A Wake Of Vultures

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Tortminder

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As I mentioned in my introduction I am writing a story scheduled for publications sometime late spring or early summer 2018. Here is a teaser sample:

CHAPTER 1 - A Writhing of Maggots

Inigo Montoya: He's dead. He can't talk.
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.

---The Princess Bride

There is blood all over the room. It’s on the walls and it has seeped into the cracks in the floor. There are smears of it on the doorknob and bloody hand prints on the lampshade, the light switch, and the walls. There is even a large pool of it congealed under an old fashioned occasional chair, where the victim's corpse is securely zip tied. As if by some occult magic flies have appeared for a macabre banquet, on the lampshade, on the light switch, on the walls, but mostly under the final earthly remains.

That’s the thing about a bludgeoning, the blood spatters everywhere.

Sherman Melvin Jacob was short, overweight, unkempt and more than slightly casual about personal hygiene. His nose was flattened from a beating he suffered as a youth and a complexion that looked like someone set his face on fire and then put out the flames with a golf shoe. Sherman Melvin Jacob was one other thing. He was absolutely, positively and unequivocally dead.

Someone had done a very meticulous and thorough job of making certain that Sherman Jacob's death was horrific, up-close and personal... very, very personal.

His run down little house just a block south of Skokie’s main drag, Dempster street... had a rickety fence overgrown, carpeted with weeds. It was a small frame house that badly needed painting, the last structure on a block that had been cleared for a TIF district, showing a sad face to the world.

The interior was worse than the places described in the tabloids about hoarders. Filled with old newspapers, crushed Golden Arches bags containing greasy burger wrappings, dirty clothes and crumpled styrofoam coffee cups and the mummified remains of franchise pizzas in their boxes that weren’t worth eating when fresh. Jacobs abode closely mirrored his disheveled self.

It wasn’t always like this, not when his mother was alive. Back then it was clean and neat. Mama Jacob had a pride of place that was not transmitted to Sherman. He was a “loner” for the most part spending most of his time on his computer. He was not a pleasant or likable person, but he was doggedly persistent.

His one redeeming attribute was that he was a “squirrel whisperer”. Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a milder form of autism, he was a loner in high school, antisocial and awkward, (which earned him his broken and misshapen nose).

Jacob began interacting with his neighborhoods friendly gray squirrels in 2012. Once hand tamed, he idly wondered what one would look like with a hat on its head. The resulting picture became an internet sensation. Pleased with the result, he gave a copy of the photo to his mother, who loved it.

The squirrels helped Jacob come out of his shell.

“The squirrel’s actually a good way to break the ice”, he explained when asked, “because I’ll be sitting here petting a squirrel and other people will come over and we’ll just start like feeding the squirrels together and talking about them.”

It would take a while before anybody missed Sherman Melvin Jacob, About three weeks to be exact.

George Papalounis, the owner of The Little Club in Skokie, one of the people who had talked with the squirrel whisperer on occasion walked past the front of the house and noticed the smell. It was the sick, sweet but metallic smell of death. George remembered that smell from when he was in the war. He called the cops.
 
I will most certainly keep the board updated on progress. I'll post more excerpts if there is interest.
--tort-
 
Here's Chapter 2
CHAPTER 2 - A Mischief of Rats

"The Cops in Northern Cook County are not prejudiced and do not engage in random police brutality. They hate everyone equally and they treat everyone miserably."

Sgt. Andy Novak had long ago become disillusioned with the idea of being a crime-busting cop. He found that his professional life consisted of periods of boredom infrequently broken by occasions of being exposed to either irate citizens or absolute scumbags. There wasn’t too much “public service” left in his experience of police work.

Pulling up to the address he saw that Tom had started stringing the crime scene tape across the front of the property and as he checked in with Dispatch he saw Tom emerging from the side yard to the East of the property.

“Tom, you look like ****. Whata we got here?”

“Well Sarge, what we have is a stiff in the house that looks like he had a close encounter with a herd of stampeding elephants followed by a full body massage by every maggot in the north suburbs. It was bad enough that I tossed my cookies in the alley behind the house. I haven’t done much... a cursory premise check. Once I found the body I tried not to contaminate the scene any further.”

“Anything on who our deceased might be or why he partied with the grim reaper here in this house?”

“Nothing much Sarge. This was called in by the Greek guy that owns the Little Inn on Golf road. He was out for his constitutional and smelled something walking past here. I guess he knew the guy that lived here in a casual manner.

The Greek said that he was kinda weird… tamed wild squirrels… petted ‘em… even put hats on ‘em. But I’m not even sure that the stiff inside is the same guy.

Anyways, the Greek guy said that the guy he knew had been in his restaurant about 3 weeks ago with a female… quite the looker. Looked like one of those plastic real estate broads according to him.”

"O.K. Tom. Not too much more we can do here between us. Let's just make sure the place is cordoned off with the crime scene tape and I'll take a quick trip inside the house to get a quick photograph of the scene then I'll call out the lieutenant.

I'm just as happy to dump this in his lap. It will be a nightmare for the NORTAF crew with our lieutenant bloodhound in charge.

You make sure the tape is up and start on your report while I call in to get Litkowiak out here along with the NORTAF crew and someone from the Medical Examiner's office."

Lieutenant Kevin Litkowiak looked, colleagues often said, how a detective in a movie looks. And he played the part well. His suits were tailored. He always seemed to be chomping his trademark cigar... had a booming voice thick with a Chicago accent. He had a hearty laugh and a respectable handshake. He loved to buy others drinks and trade stories. He was the friendliest and warmest man many of his peers had ever met, and he was quick to cut himself down with abundant doses of self-deprecation.

It was hard not to love Detective Lieutenant Kevin A. Litkowiak. He was a Skokie cop but he was attached to the North Regional Major Crimes Task Force – NORTAF.

NORTAF was a crime investigation cooperative between the Northern Chicago suburban police departments of Lincolnwood, Skokie, Morton Grove, Niles, Glenview and a few others. They pooled their resources to bring major crime investigation resources to the smaller towns and villages.

When there was a NORTAF homicide investigation you would usually find Litkowiak's partner, Detective Sergeant Paul Berg, a stout man with a trim mustache, a brown comb-over, and skeptical, probing eyes. Where Litkowiak seemed to seek the spotlight, Berg was fine working in the shadows. The Robin to Litkowiak’s Batman.

Litkowiak was the star of the NORTAF Homicide Squad. He had solved some of the suburbs most notorious murders, plus scores more that got barely a blurb in the papers. He was tenacious and crafty... developed close contacts on the streets. He had a knack for tracking down eyewitnesses...and was a master at getting suspects to talk. “That crystal ball” in his stomach, he called it.

Great detectives, he once said, had “the ability to get inside to a person’s soul whatever way you can and get the person to say what you need to hear.”

What set Kevin Litkowiak apart, prosecutors and fellow cops believed, were his people skills. He understood human nature. He could read people... knew how to talk to people.

He was empathetic...didn’t talk down to them... not judgmental. He had a way with people.

Instead of putting the call out over the air and alerting every busybody that has a police scanner, Andy calls Lieutenant Litkowiak on his cell phone.

"Hey lieutenant, I got a real stinker for you at 8117 Bronx. The deceased looks like he's been worked over by a platoon of Mixed Martial Arts fighters. Tom Skrzyniarz caught the original call and he's busy taping off the scene. You're gonna need to call in the NORTAF crew, an Assistant States Attorney for a search warrant and somebody from the Medical Examiner's office."

"Andy, is there anything out of the ordinary, aside from a dead guy that's been beaten to a pulp, that I should know about?'

"Well, lieutenant, that type of judgement is over my pay grade. As many years as I've been on the force I can honestly say that the only time I've seen a body this mangled was some idiot that walked in front of a locomotive. All of you are gonna have to work in full hazmat suits, hoods, booties, double gloves, the whole nine yards."

"O.K. Andy, I'll roust Paul Berg and have Boerema from the States Attorney round up a judge to sign a search warrant. I probably have to call Hensen from the Medical Examiner's office to meet us there with his crew. What is the neighborhood like? I seem to remember that most of the houses in that block have been demolished."

"That's right Lieutenant, the house would have been third from the corner, but everything on the block has been leveled except for the murder scene. And, across the alley is that derelict municipal parking lot, but it's pretty overgrown with weeds."

"Tell you what Andy, from the sound of it, I'm gonna want the location around the house roped off as a primary scene and then an outer perimeter along the parkway in front and maybe half way through the parking lot in back as the secondary buffer zone to keep the brass, the press and the gawkers out.

I'll have dispatch roll another unit to your location to help with securing the area and my crew should be there in 30 minutes or so."

Litkowiak broke the connection and sergeant Novak headed back toward the yard looking for officer Skrzyniarz to fill him in on the plan.
 
Glad you are not a drug dealer, I would go broke . Please keep them coming, great reading, fast pace.
 
TMT Tactical: Different addictive substance... same premise. :devil:

More in a week or so.:popcorn:

---tort--
 
New year... continuation of story:

(Continued from Chapter 2)
"Hey lieutenant, I got a real stinker for you at 8117 Bronx. The deceased looks like he's been worked over by a platoon of Mixed Martial Arts fighters. Tom Skrzyniarz caught the original call and he's busy taping off the scene. You're gonna need to call in the NORTAF crew, an Assistant States Attorney for a search warrant and somebody from the Medical Examiner's office."

"Andy, is there anything out of the ordinary, aside from a dead guy that's been beaten to a pulp, that I should know about?'

"Well, lieutenant, that type of judgement is over my pay grade. As many years as I've been on the force I can honestly say that the only time I've seen a body this mangled was some idiot that walked in front of a locomotive. All of you are gonna have to work in full hazmat suits, hoods, booties, double gloves, the whole nine yards."

"O.K. Andy, I'll roust Paul Berg and have Boerema from the States Attorney round up a judge to sign a search warrant. I probably have to call Hensen from the Medical Examiner's office to meet us there with his crew. What is the neighborhood like? I seem to remember that most of the houses in that block have been demolished."

"That's right Lieutenant, the house would have been third from the corner, but everything on the block has been leveled except for the murder scene. And, across the alley is that derelict municipal parking lot, but it's pretty overgrown with weeds."

"Tell you what Andy, from the sound of it, I'm gonna want the location around the house roped off as a primary scene and then an outer perimeter along the parkway in front and maybe half way through the parking lot in back as the secondary buffer zone to keep the brass, the press and the gawkers out.

I'll have dispatch roll another unit to your location to help with securing the area and my crew should be there in 30 minutes or so."

Litkowiak broke the connection and sergeant Novak headed back toward the yard looking for officer Skrzyniarz to fill him in on the plan.



CHAPTER 3  -  A WRIGGLE OF WORMS

It takes five hours to disassemble a body. Because of the circumstances surrounding this death this one will take longer.

“John Doe: 67 inches,” is scrawled on the autopsy-room whiteboard.  The dead man laid out on a metal table... head propped up on a plastic block...  body  naked, marked only by a neon-yellow Medical Examiner’s bracelet and a paper toe tag. The flesh, gray and exposed, stretched taut over bone. Except where putrefaction caused it to rupture. The feet are swollen, blackening; all the intact muscles tensed, the face thrown back. It’s a pudgy, round face, with few wrinkles for a middle-aged man. The chin dotted with stubble.

Present in the room are Detective Paul Berg. Hoping that the examination will yield  clues  to identity.  Not only of the victim, but also the motive and identity of the murderer. Also present...Deputy Medical Examiner George Hensen, Medical Examiner Ponni Arunkumar MD and two intern assistants.

Everyone in the room must wear disposable garments that cover the body head to toe. The costume is a blue, ankle-length, long-sleeved surgical gown... a plastic apron... a tie-on surgical cap... a clear plastic wrap-around face protector with a foam-cushion head strap that’s actually called a “splash shield”... shoe covers, sleeve covers the length of old-Hollywood evening gloves, and latex gloves. They most resemble a macabre supermarket butcher team.  

The best way to can describe the autopsy room is like a big industrial kitchen. The room is stark and spacious. Modular steel cabinets and a counter-top span the back wall, with a row of tools arranged on a cloth. Forceps (“to grab tissue with”).. scissors... scalpels... a plastic container full of scalpel blades... stainless-steel rulers... a label-maker for specimens and bright-red colander for washing organs completes the kit . Heftier tools for removing organs like the brain... including a thing that looks like a mallet, with a curved hook for leverage in pulling out bone. There are long, scalloped knives, identical to bread knives. A portable dishwasher sits along the opposite wall. Nothing in a morgue is sterilized to the level of surgical tools. These tools are cleaned on a less-stringent sanitary rinse cycle, like baby bottles.  
(...continued)

---tort--
 
(...chapter 3 continued)
“What we have here is a combination of surgery instruments and common garden tools and kitchen appliances” . From inside one of the cabinets Dr. Arunkumar pulls out a pair of green heavy-duty hedge sheers, at least two feet long. They’re used to crack open the rib cage, sometimes instead a bone saw. “We use them like chopping limbs off a tree,” she tells Berg.  

All autopsies begin the same way. The autopsist makes three large, deep cuts into the body, forming the “Y incision.” The first two cuts start at the top of each shoulder, and extend down diagonally toward the sternum.  

Then, a third cut, made where the first two intersect, a straight incision down the chest. The cuts don't bleed much after death. With the heart no longer pumping, only the pull of gravity creates blood pressure. Once cut, the chest is opened with shears to remove the organs. Arunkumar bought her shears at Lowe’s.

After those initial steps, the procedure can be modified for each case—to focus on “the money organs” in pathology, as Arunkumar jokingly calls them. 

That initial opening of the body is the hardest for non-pathologists to take. Arunkumar thinks that it strikes many as profane—the way the body is manhandled onto the table, then violently pried open... bones cracking. But it’s a matter of practicality. A dead body is heavy, stiff, resistant. Force is the only way to get inside. The word autopsy means to “self-see”—from the Greek autos, self, and optos, sight.

The dead man’s chest is wide open, and the techs have carved out all the major organs, save for the brain. The organs removed en bloc, meaning they eviscerated them in “blocks”. The organs that have related functions kept together. 

On a separate table, all the biological systems that middle-schoolers learn about are grouped on a single cutting board. Thoracic organs (heart and lungs) in one block, and abdominal organs (stomach, liver, gallbladder, intestines, kidneys) in a mostly-connected second block. They like learning the en bloc method, one of the interns explains, because it preserves organs’ anatomical relationships. The blocks make it easy to examine the way they interacted before death.

The organs, in a shiny, bloody pile on the plastic slab of cutting board, with slushy whorls of jaundice-yellow lung crowning the whole thing. The liver—the largest organ in the body, after the skin—is sticking up, firm in the middle of the dripping blocks. I say to Hensen that the kidneys are the same color as beets. The blood, draining away from the organ heap onto the table and into the sink below, looks like pomegranate juice.

At one point, Arunkumar draws my attention over to a “very important piece of technology.” She gestures at a computer where the pathologists enter their notes. “It has speakers so we can listen to music.” Though her residents like classic rock, Arunkumar prefers video-game soundtracks. One of her favorites is the score from Guild Wars 2, a dragon-slaying game; the score is epic and symphonic, brass blaring over cellos.

Today, a Bach concerto is playing.

For the first 15 minutes, the man’s face is uncovered. It’s the first thing Berg notices when he walks in. After that, he can’t help but to keep glancing over at it from where he stands observing Henson at the organ-block table. The eyes are still open, looking up, fixed on the ceiling. They look fearful, like they see an apparition that no one else can.

How they will talk about the body. Will they say it or he—

“Can you cover his face?” Arunkumar asks the interns—and they do, gently draping a white towel.

Like autopsy, the word pathology is from ancient Greek. Pathos—also the root word of empathy—is translated as both “suffering” and “experience.” Friedrich Nietzsche thought of pathos as “that which happens.”

Pathology is the specialty that studies the cause and effects of diseases. 

Pathologists are most often found examining samples in a lab. They examine biopsies, tissue samples, wounds. If you’ve given blood or a urine samples, a pathologist was the one on the other end...analyzing it and handing back your results. 

If Arunkumar and her students are any sign, pathologists love talking up their field. Most of them, it seems, have a chip on their shoulder about their specialty. They think they’re the most maligned people in medicine. They tell Berg:

“It’s one of the least popular fields.”

“We’re like the cockroaches.”

“It’s the part of medicine that people forget.”

“We’re the most misunderstood, even by doctors.”

In the room, they’re examining the organs from inside the abdominal cavity. Arunkumar shows Berg which type of scissor is best for cutting hollow viscera. A hollow viscus is any organ that isn’t solid: The liver doesn’t count, for example, but the intestines do. “Think of it like manicotti for the body,” advises one post in an online forum for medical students. “It can be stuffed with things.”

Berg: “He’s got a lot of, like something goin’ on here.”

Arunkumar: “A lot of like something goin’ on, huh?”

Every organ weighed as it’s examined... plopped onto a hanging scale like the ones for produce at grocery stores. Arunkumar and the students call out their weight estimates each time. The doctor has a reputation for guessing right by eyeballing.  

Midway through the autopsy, two interns prepare to remove the brain... turning on an electric saw to make incisions into the scalp. Immediately, the saw blade falls to the tiled floor with a crash—it’s not fastened on tight enough. Arunkumar says this happens sometimes. 

One of the interns re-fastens it and begins to cut into the head.

Hensen talks over the loud whirring across the room, his voice muffled by the splash shield. He shows Berg the bowel, which he winds into a roll with two wooden sticks, like pigs in a blanket. 

At the same time, Arunkumar and the interns go into a side room to take photos of abnormal tissue they’ve carved out.

Hours pass like this, the four of them pacing around each other taking samples... making cuts, asking questions, typing and jotting notes. The body, though it’s the object of investigation, becomes almost superfluous. It is literally dead weight in the room. After a while, it’s easy to become absorbed in the details of the work, to forget the larger context of where we are or what we’re doing. To forget death is a presence at all.

The organs examined one by one, Berg finds himself inching closer to the table, wanting to touch one. He gets so close that blood splashes onto his apron. Without thinking, he pulls his spiral notebook to his chest, transferring a splotch of blood onto it. “Blood on the notes?” Arunkumar asks. Without missing a beat, she douses the lined page with hydrogen peroxide and the blood disappears, leaving the ink intact.

“Not fainting?” Henson asks Berg, now that he’s been christened with bodily fluid. Arunkumar has warned him it’s not uncommon to faint during your first autopsy.  

To Berg’s surprise, he doesn’t faint. Instead, he tells Henson “I can’t believe how big the liver is.”

“Do you want to touch it?” Henson asks. Berg pokes at it with his gloved hand. It feels like hardened foie gras. He starts to understand what the pathologists have been talking about. There is some less-than-subtle relationship between cooking and autopsies. The blood draining into the sink below is passing through a bright-orange colander that Henson bought at TJ Maxx. One of the interns ladles fluid out of the body’s open chest cavity into a plastic container. The ladle looks like the gravy ladle in Berg’s kitchen.  

Arunkumar says, “There’s a lot of similarity between this and cooking and kitchens and...”

“And Thanksgiving,” Berg says.

“... and Thanksgiving,” Arunkumar repeats.

After five hours, Berg’s happy when it’s finally time to dissect the heart. They’ve been standing the whole time, and he’s tired, hungry, and cold in the 65-degree morgue.  

The pathologists bored and restless... joking around, talking about the case less and less. Arunkumar is explaining how to open up the aorta.

Hensen makes precise centimeter-long cuts near the middle of the heart, running parallel to the groove between the atria and the ventricles. 

Glancing at it, Arunkumar says, “Well, it’s what you’d tell a med student about what goes wrong with the heart.” Signs point to stress related coronary myocardial infarction.

Arunkumar asks Henson and the interns if they can handle sewing up the body. They place the organs back inside, then put the body back into refrigeration until the funeral home comes for it. The only things Cook County keeps are the slides and jars of samples.

The end of the autopsy is the most difficult part for Berg.

“We pretty much return a shell to the family,” Hensen says. “We return the leftover pieces, cut-up pieces, in a big plastic bag. We put it—very messy—into the body and then we sew everything back up. But then nothing is perfect, because we don’t put the bones back together, so we sew the skin over it. So the person’s chest comes out a little bit, so it doesn’t look natural.”

They do a nice job with the head, Henson says, careful to replace the brain and to not damage the face. And the funeral home is very adept at making everything look presentable. But that image of the hollowness stays with Berg.

The pathologists want to know how my first autopsy went. I say I’m surprised how banal it all was. How after only a few hours in the room, I was thinking about my feet hurting rather than the corpse five feet from me.  

Henson suggests that I get a cup of coffee from the commissary. He Dr. Arunkumar transcribe their notes into a report that will make some sense.


More in a week or so...

---tort--
 
Purchased and read. Good story line.

I would consider it a favor if you went to my Amazon author page and left a review... it helps move the book up the rankings.
Thanks
 
Is there a link to the final work? I want to make sure I find the correct one.
"A Wake of Vultures" is available at Amazon at Wake of Vultures Paperback

413Qd28OzuL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg


Thanks for asking.

---tort--
 
I have finished cutting the next video trailer for the "Wake of Vultures" book.
It's on my YouTube channel at A Wake of Vultures - Trailer



---tort--
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