Cause of Death

by Patricia Cornwell

  "We really should get him in the autopsy suite," I said.

  "You know how I feel about leaving bodies unattended in the hall."

  "I was afraid someone would slip," he said, mopping up water with the towels.

  "Well, the only someones here today are you and me."

  I smiled at him. "But thank you for the thought, and I certainly don't want you to slip. How's the knee?"

  "I don't think it's ever going to get better. It's already been almost three months and I still can barely go down stairs.

  "Patience, keep up your physical exercise, and yes, it will get better," I repeated what I had said before. "Have you rayed him yet?"

  Danny had worked diving deaths before. He knew it was highly improbable that we were looking for projectiles or broken bones, but what an X-ray might reveal was pneumothorax or a mediastinal shift caused by air leaking from lungs due to barotrauma.

  "Yes, ma'am. The film's in the developer." He paused, his expression turning unpleasant. "And Detective Roche with Chesapeake's on his way. He wants to be present for the post."

  Although I encouraged detectives to watch their cases autopsied, Roche was not someone I particularly wanted in my morgue.

  "Do you know him?" I asked.

  "He's been down here before. I'll let you judge him for yourself."

  He straightened up and gathered his dark hair into a ponytail again, because strands had escaped and were getting in his eyes. Lithe and graceful, he looked like a young Cherokee with a brilliant grin. I often wondered why he wanted to work here. I helped him roll the body into the autopsy suite, and while he weighed and measured it, I disappeared inside the locker room and took a shower. As I was dressing in scrubs, Marino called my pager.

  "What's up?" I asked when I got him on the phone.

  "It's who we thought, right?" he asked.

  "Tentatively, yes."

  "You posting him now?"

  "I'm about to start," I said.

  "Give me fifteen minutes. I'm almost there."

  "You're coming here?" I said, perplexed.

  "I'm on my car phone. We'll talk later. I'll be there soon.

  As I wondered what this was about, I also knew that Marino must have found something in Richmond. Otherwise, his coming to Norfolk made no sense. Ted Eddings' death was not Marino's jurisdiction unless the FBI had already gotten involved, and that would not make sense, either.

  Both Marino and I were consultants for the Bureau's Criminal Investigative Analysis program, more commonly known as the profiling unit, which specialized in assisting police with unusually heinous and difficult deaths. We routinely got involved in cases outside of our domains, but by invitation only, and it was a little early for Chesapeake to be calling the FBI about anything.

  Detective Roche arrived before Marino did, and he was carrying a paper bag and insisting that I give him gown, gloves, face shield, cap and shoe covers. While he was in the locker room fussing with his biological armor, Danny and I began taking photographs and looking at Eddings exactly as he had come to us, which was still in a full wet suit that continued to slowly drip on the floor.

  "He's been dead awhile," I said. "I have a feeling that whatever happened to him occurred shortly after he went into the river."

  "Do we know when that was?" Danny asked as he fit scalpel handles with new blades.

  "We're assuming it was sometime after dark."

  "He doesn't look very old."

  "Thirty-two."

  He stared at Eddings's face and his own got sad. "It's like when kids end up in here or that basketball player who dropped dead in the gym the other week." He looked at me. "Does it ever get to you?"

  "I can't let it get to me because they need me to do a good job for them," I said as I made notes.

  "What about when you're done?" He glanced up.

  "We're never done, Danny," I said. "Our hearts will stay broken for the rest of our lives, and we will never be done with the people who pass through here."

  "Because we can't forget them." He lined a bucket with a viscera bag and put it near me on the floor. "At least I can't."

  "If we forget them, then something is wrong with us," I said.

  Roche emerged from the locker room looking like a disposable astronaut in his face shield and paper suit. He kept his distance from the gurney but got as close as he could to me.

  I said to him, "I've looked inside the boat. What items have you removed?"

  "His gun and wallet. I got both of them here with me," he replied. "Over there in the bag. How many pairs of gloves you got on?"

  "What about a camera, film, anything like that?"

  "What's in the boat is all there is. Looks like you got on more than one pair of gloves." He leaned close, his shoulder pressing against mine.

  "I've double-gloved." I moved away from him.

  "I guess I need another pair."

  I unzipped Eddings' soggy dive boots and said, "They're in the cabinet over there."

  With a scalpel I opened the wet suit and dive skin at the seams because they would be too difficult to pull off a fully rigorous body. As I freed him from neoprene, I could see that he was uniformly pink due to the cold. I removed his blue bikini bathing suit, and Danny and I lifted him onto the autopsy table, where we broke the rigidity of the arms and began taking more photographs.

  Eddings had no injuries except several old scars, mostly on his knees. But biology had dealt him an earlier blow called hypospadias, which meant his urethra opened onto the underside of his penis instead of in the center. This moderate defect would have caused him a great deal of anxiety, especially as a boy. As a man he may have suffered sufficient shame that he was reluctant to have sex.

  Certainly, he had never been shy or passive during professional encounters. In fact, I had always found him quite confident and charming, when someone like me was rarely charmed by anyone, least of all a journalist. But I also knew appearances meant nothing in terms of how people behaved when two of them were alone, and then I tried to stop right there.

  I did not want to remember him alive as I made annotations and measurements on diagrams fastened to my clipboard. But a part of my mind tackled my will, and I returned to the last occasion I had seen him. It was the week before Christmas and I was in my Richmond office with my back to the door, sorting through slides in a carousel. I did not hear him behind me until he spoke, and when I turned around, I found him in my doorway, holding a potted Christmas pepper thick with bright red fruit.

  "You mind if I come in?" he asked. "Or do you want me to walk all the way back to my car with this." I said good afternoon to him while I thought with frustration of the front office staff. They knew not to let reporters beyond the locked bulletproof partition in the lobby unless I was asked, but the female clerks, in particular, liked Eddings a little too much. He walked in and set the plant on the carpet by my desk, and when he smiled, his entire face did.

  "I just thought there ought to be something alive and happy in this place." His blue eyes fixed on mine.

  "I hope that isn't a comment about me." I could not help but laugh.

  "Are you ready to turn him?"

  The body diagram on my clipboard came into focus, and I realized Danny was speaking to me.

  "I'm sorry," I muttered.

  He was eyeing me with concern while Roche wandered around as if he had never been inside a morgue, peering through glass cabinets and glancing back in my direction.

  "Everything all right?" Danny asked me in his sensitive way.

  "We can turn him now," I said.

  My spirit shook inside like a small hot flame. Eddings had worn khaki range pants and a black commando sweater that day, and I tried to remember the look in his eyes. I wondered if there had been anything behind them that might have presaged this.

  Refrigerated by the river, his body was cold to my touch, and I began discovering other aspects of him that distorted the familiar, making me feel even more disturbed. The absence of first molars
signaled orthodonture. He had extensive, very expensive porcelain crowns, and contact lenses tinted to enhance eyes already vivid. Remarkably, the right tens had not been washed away when his mask had flooded, and his dull gaze was weirdly asymmetrical, as if two dead people were staring out from sleepy lids.

  I was almost finished with the external examination, but what was left was the most invasive, for in any unnatural death, it was necessary to investigate a patient's sexual practices. Rarely was I given a sign as obvious as a tattoo depicting one orientation or another, and as a rule, no one the individual was intimate with was going to step forth to volunteer information, either. But it really would not have mattered what I was told or by whom. I would still check for evidence of anal intercourse.

  "What are you looking for?" Roche returned to the table and stood close behind me.

  "Proctitis, anal tunneling, small fissures, thickening of the epithelium from trauma," I replied as I worked.

  "Then you're assuming he's queer." He peered over my shoulder.

  The color mounted to Danny's cheeks, and anger sparked in his eyes.

  "Anal ring, epithelium are unremarkable," I said, scribbling notes. "In other words, he has no injury that would be consistent with an active homosexual lifestyle. And, Detective Roche, you're going to have to give me a little more room."

  I could feel his breath on my neck.

  "You know, he's been in this area a lot doing interviews."

  "What sort of interviews?" I asked, and he was seriously getting on my nerves.

  "That I don't know."

  "Who was he interviewing?"

  "Last fall he did a piece on the Inactive Ship Yard. Captain Green could probably tell you more."

  "I was just with Captain Green, and he didn't tell me about that."

  "The story ran in The Virginian Pilot, back in October, I think. It wasn't a big deal. Just your typical feature," he said. "My personal opinion is he decided to come back to snoop around for something bigger."

  "Such as?"

  "Don't ask me. I'm not a reporter." He glanced across the table at Danny. "I personally hate the media. They're always coming up with these wild theories and will do anything to prove them. Now this guy's kinda famous around here, being a big-shot reporter for the AP and all. Rumor has it when he gets with girls it's window dressing. You get beyond it and nothing's there, if you know what I mean." He had a cruel smile on his face, and I could not believe how much I did not like him when we had only met today.

  "Where are you getting your information?" I asked.

  "I hear things."

  "Danny, let's get hair and fingernail samples," I said.

  "You know, I take the time to talk to people on the street," Roche added as he brushed against my hip.

  "You want his mustache plucked, too?" Danny fetched forceps and envelopes from a surgical cart.

  "May as well."

  "I guess you're going to test him for HIV.- Roche brushed against me again.

  "Yes," I replied.

  "Then you're thinking he might be queer."

  I stopped what I was doing because I'd had enough.

  "Detective Roche--I turned around to face him, and my voice was hard--if you are going to be in my morgue, then you will give me room to work. You will stop rubbing against me, and you will treat my patients with respect. This man did not ask to be here dead and naked on this table.

  And I don't like the word queer."

  "Well, irregardless of what you call it, his orientation might somehow be important." He was nonplussed, if not pleased by my irritation.

  "I don't know for a fact that this man was or was not gay," I said. "But I do know for a fact that he did not die of AIDS."

  I grabbed a scalpel off a surgical cart and his demeanor abruptly changed. He backed off, suddenly unnerved because I was about to start cutting, so now I had that problem to cope with, too.

  "Have you ever seen an autopsy?" I said to him.

  "A few." He looked like he might throw up "Why don't you go sit down over there," I suggested none too kindly as I wondered why Chesapeake had assigned him to this case or any case. "Or go out in the bay."

  "It's just hot in here."

  "If you get sick, go for the nearest trash can." It was all Danny could do not to laugh.

  "I'll just sit over here for a minute." Roche went to the desk near the door.

  I swiftly made the Y incision, the blade running from shoulders to sternum to pelvis. As blood was exposed to air, I thought I detected an odor that made me stop what I was doing.

  "You know, Lipshaw's got a really good sharpener out I wish we could get," Danny was saying. "It hone-grinds with water so you can just stick the knives in there and leave them."

  What I was smelling was unmistakable, but I could not believe it.

  "I was just looking at their new catalog," he went on.

  "Makes me crazy all the cool things we can't afford."

  This could not be right.

  "Danny, open the doors," I said with a quiet urgency that startled him.

  "What is it?" he asked in alarm.

  "Let's get plenty of air in here. Now," I said.

  He moved fast with his bad knee and opened double doors that led into the hall.

  "What's wrong?" Roche sat up straighter.

  "This man has a peculiar odor." I was unwilling to voice my suspicions right then, especially to him.

  "I don't smell anything." He got up and looked around, as if this mysterious odor might be something he could see.

  Eddings' blood reeked of a bitter almond smell, and it did not surprise me that neither Roche nor Danny could detect it. The ability to smell cyanide is a sex-linked recessive trait that is inherited by less than thirty percent of the population. I was among the fortunate few.

  "Trust me." I was reflecting back skin from ribs, careful not to puncture the intercostal muscles. "He smells very strange."

  "And what does that mean?" Roche wanted to know.

  "I won't be able to answer that until tests are conducted," I said. "In the meantime, we'll thoroughly check out all of his equipment to make sure everything was functioning and that he didn't, for example, get exhaust fumes down his hose."

  "You know much about hookahs?" Danny asked me, and he had returned to the table to help.

  "I've never used one."

  I undermined the midline chest incision laterally. Reflecting back tissue, I formed a pocket in a side of skin, which Danny filled with water. Then I immersed my hand and inserted the scalpel blade between two ribs. I checked for a release of bubbles that might indicate a diving injury had caused air to leak into the chest cavity. But there were none.

  "Let's get the hookah and the hose out of the boat and bring them in," I decided. "It would be good if we could get hold of a dive consultant for a second opinion. Do you know anyone around here we might be able to reach on a holiday?"

  "There's a dive shop in Hampton Roads that Dr. Mant sometimes uses."

  He got the numbers and called, but the shop was closed this snowy New Year's Eve, and the owner did not seem to be at home. Then Danny went out to the bay, and when he returned a brief time later, I could hear a familiar voice talking loudly with him as heavy footsteps sounded along the hallway.

  "They wouldn't let you if you were a cop," Pete Marino's voice projected into the autopsy suite.

  "I know, but I don't understand it," Danny said.

  "Well, I'll give you one damn good reason. Hair as long as yours gives the assholes out there one more thing to grab. Me'? I'd cut it off. Besides, the girls would like you better."

  He had arrived in time to help carry in the hookah and coils of hose, and was giving Danny a fatherly lecture. It had never been hard for me to understand why Marino had terrible problems with his own grown son.

  "You know anything about hookahs?" I asked Marino as he walked in. He looked blankly at the body "What?

  He's got some weirdo disease?"

  "The thing you'
re carrying is called a hookah," I explained.

  He and Danny set the equipment on top of an empty steel table next to mine.

  "Looks like dive shops are closed for the next few days," I added. "But the compressor seems pretty simple a pump driven by a five-horsepower engine which pulls air through a filtered intake valve, then through the lowpressure hose connected to the diver's second-stage regulator. Filter looks all right. Fuel line is intact. That's all I can tell you."