Excerpt
One year later
Detective Thomas Moore disliked the smell of latex, and as he snapped on the
gloves, releasing a puff of talcum, he felt the usual twinge of anticipatory
nausea. The odor was linked to the most unpleasant aspects of his job, and like
one of Pavlov’s dogs, trained to salivate on cue, he’d come to
associate that rubbery scent with the inevitable accompaniment of blood and body
fluids. An olfactory warning to brace himself.
And so he did, as he stood outside the autopsy room. He had walked in straight
from the heat, and already sweat was chilling on his skin. It was July 12, a
humid and hazy Friday afternoon. Across the city of Boston, air conditioners
rattled and dripped, and tempers were flaring. On the Tobin Bridge, cars would
already be backed up, fleeing north to the cool forests of Maine. But Moore
would not be among them. He had been called back from his vacation, to view a
horror he had no wish to confront.
He was already garbed in a surgical gown, which he’d pulled from the
morgue linen cart. Now he put on a paper cap to catch stray hairs and pulled
paper booties over his shoes, because he had seen what sometimes spilled from
the table onto the floor. The blood, the clump ... read full excerpt from: The SURGEON ebook
