The Last Autopsy: A Father’s Illegal Dissection
BlurbDavid Carter, a forensic pathology lecturer at a medical university, breaks every rule for the first time in his life—for his own daughter.The official autopsy report reads: “Death by car accident, nothing more.”
But when he secretly re-examines her body in the morgue, he discovers:The angle of entry of the bamboo skewer proves it was driven in after the car had already come to a stop;Under Emily’s fingernails, there is skin tissue from an unknown man;The coffee residue in her stomach doesn’t match the records from the convenience store at the scene.This wasn’t an accident. It was a carefully directed “natural death.”No sooner has he finished his own report than the evidence begins quietly disappearing.
He’s suspended by the university, painted as a “lunatic” by the media, and even his wife starts to wonder if he’s simply unable to let go.
Chapter 1My daughter started seeing a guy I really didn’t like.
He never seemed to do anything serious, just drifted around all day.
But she was set on marrying him, and in the end I could only nod and agree.I never imagined that one year after the wedding, my daughter would be dead.That day I was in the lab in the middle of class when the hospital called to say my daughter and her husband had been in a car accident.I rushed over and found my girl lying in the emergency room.
There was a bamboo skewer jammed in her mouth, driven up from her throat into her brain.
She was covered in blood.She didn’t move at all.
One hand hung off the side of the bed, cold and pale.A nurse was pulling a white sheet over her.My head felt like someone had taken a swing at it, again and again, until everything went numb and buzzing.The ER doctor came over to talk to me, but I could not hear a word he said.
My whole body was shaking, my mind completely blank.He had to hold me up so I would not collapse.
When I finally steadied a little, he told me the skewer had pierced her carotid artery and caused massive bleeding.
By the time they brought her in she had already lost a huge amount of blood, her vital signs were unstable, and the bacteria had spread into her skull, causing purulent meningitis.They had done everything they could.I will never forget that moment.
It felt like the whole world just caved in right in front of me.Then he told me they had found out my daughter was pregnant, about three months along.I froze.
I had no idea she was carrying a child.Her husband heard it too and broke down crying beside us.He was not badly hurt, just a fractured left arm and some scrapes.I went straight at him and punched him in the face, shouting at him, asking what the hell he had been doing at the wheel.“She was pregnant, did you even know that?”
My voice came out completely warped.He just let me hit him.
He did not fight back at all.In the end the police had to pull us apart.They were there because of the accident report.“Sir, you need to calm down first,” they said as they led me to the side, trying to talk me down, then they went over to take Mark’s statement.“You’re Mark Lewis, right? We got a call about a crash at the intersection of Hawthorne Avenue and Gardenview Street. The sedan you were driving hit a truck and an electric scooter. Tell us what happened,” one of them said.Mark kept his head down.
“I was driving to pick Emily up from work,” he said. “On the way she saw a street cart selling candied fruit, said she wanted some, so I pulled over. She went and bought a skewer. When she got back in the car she started eating it. I didn’t really look at her, because traffic was heavy. When we were going through the intersection an electric scooter suddenly cut in front of us. I hit the brakes and jerked the wheel to avoid it, then I heard her scream. I got scared and the next second we slammed into the truck next to us.”“I was thrown into the windshield and my left arm started hurting like hell. I looked over at Emily.”He lost control at that point, his voice breaking.
“I saw her face covered in blood. That skewer had gone straight through her mouth, deep inside. It was such a long stick, there was almost nothing left sticking out. It was horrible.”He grabbed his head and sobbed.
“It was my fault. I should’ve watched her. I’m the one who killed her.”I was shaking all over, my chest twisting so hard I could barely breathe, and I could not listen anymore.She was my daughter.
I had never been willing to let her suffer even a little, yet at the very end of her life she went through something that cruel.I did not even get to see her one last time while she was still alive.I keep wondering if she was scared when it happened.
If she was holding on, waiting for me to come.Every time that picture flashes through my mind, I feel like I am suffocating.I am not even sure how I made it through these three months.My hair went white almost overnight.In three months I aged ten years.A parent who has lost their only child never really climbs out of that hole.
The longer you live, the more hopeless it feels, because you honestly no longer know what you are living for.The police took what Mark said and went to pull the traffic camera footage from that day, as well as the dashcam from his car.The dashcam clearly recorded their conversation in the car.Emily was the one who saw the street cart and said she wanted the candied fruit.The road cameras showed her coming back to the car with the skewer in her hand.
The car then drove along Hawthorne Avenue and stopped at the light where it crossed Gardenview Street.When the light turned green, the car started forward and at the same moment a scooter on the right tried to cut in front of them.Everything matched what Mark had said.He yanked the wheel to avoid the scooter and crashed into the truck in the next lane.
The scooter did not make it clear either and smashed into them.To the police, it was just a traffic accident. Chapter 2After we buried my daughter, I went over to her place.After she got married, she and Mark moved into the new apartment I had bought for her.I knocked.
Mark opened the door with stubble all over his face, eyes bloodshot, looking like he had not slept in months.“I’m here to pack up some of Emily’s things,” I said.I had told him yesterday that I wanted to take a few of her belongings to remember her by.He nodded. “They’re all in the bedroom.”He started to come help. I glanced at the bandage still wrapped around his arm and let out a sigh.
“I’ve got it. Go get some sleep.”He said nothing and quietly left the room.I had complicated feelings about him.He was not particularly capable, but he had treated Emily alright, and their marriage had always seemed solid.During the funeral he ran around handling everything.
One night I woke up and went to the hall where the memorial was set up to talk to my daughter for a while, and I saw him kneeling in a corner, secretly wiping his tears.He was in a lot of pain too.He had lost his wife and his child.Just like I had.So when the police told me that, after their investigation, Emily’s death was a traffic accident and that most of the blame fell on the scooter that had cut into their lane, they said their recommendation was not to charge Mark.
They still needed my answer as her family and asked if I could forgive him and sign a statement of forgiveness.In the end, I chose to forgive him.I signed the papers.
Emotionally I might never truly forgive Mark, but deep down I knew this was not really his fault.And Emily would not have wanted to see him dragged into court either.I put the things she used most often into a bag, then opened a document box and took out our family record book and some of her IDs.There was also a small vaccination booklet from when Emily was a child.
I ran my hand over the cover and opened it.
After a moment something about the entries felt off. I checked the name page and realized it was Mark’s, so I put it back.Just then something deeper in the box caught my eye.There were two insurance policy folders.Mark and Emily had taken out critical illness policies on each other so that if one of them ever got seriously sick, there would be money for treatment.
I already knew that; the police had told me.It was such a common kind of family insurance that I had never thought twice about it, and after checking, the police had not treated it as suspicious either.But now a payout notice drew my attention.The amount on it was eight hundred thousand.
The recipient was Mark, and the date was two weeks ago.For a moment I just stared at it, stunned.Two weeks ago, Mark had collected an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance payout?I flipped through the policy right away and saw that the critical illness coverage also included life insurance.
It meant that no matter how the insured person died, the beneficiary would get the payout.In other words, as long as Emily died, Mark would receive eight hundred thousand.That thought hit me like a hammer. ***本内容需购买可见***
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