He and two of my residents were working on the burned woman’s body, defleshing her as best they could with plastic spatulas, because anything harder might scratch the bones.Chuck was sweating beneath his surgical cap and mask as he scraped tissue from the skull, his brown eyes rather glazed behind his face shield. He was tall and wiry with short, sandy blond hair that tended to stick out in every direction no matter how much gel he used. He was attractive in an adolescent way and, after a year on the job, still terrified of me.“Chuck?” I said again, inspecting one of the more ghoulish tasks in forensic medicine.“Yes, ma’am.”He stopped scraping and looked up furtively at me. The stench was getting worse by the minute as unrefrigerated flesh continued to decompose, and I was not looking forward to what I needed to do next.“Let me just check this one more time,” I said to Ruffin, who was so tall he tended to stoop, his neck jutting out like a turtle when he looked at whomever he was talking to.
