by Archer Mayor
I had stood over quite a few dead bodies in my time, considering it covered both the Korean War and some thirty years as a cop. Most of them had been in context, from shell holes and blasted trees to twisted auto wrecks and smashed living rooms. Autopsies were different. The bodies were stripped, both of clothes and environment. They were laid out, cold, white, and flat on their backs, and they were dissected, just like frogs in a classroom. In many ways, an autopsy for me was the careful disassembling of a complex machine, piece by piece. I will admit, though, that I kept this side of me private. People tended to get twitchy around other people who enjoy autopsies.
Hillstrom and Bergen struggled to roll Mrs. Ricci onto her side so they could fit the two slats beneath her. That done, she lay somewhat suspended above the surface of the table, allowing a gentle stream of water to course under her, carrying away whatever fluid she might give up.
She was an enormous woman, gray-haired, lightly mustached, with heavy, unpleasant features. She reminded me of those discontented travelers I’d seen on buses or trains, their sleeping faces reflecting all the inert unhappiness of their lives. I also noticed, for no reason whatever, that she had incredibly unattractive toenails, yellow and gnarled in contrast to her pasty-white rubberlike skin.
Hillstrom picked up a scalpel and quickly made a long curved incision from shoulder to shoulder. She then intersected the slit just below the throat and cut a straight line between the breasts down to the groin, creating a slightly rounded T.
“Were you the officer at the scene, Corporal?” Hillstrom asked without looking up.
Evans, his eyes glued to the scalpel, swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“Could you give us the circumstances?” She buried her hand into the cut near the breast and pulled the thick outer layer of skin away from the body, cutting the few small pieces of tissue that still connected the two as she went and revealing the lungs underneath. The large flap in her hand consisted of two to three solid inches of bright yellow, glistening fat. A cloying, nauseous odor filled the room.
I could hear Evans’s breath coming in short and rapid gulps. “She was, ah, crossing the street… legally. You know, a crosswalk. Car should have stopped…”
“Why don’t you have a seat? No point standing around getting sore feet.”
“Okay.” Evans gratefully took a seat and leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees, the perfect image of studied casualness.
“You might also want to get your camera gear ready.” She motioned to Harry, who picked up Evans’s camera bag and placed it on the floor between his feet. Evans bent further forward to unzip it and rummaged among its contents.
“Was the driver intoxicated?”
“Yes, ma’am.” His voice was distinctly clearer. “She became hysterical at the time of the accident, so we haven’t been able to question her yet.”
Having folded both breasts back under the body’s arms, Hillstrom started examining and removing the organs, as carefully as she might have unpacked a duffel bag filled with china. The odor was absorbed by the ventilating system.
“You might want a shot of this.” Evans, steady once more, slowly approached the table, camera in hand.
“She’s suffered a punctured aorta, in itself enough to cause death, although possibly not the primary cause here; and right behind you can see where her spine is broken. I can get you a clearer view of that later.” Hillstrom placed her pale hand behind the aorta to give the picture more contrast. Evans focused and shot.
“You might want to add, by the way, that so far we also have a punctured lung, several broken ribs, a ripped diaphragm, and an entire pelvic area that looks shattered beyond belief. Also a perforated bowel. Did she go under the car, do you know?”
“I don’t know. We found her with her head resting on the curb in front of the car.”
“Yes, I noticed that.” She moved to the body’s right side and slipped her finger deep into a hole hidden in the hair above the ear. “Your primary cause may be lurking under here.”
Evans sat down.
The autopsy continued for another hour and a half, during which Harry retrieved vitreous fluid from the body’s eyeballs with a syringe, and Hillstrom cut around the back of Mrs. Ricci’s head, peeled her forehead down over her nose like a rubber mask, and revealed the naked skull. She used a hand-held vibrator saw to remove the top half of the cranium and established that a broken brain stem had been the elusive primary cause of death. Both events sent Evans back to his chair.
Hillstrom’s prowess at this was impressive. She cut, sawed, and sliced with absolute grace, never nicking a wrong part, never hesitating once she’d started. It made me realize that, had Mrs. Ricci been alive, she could have done a lot worse than to pull this doctor for an operation.
We ended up, the two of us, off by a side counter where Hillstrom did her organ dissections. She was cutting thin slices of lung and studying them under the bright light. She held up a large piece of tissue. “See how the furrows are ingrained with black? That’s pollution. You don’t find it in country people; you get a ton of it in New Yorkers and the like. I’d guess she lived around Rutland, or a similar-sized city, all her life.” She looked up from her work at the others in the room, now out of earshot. “So, what about Kimberly Harris?”
“I just have some questions about your findings.”
“Think I messed up, huh?” The question was put with perfect neutrality, but I decided I wouldn’t run the risk. Things had started out badly enough.
“No, I think I came here at the wrong time, without an appointment, and said all the wrong things. Will you let me get my foot out of my mouth?”
She looked at me for a moment and smiled slightly, as if letting me halfway off the hook. “What would you like to know?”
“At the trial, you testified to the presence of sperm on the body…”
“Semen.”
“Right. Is there anything else you can tell from that?”
“Like blood type? I did.”
“No, I mean anything else—like race or if the man was taking medicine or had a cold.”
“Are you asking if I did or if I could?”
“Both, I guess.”
“I didn’t and I might. I couldn’t tell if he had a cold.” She stood up and took off her gloves. Harry began gathering up the organs and placing them into a large plastic bag, which he packed in the body’s empty cavity before sewing it up.
“But you didn’t do any of that?” I followed her across the room where she filled out some forms stuck to her clipboard.
“No. It’s usually not required in those cases, especially the quote-unquote open-and-shut ones like Harris, which I gather from your presence has undergone a change of status.”
“No, no. It’s still officially closed. I’m a bit of a Lone Ranger on this.” She stopped writing and genuinely smiled at me for the first time
“Really? You trying to reopen the case on your own?”
“Sort of. Things have happened that have made me curious.”
She nodded. “I’m glad.”
That got me. “You are?”
“Yes. You want to follow me back to my office? My records are there, and I’m finished for the day. I also have some very good hot cocoa on hand.”
“That would be hard to turn down.”
“Then don’t.”
9
SHE DROVE A DARK BLUE MERCEDES with license plates marked “QNCY.” As we drove along a snow-blurred, Christmas-card-pretty Colchester Avenue in the darkening cold air, I had to admit that while I enjoyed the occasional autopsy, I wouldn’t make them a habit. For all their incredibly vicious, stupid, venal and self-centered moments, I still preferred my fellow humans alive.
Her office was small, warm, and friendly, decorated with childish drawings and family pictures taken at the beach and on a mountain top. It was also cluttered with hundreds of books, magazines, and mysterious black-bound volumes that were parked neatly on every available surface. In many ways, it remin
ded me of movies I’d seen featuring the favorite professor’s hideaway study. Classical music drifted from some hidden radio behind her desk.
She served the cocoa from a machine parked on the window ledge and handed me a cup. In the midst of her own cozy environment, immune from the swirling dark snow outside and all it hid, her earlier tenseness slid away. She raised her cup in a toast. “Truce?”
I toasted back. “Gratefully.”
“I’d like you to know that I am not an I-do-my-job-and-you-do-yours bureaucrat. When a case reaches me, most of the emotion has been drained from it; I see its background on a printed report, I usually never meet the principals involved, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, I’ve never even heard of the individual I’m working on. I have to fall back on procedure: I do what is required by law and what is additionally asked of me by the appropriate authorities. I am a middleman who does her utmost to steer clear of other people’s squabbles. I followed that precept in the Kimberly Harris case, but I will admit here and now that I wasn’t fond of the way things turned out.”
“Why not?”
“Human beings are sloppy creatures—nothing about them is perfect, either inside or out—and it is most often their imperfections that help us see what makes them tick. Kimberly Harris’s body fit that category just fine; the circumstances that put her body in my autopsy room did not—they were nice and clear and tidy.”
“So you think Bill Davis was framed.”
“If I did, I would have said so. What I think is that I’m happy someone is sniffing around this case again.”
I had to smile. I had never felt so suddenly in the presence of a kindred spirit. “What kind of information can you get from a semen sample, given the chance and a blank check?”
“A lot, with time, money, and the proper training and equipment, none of which I have. Realistically, if you’re as alone as you say you are, you’re not going to get any more than what I already supplied.”
She got up and left the room, returning a couple of minutes later with an open file. “The semen was spermatic, although the sperm count was a little low—nothing exceptional there. We were lucky we even got a blood type. If the depositor had been a nonsecretor, we would have been up a tree.”
“A nonsecretor?”
“A secretor is somebody whose blood type appears in his or her body fluids as well as in the blood itself—handy if all you’ve got is a sweaty shirt or, as in this case, semen. A nonsecretor’s blood type can only be ascertained through the blood.”
I opened my mouth, but she cut me off. “Davis is also a secretor, if that’s what you were going to ask, and he is group O, which you probably knew. That part is especially unfortunate for him.”
“How so?”
“Let me give you a fast course in blood grouping. All secretors make a blood substance called ‘H’ in addition to whatever else they make. For example, type A secretors make A and H; type Bs make B and H; type ABs make AB and H. Type Os only make H. When we tested the semen, it came up H—period. What’s unfortunate for Davis is that forty-three percent or more of the entire population is of that type. It makes him an easy target—kind of like saying, ‘he’s guilty because he’s a man,’ if you get my drift. That, needless to say, was a subtlety lost on the jury.” She put the file on the desk and sat down.
“You said a lot more could be gotten out of this.”
“Yes, but not by me. Staying with blood grouping for a while longer, they’ve been able to break down those broad categories through something called PGM typing, or enzyme typing, and even PGM subtyping, as well as other methods I don’t even know about. Well, I’ve heard about them, but I don’t know the details. In any case, the result is that each stage of typing makes the tested sample more specific to one individual. So, if you compare Davis’s sample to the semen and go down the line, the first difference in typing lets your man off the hook. Of course, it’s not going to give you the real depositor of the semen, but it might help an innocent person.”
I caught the first glimmer of a chance to take control of this case. “What about the fetus?”
She shrugged. “There again, we did a blood grouping on it. It wasn’t Davis’s, but that didn’t help him much. I had to admit in court that it’s unfortunately not rare to find a young unmarried pregnant girl in our society. I might have added that it’s also not unheard of to find a third person’s semen involved in a two-person rape case—she may have had relations with someone prior to being raped by someone else.”
“Are you suggesting that?”
“Not exactly, although there might have been several people involved—a depositor and a killer and even the father. Another possibility is that the semen was carried to the site and placed by hand, explaining why it wasn’t found in the vagina but only the mouth and pubic hair.”
She smiled, presumably at the crease in my forehead, which had to be there by now. “There’s something else, too. While I was doing my investigation prior to the trial, I spoke with the hospital staff that treated Davis’s head wound. They described it as a serious trauma, one likely to have rendered most men unconscious. Of course, he may have a hard head.
“But the lamp brings me back to the ‘too-nice-and-neat’ problem I mentioned earlier. Harris was found tied down with one hand free. From her torn nails and Davis’s cheek, the assumption was that she got that hand loose, hit him with the lamp, scratched him—or vice versa—and then was strangled. Now I can theoretically swallow one or the other—the scratching or the lamp—but not both. Had she gotten away with one, her assailant surely wouldn’t have let her do the other. It’s almost as if somebody planted one piece of incriminating evidence too many. Makes you wonder, huh?”
“Makes me wonder why you’re not doing what I do for a living.”
“Well, I am, aren’t I?” She laughed. “Actually, the truth is I see every homicide in this state, year after year. That only comes to about twenty or so on the average—about what New York racks up in a day—but it still makes me the resident expert. I’ve seen a lot more than you have—in that area at least.”
“Okay. All this leaves one final question—a pretty big one. Do you still have the samples?”
She let out a conspiratorial laugh. “You’re a lucky man. I always keep my own slides, but usually the samples get dumped after two years. This time I held on to them, including the fetus.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know—intuition.”
“You’re right—lucky me.” I stood up. “This has been a big help, really. By the way, since you can’t do those tests you told me about, who can?”
She quickly scribbled a name on a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “Bob Kees, University of West Haven—that’s just outside New Haven. All this is his specialty. Whenever I get stumped, I call on him. So does everyone else, I might add, so any work out of there will take time—but it’ll be worth it.”
“How does he handle his fees?”
She looked at me quizzically. “Why?”
“My captain’s the only one who knows I’m on this. If vouchers start appearing with Harris’s name all over them, I’ll be up the proverbial creek.”
“Politics?”
“You got it.”
“Don’t worry about it. In situations like this, Bob usually waives his fee, and I’ll make sure he does this time.”
“How about getting the stuff to him?”
“No problem there either. It all fits into a small picnic cooler, and I can get the state police to act as couriers if time is a problem. They’ll go from door to door, within the state at least, and you can take it from there. I can code it so no one knows what’s inside. Your only problem should be letting me know when to start things rolling. In the meantime, I’ll gather it all together in one spot so as not to slow things up when the time comes.”
She got up and shook my hand. “Happy hunting.”
“I have to admit, when we met I never dreamed it would end this way.”
“You’re a hard man to say no to.”
This time, the tape on the door was intact. Still, I checked the rooms and closets—and phones—to see if I could sense anyone having come by. At the end of my search I gave an obligatory glance down into the street. The Plymouth was back, just visible by the street lamp’s blurred light.
“You son of a bitch,” I muttered, and headed for the door.
It was still snowing, though just barely at last, and the ground was covered by a good ten to twelve inches. I stepped onto the unshoveled sidewalk and walked rapidly north, away from High Street and the Plymouth. I heard the muffled sound of a car door slamming—whoever this clown was, discretion wasn’t his strength. At the first left, a narrow, cluttered back street that twisted steeply up to join Chestnut Hill, I climbed as quickly as I could, fighting to keep my footing. At the point where the street curves left, I stopped and ducked behind a parked van.
I waited a full minute and a half, hearing all the while my follower’s labored progress up the slippery hill. Obviously he didn’t have the proper footwear because several times he resorted to pulling himself along on parked cars, garbage bins, and the occasional spindly sapling. I began to wonder why he was even bothering; had I been anything short of an elephant riding a wheelchair, I would have been long gone. But he was nothing if not persistent; by the time he finally reached the van, he was breathing hard and quietly swearing nonstop.
I stood very still, resting against the back of the van, facing the street, where my pursuer had gone for firmer footing. As he came abreast of the rear bumper, I swung my leg out with full force and caught him across both shins. His feet flew out from under him and he landed face first in the street with a dull thump.
I stepped on the nape of his neck and pushed my gun barrel into his ear. “Put your hands behind your back.” Both snowy hands appeared. I snapped my handcuffs onto them. “Roll over.”
He did as he was told. I looked at him in the dim light; his face was covered with soft powdery snow which he was trying to blink from his eyes. His nose was bleeding. “What’s your name?”
