Chapter Fifteen

One week later. Monday 8 July

Ronald Reagan Medical Center UCLA, Westwood

While most of the students in the advanced Autopsy and Frozen Section class hung out in their usual groups, scattered around the large pathology theater, waiting for their professor to arrive, Carol Sixtree sat alone at the far back of the class. Like always, she had at least two books open in front of her, her gaze bouncing like a ping-pong ball from one to the other, while at the same time she sped-typed notes into her laptop, which, funnily enough, was sitting on her lap.

Carol, or Kay, as her friends called her, was the best student in that class by a long shot – she knew it… her professor knew it… and every student in her class knew it too. In fact, Kay Sixtree had been the best student in her class since her freshman year in high school, where her grade-point average never once dropped below 3.8. Once she entered university, almost eight years ago, that GPA increased to 4.0, all year round… every year.

For as long as she could remember, Kay Sixtree had always wanted to be a doctor. Her ambition had started sometime when she was around ten years old, but not even she could pinpoint how it exactly began. The story that she always told everyone was that it was due to that old buzzing game – Operation. Maybe it did have something to do with it. She did love playing it when she was a kid, but Kay didn't really believe that something so silly – a simple game of steady hand – had been ‘ground zero' for what had become her lifelong obsession.

With a high school GPA of 3.8 or higher and an almost perfect score in her SAT exams, it was no surprise that after her graduation Kay got to have her pick of colleges to go to, with almost all of them offering her a full scholarship. For a while, she did consider going to Harvard or Yale – both world-famous and ranked in the top ten best medical schools in the USA, also known as the Ivy League – with Harvard holding the top spot. But Harvard was located in Boston, Massachusetts, and Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, both on the very east coast of America. For Kay Sixtree, that did constitute a problem.

Kay was born and bred in Los Angeles, California – the very west coast of America. Her father was a school janitor by day and an office cleaner at night. Her mother did clothes repairs out of their front room for a living. Even with her father working two jobs, her parents' combined income wasn't quite enough to breach the line between ‘poor' and ‘working class', but they did all they could. What they lacked in dollars, Kay's parents more than made up for with love.

Not once had either her father or her mother raised their voices with Kay, or her older brother, Nathan. Any problems in their household were always fixed through dialogue. No shouting, no running away from it… and no physical violence, not under any circumstances. The result was a family that loved, trusted and respected each other in a way that was rarely seen in today's modern society. And it was that love and respect that most influenced Kay in her decision of where to go to college.

Kay and her family lived in Lynwood, an underprivileged neighborhood in South LA, where crime and gang violence used to be a common occurrence. Almost nine years ago, when Kay was just about to start her senior year in high school, her brother Nathan, who was two years her senior, was shot through the heart during a store robbery gone very wrong. He was not part of the robbery. He was just unlucky. The proverbial ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time' – shot by accident as the storeowner, a sixty-five-year-old African American man who went by the name of Joe, reached for the loaded shotgun that he kept behind the counter when he saw two masked men enter his shop. They were carrying two Smith Wesson revolvers, which they made no effort in concealing. What ensued was a Wild West gunfight. Nathan, who hadn't seen the gunmen, had just reached the counter to pay for his groceries at the exact moment that Joe opened fire. As the gunmen retaliated, one of their 357 Magnum rounds perforated Nathan's chest and sliced right through his heart, rupturing the aortic and pulmonary valves, severing the right ventricle and obliterating the left and right atriums. He died right there on the store floor.

Nathan's death devastated the Sixtree family. Both of Kay's parents slumped into a spiral of deep depression, something neither had ever managed to fully recover from.

Graduating from high school just a year after her brother's death, Kay just didn't have the courage to leave her broken-hearted parents alone and move across America all the way to the west coast. Who cared if Harvard and Yale were two of the top medical schools in the country? Despite not being considered Ivy League, UCLA was still a great university with a fantastic medical program, and Kay Sixtree was an outstanding student. There was no way that she could go wrong with that combination, but most important of all, Westwood and UCLA were just a couple of short bus rides away from Lynwood and her parents' home.

A week after she graduated, Kay Sixtree accepted a full scholarship from the University of California Los Angeles and began her journey to becoming a doctor.

On average, in the USA, the education and training needed to become a specialized medical doctor will require at least eleven years of education, including four years of college, four years of medical school and three to four years of residency at a teaching hospital.

It was during her very first year of medical school that Kay decided that she wanted to become a forensic pathologist. The reason for that was simple – she loved the quiet and tranquil feel of an autopsy theater. There was no rush, no time challenge to try to save a life, no mess, no mental and physical exhaustion at the end of a procedure… and no room full of other doctors and nurses. It was just her, the body and maybe an assistant. Plus, Kay felt a lot more comfortable among the dead than she did with the living.

After eight years of university, Kay was now just about to graduate from medical school and she was looking forward to a residency at the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner – a position that she had been offered at the end of her third year of medical school by the LA Chief Medical Examiner herself, Dr. Carolyn Hove – who just happened to be the UCLA professor teaching the class that morning.

‘Good morning, everyone,' Dr. Hove said as she entered the pathology theater. ‘I hope you all had a good weekend and are all rested and ready to start cutting.' She followed her greeting with a smile.

‘Always, Doc,' Kenny said, returning the smile, as he reached for a scalpel from an instruments tray and lifted it up in the air. ‘Just point me to the body.'

The comment got laughs from everyone in the class, except for Kay Sixtree.

Kenny was a tall and muscular student, with fair hair and a nose that seemed to have been sculpted by Michelangelo. He was both the hunk and the joke maker in that class.

‘Put the knife down, bad boy,' Dr. Hove said back, her tone dismissive. ‘Before you cut your finger like last time.'

More laughs, this time harder and accompanied by a few ‘woo-woos'.

‘The scalpel slipped, Doc,' Kenny came back, a little embarrassed, as he returned the sharp blade to the instruments tray.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,' another student commented from across the room. ‘Of course it did.'

‘OK, everyone, settle down,' Dr. Hove said, lifting a hand at her students. ‘We need to get started. Today, we're going to have a hands-on, long-procedural class, so time is very important here, as it will be when you're out in the real world. Let's see what you can accomplish in just over two hours and, yes, what you accomplish here today will certainly count toward your final grade.'

Every student in that class knew full well that Dr. Hove didn't quite subscribe to what was considered a conventional, end-of-term exam. She would never gather all of her students inside a classroom, sit them down and hand everyone an exam paper. That wasn't how the real world functioned. Instead, Dr. Hove was known for springing what she liked to call a ‘procedural' class onto her students. Those were classes without a lecture… without her helping them at all. Yes, they could use each other, just like in the real world, but procedural classes didn't require the use of textbooks, so conventional ‘cheating' didn't really take place. Procedural classes were always hands on – just the students and a body.

Dr. Hove quickly did a headcount. All fifteen students in her advanced Autopsy and Frozen Section class were present.

‘Perfect,' she said, giving everyone one of her famous enigmatic smiles. ‘Fifteen students and five bodies to work on. Please get yourselves into groups of three. C'mon, let's go.'

Voices echoed through the autopsy theater, while everyone quickly organized themselves into their favorite ‘buddy' groups, except for Kay Sixtree. Instead, she slowly closed the two books on her desk before putting away her laptop. She would group up with whoever was left behind, as she always did.

If they had a choice, no student in any of Kay's classes would ever be paired or grouped up with her. She was too knowledgeable, too serious… and way ahead of everyone in every discipline. No one liked to be second best but, truthfully, the main reason why most of the other students disliked her was because Kay didn't hold back if another student in her group made, or was about to make, a mistake at the autopsy or operation table.

‘Oh, I sure wouldn't do that,' was her favorite phrase to stop a fellow student from cutting in the wrong place or making a mistake that would've cost a patient's life had they been inside a real operating room. It annoyed the hell out of the other students, but the fact of the matter was that Kay was almost always right… almost.

It took less than half a minute for the students to organize themselves into four groups of three. The two students left without a group were Myeong Jang Bo, a petite exchange student from Seoul in South Korea, and Tullik Bryant, a twenty-eight-year-old African American student from Mississippi, who had the big hazel eyes of a baby deer and the ego of a narcissist. Tullik and Myeong exchanged a dispirited look before they approached Kay.

‘I guess you're with us then,' Bambi-eyed Tullik said, the expression on his face matching his total lack of excitement.

‘I guess that's a question of perspective, isn't it?' Kay had bit back on the cutting sarcasm that was her initial reaction, but it still came out meaner than what she had intended.

‘Are we all sorted?' the doctor asked.

A choir of ‘Yep' and nods followed.

‘OK,' Dr. Hove began. ‘Like I said earlier, we've got five bodies to work on today. All five of them were victims of suicide. The suicide method used will be quite obvious with most of them.' She paused to make sure that she had everyone's attention on her. ‘Regardless of how obvious that method was, I want indisputable confirmation of the COD.'

Dr. Hove watched as all fifteen students in her class nodded back at her in silence.

‘Now, that is the easy part,' she continued.

Most of the other students shifted on their feet, uncomfortably. They all knew that Dr. Hove always liked to add something else on top of the obvious. Kay Sixtree, on the other hand, pressed her lips together tightly to keep herself from smiling. That ‘something else on top of the obvious' was what she lived for, so to speak. To her, the obvious was nothing more than just that – the obvious. It was the details that made all the difference.

‘Almost every dead body hides a secret,' Dr. Hove clarified, guiding the groups toward the bodies on the five autopsy tables. ‘So, other than indisputable confirmation of the COD, I want you to find and catalogue whichever details of that person's life you might find – surgeries, accidents, bone breaks, wound scars… anything – and if possible, I'd like time frames. If you come across an old surgery, I want to know how long ago that surgery took place. Same with everything else – accidents, bone breaks, scars… whatever you find.'

‘Are we doing a brain autopsy as well?' Kay asked, her dark eyes showing the excitement that her expression managed to hide.

‘If you deem it necessary – by all means,' Dr. Hove replied, as her gaze strayed to her students. ‘Like I said, almost every body hides a secret, and that secret can be hidden just about anywhere, and those are the sort of details that can easily shine light on an investigation going dark. Today, I'll be walking around and checking on your progress, but I'll not be helping in any way. Use your group members for that – ask for opinions… bounce ideas… you know what to do.' Her head tilted slightly to one side in a doubtful gesture. ‘I know that many of you are only here today courtesy of a few very well glamorized TV series.' She indicated the bodies on the autopsy tables. ‘You wanted forensics CSI? You wanted to be the heroes and solve the case for the police?' She gave her students a subtle wink. ‘Well, this is it, ladies and gentlemen. Let's see how closely you can listen to what the body is trying to tell you.'