Chapter Minka
MINKA
“As Chief Medical Examiner, one would expect you to hand unpleasant tasks over to the younger, lower-paid staff.” Wrinkling her nose to combat the stench in the air, Aubree works hard to ignore the noisy flies swarming an alleyway behind a bar across town and the oohs and ahhs of the looky-loos who can only get as close as uniformed officers allow.
She inches nearer to the half-full dumpster I’m currently lowering myself into and pinches her nostrils with the thumb and finger of her gloved right hand.
“It smells really, really bad in there.”
“Are you volunteering to climb in, Doctor Emeri, or simply talking for the sake of hearing your own voice?”
She chokes out a playful snicker and brings her camera up.
To photograph our scene… or me? “The fact that you say these things while on official record will make my future workplace harassment claims so much easier to substantiate.” Snap, snap, snap.
She takes picture after picture and grins from behind the lens. “Find anything yet?”
“Does it look like I’ve found anything yet?
You’re literally standing right there.” I lower my weight and ensure a steady stance on my feet, but as I step on what may be three-day-old Chow Mein made rank by multiple consecutive hundred-degree days, I hope and pray it is, in fact, Chow Mein, and not something much worse.
“I’m never gonna get this stink out, am I? ”
Aubree lowers her camera so it hangs from the strap around her neck, then, reaching into her pocket, she comes out again with a small tub of Vicks gel. Popping the cap open, she grabs a dollop and smears it beneath her nose. Then she dips her finger a second time and meets my eyes in question.
“Yep.” My stomach quivers as I lean forward and allow her to spread the gel under my nose. “Jesus. Decomp doesn’t usually bother me, but this is next level.”
“There’s no way this alleyway hasn’t stunk for three days already.” Gulping, she closes the tub and drops it into her pocket. “People around here intentionally ignored the stench, hoping it would go away before they had to involve the authorities.”
“But there’ll always be a curious kid wandering by whose sense of smell isn’t quite developed enough to tell them to stop.
” I carefully pick through the dumpster’s contents and swallow the bubbles of nausea just begging to join the fray.
Peeling a greasy pizza box to the side, then a busted bag of…
I don’t even know what, but it’s liquid now, I consider the arm—singular, left, mostly intact from shoulder to fingers, but already sloughing in sections—an eight-year-old found just two hours ago, and though a part of me hopes the arm is all we’ll find today, the stink making my lungs shrivel proves otherwise.
And then I move another bag and find what we’re looking for.
“Here.” I gently set the bag aside and stop moving.
Stop disrupting our scene. Stop everything.
I tilt my head to get a better angle and study the still-open eyes of a man who owns the arm.
“I reckon he’s thirty-five to forty-five years old.
Dark brown hair, two piercings, both in his left ear.
” Cautious, I inch a Chinese restaurant noodle box to the side and study the thick silver chain strung around his neck, and further down, the dark blue shirt he wore the day he died.
“Active decomp. How often are these dumpsters emptied?” I glance up and catch the watchful eye of the poor detective who caught this case.
Not my detectives. Lifting my chin, I summon him despite his preference to stay the hell away.
“Chief Mayet.” He stops six feet back and plugs his nose. “Did you find something?”
“Yeah. I got your DB. How often do they empty these dumpsters?”
“Ah… once a week, I believe, why?”
“Because whoever dumped him wasn’t all that smart.
They should’ve made the drop an hour before collection, not an hour after.
” I look to Aubree. “I’d say he’s been here a week already.
Five days at the lower end.” Then back to the detective.
“The kid who discovered him made a mess already, so we lose some of the timeline that way, but he’s got trash under him, trash over him, and maggots have already worked through a lot of his soft tissues.
DB is male, thirty-five to forty-five years old.
I can’t give you an accurate guess on weight yet, but I err toward the opinion that he was fed and not underweight when he died.
Once he’s out of here and in my autopsy suite, I can get you more. ”
“Cause of death?”
I crook my finger and bring him forward until his arms rest atop the bin’s steel edge and his cheeks turn a nasty shade of green.
Then I point down at the right side of his skull.
“Someone hit him really hard. A couple of times. You’ve got yourself a homicide, Detective.
This isn’t your primary scene—it’s just the dump spot.
Unfortunately for you, you’re already a week behind your killer, and your only lead is an eight-year-old with a smartphone, too little parental supervision, and the wonderful idea to alert the media before he alerted the cops. ”
“Messy,” Aubree hisses her sympathy. “You have my condolences, Detective.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Pissed, he turns on his heels and stomps back the way he came.
“I don’t think he wanted us to find the body that belonged to that arm.” Aubree swings grinning eyes back around to me and offers a hand. “Need help climbing out?”
Three hours after finding Isaac Hawthorne’s body half buried in a stinky dumpster, and two and a half hours after retrieving the wallet and ID tucked conveniently in his back pocket, I stride out of the private bathroom attached to my office in fresh clothes and with my still-damp hair tied into a ponytail.
I washed twice all over, and when that wasn’t enough, I washed a third and fourth time.
I can still smell myself.
I wander to my desk and plop into my chair, but I don’t get more than a second of sitting before Aubree bustles through my office door.
“Jesus!” From smiling to scowling, she slows her stride to a hesitant step-shuffle and timidly sets a small package on my desk. “I bring gifts.”
I peel the paper bag open and discover a nostril waxing kit I would normally scoff at.
But these are dire times, and Isaac Hawthorne is still an active problem in my life, so I tear the box open and take out the small pot of cold wax.
“Here.” I toss it across my desk, so while Aubree grabs it and darts out of my office again, I take everything else from the box.
The sticks I’m supposed to shove up my nose, the instruction manual that says to leave them there for two minutes.
The small infographic that tells me to pull fast. I glance to my left and watch Aubree stare at the microwave in the communal coffee room—ten, nine, eight, seven—and then as she whips the door open on four, too impatient to wait any longer.
Spinning on her light-up shoes, she charges back into my office with a grin. “I doubt waxing the hair off your head is an option you’re considering…” She sets the warmed pot on my desk. “Right?”
“I’m not waxing my head.”
“Exactly, but I see that your hair is wet, and your face is shiny and clean. That means you washed good, but these…?” She points straight up at her nose.
“They’re sneaky, because they’re not so easy to clean, and if you miss just the tiniest little hair, you’re gonna send yourself mad trying to escape the stench. ”
“Mmhm.” I’ve been here, done this before, so I dip the first stick into the melted wax and coat the spongy end, then, bracing myself for the sting, I shove it up my nose and exhale a low hiss of pain as the hot wax burns.
Grabbing the second stick, I repeat my steps, cover, shove, hiss, release, and since I have to sit here looking like a complete idiot for two whole minutes, I try to pretend they’re not there, and instead, bring my focus back to a smirking Aubree.
“Shut up. Tell me something interesting.”
“Oh! Well, okay.” She drops into the visitor’s chair, folds one leg over the other, and places both hands on her knees. “So I think I’ve decided I will be a surrogate for Eli and Curtis.”
“I…” I jolt back in my seat and study her through fresh eyes. “I meant tell me something about Isaac Hawthorne!”
“Oh!” A warm blush fills her cheeks. “Oops.”
“But this… uh…” A million different thoughts ping-pong inside my brain. How? When? Do you have to? Can we negotiate? “Wow…” I exhale a heavy breath. “Alright. That’s a big deal.”
“It’s pretty huge.” And going by the hesitation in her eyes, I suppose she understands the gravity of her choice.
“With Cordoza’s thing happening, and our promotion.
” She emphasizes each syllable in the word.
“Even if we remain largely hands off and pretend what he told us doesn’t exist, our lives still change anyway.
We know a standard pregnancy takes forty weeks.
Add in the hormone monitoring and the insemination, and this could take a year, even if we started right now. ”
“R-right now?” My nose sticks twitch with my stammered words. “You’re gonna start immediately?”
“I’m gonna tell Eli I’m on board. Let them do the things they need to do.
Make the decisions they want to make. Ultimately, I think it would be best if I get this done before Estefan dies, because after he does, our lives are going to be crazier than ever, and pregnancy is a time I’ll feel especially vulnerable. ”
“Well… yeah. Exactly. You’ll be vulnerable, Aubs, and rushing toward vulnerability is rarely the right thing to do.
Don’t you think it might be better to wait Cordoza out, see what happens when he dies, and settle into whatever comes for us once he’s in the ground…
and then consider growing a baby for someone else?
Introducing more stress into an already chaotic life probably isn’t smart. ”