Mahu Read Online Free PDF Page B

lesson to those less fortunate. You never know what the city fathers are really thinking, after all.
    We pulled into the small parking area in the center of the building, and walked in the glass block entrance, where Alice Kanamura greeted us with a renewed offer of sickness bags. “I’ll get back to you on that,” I said. “Doc ready for us?”
    She buzzed him. “He’ll be right down.” Doc Takayama was the Medical Examiner for Honolulu City and County, though he look ed barely old enough to have graduated medical school. He was a kind of whiz kid, graduated in record time from the U of H, and he told me once he went into pathology because he didn’t have to worry if the patients would trust him. He came into the vestibule to meet us, patting down the pockets of his white coat for his tape recorder.
    “Good, I’m glad you’re here. We can get started.”
    We followed him up the stairs to a white-tiled room where we all put on surgical scrubs, paper booties over our shoes, and paper shower caps. You can’t be too careful today, especially with an unidentified corpse. The scent of formaldehyde and death wafted around us, but Doc Takayama was oblivious to it.
    We walked beyond the white room into another, where the body was laid out on a metal table, ready for the medical-legal autopsy. That’s a special kind of exam, ordered by the authorities in the case of deaths which may have legal implications. Suspicious deaths, like murders and suicides, or unexpected sudden deaths without clear causes.
    Doc’s assistant, Marilyn Tseng, was taking photographs. On the wall beyond us, against lights, were a set of x-rays of the guy’s head. From where I stood, I could see a bloody matted place on the back of the head, where he’d been hit. I hadn’t seen that the night before—it was the side that had rested against the ground.
    The guy looked paler than he had the last time I’d seen him. Then, it was probably only an hour or less after he’d been killed, and the skin on his face had been waxy and blue-gray. His lips and nails had seemed pale in the limited light available to me then. He was still pale, though where the blood had settled at the back of his neck I could see a lot of post-mortem lividity.
    “The body is that of an Asian male approximately forty-five years of age,” Doc began narrating into his tape recorder. “Black hair and brown eyes. The body shows signs of good nourishment and care, is seventy inches long and weighs 165 pounds. Death was pronounced at 2:55 this morning by an emergency medical technician. Preliminary finding, based on initial examination of the body and x-rays of the skull, is that death occurred due to blunt trauma of the head.”
    He clicked off the recorder. “Take a good look before we undress him, boys.”
    Akoni and I looked. It wasn’t so bad yet, before they cut him open. He could have been sleeping, except for his pale color and that matted wound on his head.
    “It’s clear he was killed up by the door to the office,” Doc said. “The techs found blood spattered around him for as much as a meter. Head wounds are real bleeders.”
    Doc Takayama dictated a few more things about the general condition of the body and then Marilyn turned the lights off and began surveying the corpse with some kind of black light device. That went on for a while, as she and the doc took fibers off the guy with tweezers, rolling him over to do his back as well. They’d be examined, and then matched against the fibers found in the alley.
    Finally, the doc was content. Marilyn turned the lights back on and started cutting off the guy’s clothes. “From the condition of the body and the head wound I’d say he was killed almost immediately before he was found,” Doc said.
    Marilyn continued putting the pieces of the guy’s clothes into larger plastic bags, labeling everything carefully. He was wearing a heavy gold chain around his neck, expensive shoes and good quality clothing. He would