The Drowned Man

by David Whellams

  “I get your point, Peter,” Rizeman said, “but we need to be a bit careful. The girl died on U.S. territory. Either the Bureau or D.C. police have authority over that matter. We’ll have to sort it out. I’m willing to coordinate jurisdiction and smooth the way for you. I do agree that the murder of a Scotland Yard officer within the boundaries of Canada is the more compelling issue. Let me introduce you to the special agent in charge at our end of things.”

  He pressed a button under his desktop.

  While they waited, Peter considered Rizeman’s interpretation. Unlike some of his colleagues, Peter had the greatest respect for the Bureau and he had no doubt that Rizeman would extend full cooperation. Sharing wasn’t the toughest issue. There could be considerable tension between the FBI and Washington Metro, and Peter was relying on Rizeman to sort out any friction inside the Beltway.

  A tall young agent entered the office.

  “This is Henry Pastern from our Art Crime Team,” Rizeman said. The young man fit the FBI profile: neat blue suit, clean-shaven, perfect American teeth.

  Peter instantly understood how the Bureau regarded this case. They were assuming that the girl had committed suicide. Any offences committed by Alice Nahri — crossing the U.S. border with intent to commit a crime, for example — had become moot with her death. All that remained was the disappearance of the Booth letters. Hence the delegation to Art Crime.

  Rizeman rushed the discussion along. “Don’t worry about bailiwicks, Peter. There are enough federal dimensions for us to assert our preeminence, if necessary. Henry will drive you over to Quantico to see the girl’s body.”

  Pastern had said nothing beyond “Hello,” and appeared nervous. Peter knew that Pastern was wondering why a senior Scotland Yard officer, even a retired one, had been dispatched merely to view a dead body. It was the question Peter had been asking since day one.

  “One last thing, Peter,” Rizeman said. “Is Alice Nahri an Indian subject as well as British?”

  “Dual, likely. That is, two passports. She was travelling on a British passport and we should work towards repatriating her body to the U.K. Only family is her mother and perhaps a sister, and we’re trying to locate them.”

  “Then my ruling is that we proceed with suicide, let the Sûreté take the lead on the Montreal killing, and put the mythical letters on whatever hot list seems appropriate. Nice and neat. Putting it indelicately, Peter, will you be taking the girl’s body off our hands this week?”

  “As necessary,” Peter answered coyly. He now grasped that this was all about containment. The dead girl, it had been ruled, was not an active threat, and most important for Rizeman, never a terrorist threat.

  Peter accompanied Henry Pastern to the basement of the Hoover complex. Peter liked his earnestness. He stood over six feet and had a distinctive shaved head. At one time, the Bureau wouldn’t have allowed a cue ball cut, but anyone would have to admit that Pastern presented the proper buttoned-down image of a purposeful FBI special agent.

  Yet it was strange that Pastern had chosen to make his mark in Art Crime. These agents spent their time retrieving paintings and objets d’art listed on the National Stolen Art File Index — not exactly pounding the pavement. As for a missing document with an unverified signature, such as the Booth note to Sir Fenwick Williams, the Bureau, like other national forces, hired experts with very specific forensics skills. Peter wondered what credentials Henry Pastern possessed, other than, perhaps, a fine arts degree. He concluded that young Henry was simply playing the angles, initially getting in the door through the Art Crime unit, and now seizing his chance to work a murder case. Street cred was everything in the FBI.

  Washington was a humid city and the art of navigating it in early September depended on adroit leaps from air-conditioned office to air-conditioned transport. Retrieval of a Bureau sedan from the basement entailed signing out a vehicle and moving through several layers of security barriers. But in a few minutes the agent had them out onto 10th Street, steering south across Constitution Avenue towards Quantico. Peter was always happy in the U.S. capital and he rubbernecked like a tourist.

  Any jitters Henry had from sharing a car with a Scotland Yard chief inspector did not impede his driving, and so Peter felt comfortable launching into a more detailed briefing on the murder of Carpenter. Without expressing an opinion on Alice Nahri’s culpability, he emphasized the equally important goals of pursuing both the girl and the letters. Pastern nodded constantly as he wended his way through traffic. As Henry adjusted his grip on the steering wheel to make a turn, Peter discovered a clue to the young man’s background. On his left hand he wore a small ring embossed with “CTR.” Choose the Right. Pastern was a Mormon. Two of the most famous document forgery cases in U.S. history involved the Mormons: the case of the putative Mormon Will of Howard Hughes, and the murders committed by Mark William Hofmann, a rare book dealer and counterfeiter of Mormon artifacts. Over the decades, the Bureau had welcomed such straightlaced Mormon recruits as this young man, assured of getting reliability and loyalty. Henry Pastern had opened a logical career door.

  “Can I ask you a question, Chief Inspector?” the special agent said, his voice tentative.

  Peter was in a benevolent mood. He smiled. “Ask me anything, Special Agent.”

  In this context, Peter knew, this was neither a right nor a wrong posture towards what was coming. Pastern regarded him as a Sherlock-Holmes-slash-dinosaur and would be hoping for pithy revelations. He must have heard that Peter had worked on the Unabomber, Oklahoma City, and Yorkshire Ripper cases. Peter wondered if Henry Pastern had ever viewed a body on the slab.

  “Did you really find the Unabomber?”

  “No, it was a team effort, and as you know, his brother finally turned him in and led us to the cabin in Montana.”

  “But you visited every crime site, every place he bombed,” Henry said.

  “Not exactly. Some of the bombs were on airplanes. Others blew up in places they weren’t intended to, or got the wrong target. We tried to figure out, first, who the next target would be and what Kaczynski thought he was likely to achieve. For example, if he sent a bomb through the post, did he care who opened it? Then, when he issued his Manifesto, that told us a huge amount about his preoccupations, his targets. We ran word analysis and text extrapolations on the Manifesto, combined that with a map of both his known targets and the actual locations of the explosions, and then ran regressions to determine his pattern. Then we superimposed it on a map of the country.”

  The FBI academy taught the Unabomber story to all recruits. The case exemplified the classic manhunt but Peter, enjoying being chauffeured through sunny Washington, decided to add some flavour to the tale — stuff not taught to trainees.

  “You know who Brin and Page are?”

  “The founders of Google.”

  “They helped us out a bit. That was in the first year of Google, back before they became billionaires.”

  Peter sensed that the young agent didn’t quite believe him. That was okay with Peter; he was starting to like the earnest young man.

  “Chief Inspector, I heard that you worked on Oklahoma City, too.”

  “That was around the same time. Someone came up with the theory that the Murrah Federal Building bombers and Kaczynski might be connected.”

  “Well, were they?”

  Peter looked off towards the Jefferson Memorial. “No,” he lied.

  For the first two hours the girl floated face up in the muddy swill. Her body hung up in the shallows. But with the incremental flow of the morning tide the current refloated her and she drifted to the centre of the Anacostia, to begin her fitful journey to Chesapeake Bay. A quarter moon gave some light to the river yet there was no one to see the poor girl, even as the sun rose. It was Sunday; the commuters were home asleep. The construction crews were off too, and the single watchman who came out of his hut on the middle of the
11th Street Bridge to spit over the edge might have seen her, had she not by then drifted three hundred yards farther to the south. With the tide building, her body turned over in the main stream and she continued face down through the gap between the posts of the Frederick Douglass Bridge, past the Navy Yard complex, where duels were once fought at dawn.

  Her head drooped below the surface and her arms stretched down like strange seaweed. For several hours she bobbed against the shore, her sequined shirt tagging on the weeds. Branches abraded her now bloated face. Sunfish and bass nibbled at her soft tissues and macerated her fingertips, which were already raw and blanched, chewing away the whorls of her prints. Once, her right hand twitched and clutched at the weeds as if she had come alive, but it was only a cadaveric spasm. She drifted in a toxic pool of boat slick and chemicals, and after another two tidal cycles her corpse was coated with oily residue. On the second night, just before sundown, the tide rose and carried her farther on her journey. The warm water attracted live diatoms — algae — to her orifices, but they failed to force an entry to her throat, which had been sealed by strangulation and was further defended by the methyl alcohol in her stomach.

  For a while, her clothing increased her buoyancy and carried her smoothly along the flow of the river but on the third day her body sank. Immersed, her flesh began to decay faster. The fish were all over her, eating at the pulpy skin and coring out the punctures left by hypodermic needles in the fat around her waist. The weak brine of the river leached the blood out of these wounds. The different specific gravities of her bodily fluids and the methyl alcohol, still not metabolized, caused her stomach wall to swell.

  By the fourth day, the putrefying gas in her corpse raised it again to the surface. The last section of the Anacostia, before it merged with the Potomac at Buzzard Point, was twenty feet deep in the central channel, and she might have made it many miles farther, but for the new creatures. They swarmed her body, lacerating her face, legs, and shoulders. There were so many that two shoreline residents sailed out to take a gander, and they were the ones who found what was left of the prostitute.

  CHAPTER 20

  Dr. Robert Ehrlich worked inside a large bureaucratic onion. Surrounded by a Marine Corps base in Virginia, the Bureau coexisted happily with the military. The FBI kept laboratories here but Quantico was perhaps most noted for its training facility. As Peter Cammon and Henry Pastern moved through the layers of security to the morgue, they met dozens of earnest young men and women. “High policing,” the shaping of broad policy to protect the nation, might be the preoccupation of the executive cadre at the Hoover edifice downtown but Quantico was the place that excited every recruit and stayed in the memory of every graduating field agent.

  A smartly dressed young trainee called the medical examiner out to the reception room to meet Cammon and Pastern. Owen Rizeman had been lucky to get them an appointment in Ehrlich’s crammed teaching schedule. Ehrlich was short, about Peter’s height, and with a bald pate, though not as smooth as Henry’s landing-strip skull. He sported gold-rimmed glasses and a fresh Brooks Brothers shirt and silk tie, and his manner was Old-World gracious. Peter knew that this formality was his way of showing respect for the dead. Lowndes was a bit like that, too.

  If the pathologist seldom made eye contact, it was not because he was shy; rather he was used to explaining his work while looking down at a body. Rusty blood stained his lab coat. Ehrlich introduced himself but did not shake hands. He didn’t appear to find the detectives an odd pair, the tall Mormon and the shorter Brit.

  “Thank you for receiving us on short notice,” Pastern said.

  “I want to thank you, Special Agent, Chief Inspector,” Ehrlich responded. “Finally, someone has taken an interest. This is the damnedest autopsy. I’m on my fourth straight day. Actually, three evening sessions and today.”

  “Is there a particular problem with this one?” Peter said. His tone was sympathetic; he wanted Ehrlich to know that he had seen many an autopsy table.

  “Come with me,” Ehrlich said, and led them through a short passageway. Cold air and the odour of formalin flooded from the doorway as they entered the examination room. Three steel tables stood in parallel in the centre of the room, only one occupied and it covered by a plastic sheet. He led them over to the draped body and paused to allow Henry Pastern — he wasn’t worried about Peter — to compose himself for the unveiling.

  “Gentlemen,” Ehrlich began, “I am saying that I’ve been having trouble with cause of death. That is not an easy admission to make.”

  He drew the sheet back from feet to skull to reveal the remains of a woman who might or might not have been Alice Nahri. There wasn’t a lot left to interpret.

  Peter was surprised by the sweeping trauma to the body. He expected the head to be swollen and battered, but not like this. Much of the facial skin had been eaten away by fish or some caustic chemical, and the rest of the forehead and every feature not protected by the girl’s black hair had turned dark purple. Peter bent over closer and noted a pearly sheen just beneath the remaining purple skin on the chin and cheeks. He looked along the surface of the body, naked except for a sheet of muslin covering her excavated chest and stomach. This was a dark-skinned woman, African-American, he concluded from the less damaged surface of her upper thighs.

  “How long in the water?” Peter said.

  “Not more than four days,” Ehrlich said, exhaling loudly. “At first, I thought more than a week, but the pearlescence you see under the facial skin is not adiposia. That usually takes a month or more. The fatty layer of the body starts to turn to soap as it decays.”

  “What accounts for that effect, then?” Peter said.

  “A lot of things going on that accelerated the rot and putrefaction. There’s evidence of strangulation. Her oesophagus was crushed pre-death, or at least damaged. That accounts for the unusual swelling of the face, and that was compounded by three or four days in filthy water. There are other problems in determining both cause of death and how long she was floating in the river. Take a look at her stomach. Prepare yourselves . . .”

  He pulled back the square of muslin to reveal a gaping stomach wound. Peter understood that the opening was not entirely the result of Ehrlich’s excavations. The remaining fat around the midriff had the pearly sheen, and odd puncture wounds had been stitched horizontally into the fat.

  “How did that happen?” Peter said. “I’ve never seen that. Was this woman a drug addict?”

  “That was my first thought. As it turns out, she was diabetic. The injection marks for insulin would be less conspicuous than smack injections, and if you take insulin daily then the stomach roll is a convenient spot. Nonetheless, the original puncture locations were wide enough to let in sea lice to feast, leading to coring out of the belly fat and the enlargement of the holes you see here.”

  Henry threw up on the floor. Ehrlich raised an eyebrow and nodded to the perfectly good sink a few feet away. He went to a cupboard and took out a mop and rags.

  The pause gave Peter a chance to scan the entire corpse. The body was a mess. It left so many questions. He quickly reached at least one conclusion: to pin down the woman’s identity they would have to employ every available tool, from fingerprinting to dental impressions to DNA tests. For now, he returned to the fundamental riddle of how she died.

  But it was Henry, having cleaned off his face with a towel, who asked the essential question. “Did she drown, Doctor?”

  “No,” Ehrlich stated.

  “Oh,” Henry said. He felt stupid, though the query wasn’t.

  Ehrlich was a tolerant man, no more so than when instructing students, and he hastened to say, “No, no. At first I wondered if she might have entered the water with a spark of life still in her. It is usually easy to tell. The drowning victim ingests water, possibly debris. But she was dead when she entered the river.”

  The pathologist turned the head to
one side. The area at the top of the spinal column was darker than the rest of the swollen head. He looked to his guests for comments.

  Emboldened, Henry leaned in. “Skin is ruptured. Blunt force blow?”

  “That blow in itself would have proved fatal, may have been, in fact,” Ehrlich said. He straightened the head and pointed to the throat. “But the crushing of the oesophagus is what fully dispatched her, in my view. It’s a shredded mess now, but I can tell you that her throat was destroyed by massive pressure. It made it impossible for silt or other detritus to enter her stomach, even if she had been alive.”

  “Done by someone in a frenzy?” Peter asked.

  “Quite possibly, considering the ferocity of the other wounds. I’ll show you her extremities.”

  Peter walked to the end of the table and looked at the girl’s scarred feet. Ehrlich meanwhile turned over both of her hands.

  “Look at the hands. Fish and sea lice have been at the fingertips. They’re so bad, I can’t get prints from them. I may be able to draw images off them with fluoroscopic and chemical processes but I haven’t succeeded yet. But what I did find was signs of scraping on all the finger pads. Often, if a person falls into the water still alive, she will claw desperately at anything solid, a bridge footing, for example, or a tree floating in the current. I did find some weedy material in one hand, but that was post mortem, a reflex.”

  “But?” Peter prompted.

  “I found the scraping on all the fingers, every one. Somebody tried to destroy the fingerprints. I can’t see it being self-inflicted. And I think it was done after the girl expired. Just one more confusing element. Gentlemen, this was never a suicide.”

  Peter considered the evidence. The girl could have died in any of three ways: the blow to the back of the head; the violent crushing of her breathing passage, from the front; or, a series of traumas to other parts of her body. Now there was the desecration of her fingerprints.