Chapter 87: Case ME-2025-12-2967
The Medical Examiner of Cook County will send you a case file if you ask in writing and pay for the copying.
I wrote on the ninth of January.
It came on the sixteenth, in a manila envelope, three pages, and it cost me eleven dollars.
I opened it at the folding table with Marco standing on the other side of it in his coat.
He never sits down for the first ten minutes of anything.
Page one is a form. Page two is a narrative. Page three is a list.
Case ME-2025-12-2967. Reyes-Blackwood, Ana. Female. Twenty-nine years.
Notification received 08:11, ninth of December 2025, from Fire Department Ambulance 43.
Investigator assigned: D. Prewitt, star 4114. Scene arrival: 09:26.
The narrative is two paragraphs, written the way a competent man writes with three more of these before lunch.
Decedent discovered unresponsive by household staff at approximately 07:20, in a second-floor bedroom in use as the infant’s room. Resuscitation attempted. Pronounced 07:52 at scene.
No evidence of trauma. No evidence of forced entry. Body in bed, supine, no disarray.
Medications at bedside: one bottle omeprazole 20mg, dispensed 3 December 2025, twenty-four of thirty capsules remaining.
I did that arithmetic on the back of the envelope, because I cannot help it.
Six days. Six capsules. Once daily, as prescribed. She took it exactly the way she was told to.
History per spouse: six-week nocturnal cough and shortness of breath, seen twice, advised sleep hygiene and humidification.
Attending physician of record contacted, S. Kolar M.D., who agreed to certify cause.
Jurisdiction declined. Body released to funeral home representative at 11:40.
Then page three, which is the list, and which is why I keep the file in a plastic sleeve.
AUTOPSY: NO.
SCENE ITEMS RETAINED: NONE.
TOXICOLOGY SPECIMEN OBTAINED: and after that there is a space, and the space is empty.
Not a no. Not a box with a cross in it. Nothing at all.
Nobody answered the question, because it stops being a question the moment a physician says he will sign.
PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN: 11.
Marco read the three pages standing up, then sat down and read them again.
“Is any of this wrong?” he said.
That is the right question and it is the one nobody asks.
No. None of it is wrong. Prewitt attended, viewed, asked, photographed, telephoned a doctor, and released her.
That is the job. He did the job.
That office handles something like four and a half thousand cases a year with a staff you could fit on a school bus.
It declines most of them. It has to. Everybody who works there knows what that costs.
The thing that undid me is smaller and worse than anybody doing anything wrong.
Ana Reyes-Blackwood went to a doctor.
Twice. In the last three weeks of her life. About the exact symptom that killed her.
And that is the reason nobody looked.
If she had never been seen, a twenty-nine-year-old found dead in bed with a five-month-old four feet away is an autopsy in any county in America.
Automatically. That morning.
Because she went, there was a chart.
Because there was a chart, there was a physician who could be telephoned.
Because there was a physician, the manner was natural.
Because the manner was natural: no autopsy, no toxicology, no retained specimen, nothing.
She did the responsible thing, and the responsible thing closed the door.
I said that out loud in that room and Marco did not answer for a while.
Then he said, “Say it to Moreno like that. Word for word. Don’t soften it.”
I did, four days later. Moreno wrote it down in his own hand, which I had never seen him do.
I got back to the house at half past five.
Ethan had spent the afternoon posting the lids of my old formula tins through the bars of the stair gate, one at a time, and reporting each loss.
He put both arms straight up at the bottom of the stairs. I picked him up and he took hold of the shell of my right ear and put his forehead on my collarbone.
Twenty-five pounds. Eighteen months.
Roz had left a plate on the warmer with a cloth over it, which she had started doing in December and which neither of us ever mentioned.
Later, in the corridor, I did the last arithmetic of that day.
There are eleven photographs of that room, taken at 09:26 on the ninth of December 2025, in a building on Harrison Street.
They show a bed, a floor, a doorway and a wall.
At least one of them, if the investigator stood where investigators stand, shows the shelf above the changing table.
The office will release them to the next of kin, to a State’s Attorney, or to a court.
I am none of those.