hope were tested as the ME moved on to the translator's lungs. Not by their removal and weighing, but by the following minute exam that took place out of her sight as the colonel painstakingly dissected the translator's pulmonary tissue, all the while remarking on the smattering of pinpoint hemorrhages within for the voice recorder.

She didn't know if Riyad understood the significance of those tiny hemorrhages, but she did. Asphyxia.

Yes, the damage that blow had caused to Hachemi's face could have easily interfered with his breathing and deprived the man of oxygen…but Tarrington hadn't mentioned a corresponding obstruction.

The liver was up—and out—next.

Dissection followed.

Was it her imagination, or was the colonel spending more time than he usually did with that organ? The number of samples he'd taken to ship back to the lab intrigued her too. She'd swear he'd taken twice as many as normal.

Just then, the ME's preoccupation with the liver folded back in to the memory of those pinpoint pulmonary hemorrhages. There, they joined up with the rictus he'd pointed out—along with the seizure Vetter and Brandt had mentioned.

The combination teased at something deep inside the recesses of her mind. She couldn't quite grasp the potential significance. But it was there.

She mentally reviewed the cases she'd worked.

No, the curious combination of organs and facts didn't dovetail into one of her investigations. Someone else's, then. But whose?

And what were the particulars?

The mystery dogged her for the next hour as the translator's remaining organs were removed, weighed and individually dissected as well.

With each successive removal, Regan was able to detach herself further and further from the reality that what lay in front of her had once been a man. Albeit a man who'd attempted to kill her and had succeeded in killing an unforgivable number of her fellow soldiers and their wives, but a man nonetheless.

She had no idea how many autopsies Riyad had attended in his career, but he appeared to be holding up well. The spook hadn't so much as batted an eye throughout the entire procedure…until the ME cut into the translator's scalp and began to fold his flesh inside out and down over his face.

The spook appeared distinctly queasy now.

Once the bone saw fired up, she wasn't feeling so hot herself. She hated that sound and the peculiar smell that always followed. The odor was more subtle than the stench of blood, bile, viscera and excrement that permeated the postmortems she'd attended, and not nearly as penetrating as the acrid stench of formaldehyde coming from the container that awaited the brain, but it always managed to get to her.

It was getting to Riyad too.

She noted the flagging tic that had taken up residence in the spook's right lower jaw as the power saw began carving a circular path through the top of the skull and murmured, "Not much longer now."

That earned her a sidelong scowl. A filthy one at that.

Fine by her.

She returned her attention to the ME as the colonel used his hammer to pop off the surreal circle of bone. The tension in Riyad's jaw ratcheted tighter as the protective meninges were carefully severed. By the time the brain had made it out of the skull and gently taken up residence in the waiting bath of formaldehyde designed to fix the organ so it, too, could be dissected and studied a week or two hence, she was tempted to nudge the spook back against the bulkhead. He was in danger of popping too—all over the translator. A split second later, Riyad stiffened and spun around to focus on the cabinets hanging behind them.

Smart move. Nor was there any shame in it. Hell, if this was his first autopsy, he'd held out longer than she had during hers—and better.

She'd had to leave the room.

The spook continued to face the cabinet as the colonel finished packaging and labeling his final tissue samples.

By the time Riyad had regained his composure and turned around to the gurney, the translator's skull, face and inner