Coroner's Journal by Louis Cataldie Page B

not even a remote consideration. I’m way too geared up for that. The household is asleep. My clothes smell of smoke and death. So do I.
    I try to keep quiet, but my pacing about awakens De. She sees the pain in my eyes, smells the smoke, and just sits there with me in the dark living room.
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    It is particularly cold in the morgue this morning. Perhaps it’s just the chill of dealing with dead children, but I won’t dwell on the reason. My job is to be professionally objective and get “just the facts, ma’am.”
    We break the coroner’s seal on the bag and the smell of burnt flesh permeates the whole building. I feel the sensation of nausea creeping into the back of my throat. I know how to fight it. Take a few deep breaths and accept the smell. It works for me—most of the time. The horrible odor doesn’t go away. You never get used to it. You tolerate it.
    I’ve bought various sprays that promised to neutralize the smell and not contaminate the evidence—didn’t work. There was one case, however, when I had to put on a fireman’s SCBA oxygen tank. A fat guy died at the Salvation Army. Dead for about a week. Hot room. I smelled him when I got out of my car—in the driveway of “The Sally” and he was in the back upstairs—take it from there. When I tried to move him, he had slippage and his skin came off accompanied by fluids. . . . But ordinarily I just take some deep breaths and dive in. If you blot out the smell, you might miss a smell that is a clue. Nothing works. You just accept it and do your job.
    A random thought wanders through my brain: Though I have been on the job nearly a decade, for the first time I notice the autopsy table is too big for a little four-year-old boy. They don’t come in kiddie sizes. No, and they’re not supposed to.
    He lies there, compliant and awaiting our examination— my euphemism for his autopsy.
    We start: “The body is that of a four-year-old male who died in a house fire . . .”
    Inspection of his little body reveals no evidence of child abuse, and there is soot in his little nose. There is evidence of thermal injury—burns—over about 60 percent of his body.
    Michael Cramer, my trusted forensic pathologist, performs the autopsy. The announcement is made signaling the start of the internal examination. He pierces the stiff body with the scalpel, and begins the typical ritual of our profession—the first cut— except there’s nothing “typical” about cutting open a four-year-old child.
    The scalpel is pushed through the child’s skin and across his little chest and then the “V”-shaped incision is made from the midpoint of that cut, then down to his pelvis—a familiar “Y” pattern made by many in this line of work. No one in the autopsy theater says a word. The silence is unnerving. Even the hard-core veterans are having a hard time of it.
    A dissection of the neck reveals soot in the tracheal area and upper airways. The remainder of the autopsy is “unremarkable,” meaning he was just a healthy kid several hours ago. The knot is back in my gut. A chemical analysis of his blood reveals an elevated carboxyhemoglobin level—that’s the good news. He died of smoke inhalation. Smoke and combustion chemicals including carbon monoxide get into the lungs and cause an acute shortage of oxygen so that the person dies of asphyxia, rather than being burned alive.
    A theory emerges from the FD: the fire started in the bedroom because the little boy was playing with a lighter in the apartment and set a broom on fire. The fire starts and they run into the other room. As the fire increases, smoke forms in a closed environment. The AC may be acting as a mechanical bellows. The children’s eyes start to burn, they inhale smoke and start to cough. Their little airways—about the size of a drinking straw—become irritated;