Verses for the Dead

by Douglas Preston

  She began her general observations. “I note that the corpse has sustained significant deterioration,” she said. “This includes what is evidently a series of wet-dry cycles, decomposition followed by desiccation.” There was still a smell of embalming fluid, but it had not been able to hold back the ravages of decay. The corpse was in two pieces, and examining it grossly, she saw that the poor state of the body rendered the original—and evidently hasty—autopsy almost academic. She would essentially be starting from scratch.

  All the better.

  She began with a new Y-incision, and the diener handed her shears to open the chest cavity. The bones were brittle and snapped like dry twigs. The organs had already been removed in the autopsy eleven years before, then returned to the body cavity—now they were little more than shriveled black lumps adhering to the peritoneal wall, in an advanced state of decomposition. Soon she was “in the zone,” as she called that moment when her entire attention became focused on the body and all else faded away. She slowed down when she reached the genital area and performed a very careful dissection. This was a forensic autopsy, and as such there was always the possibility of sexual assault. But this body was too far gone to see much beyond the original M.E.’s work and the grossest of injuries.

  The clock ticked. The three spectators remained gratifyingly silent. And her boss, thank God, remained elsewhere.

  Finally she moved up to the head. According to the records, the decedent had hanged herself. She saw with a frown that the doctor who’d performed the initial autopsy had barely examined the neck, beyond confirming its role in the woman’s death. She made a U-shaped incision in the frontal aspect of the neck and began a meticulous dissection, freeing the sternocleidomastoid muscle from its lower attachments, exposing the carotid sheath and artery, the vagus nerve, and the omohyoid and sternothyroid. She finally exposed the cervical spine and noted the trauma still visible from the hanging.

  “Dr. Fauchet, a question?”

  She turned. It was the pale one, the one she believed was named Pendergast, who spoke. She was about to reiterate her rules, but something in his eye—soft and entreating—caused her to hesitate. “Yes.”

  “Do you see any evidence of strangulation prior to hanging?”

  “No.”

  “None? From what I saw, the neck showed considerable abrasive trauma.”

  “According to the coroner’s report, it was what we call an incomplete hanging—one where there wasn’t a long drop involved. Typical in a suicide. The abrasion and trauma you see here…and here—” she pointed with a scalpel— “was caused by the subject thrashing about during the period of suffocation. There is no traumatic spondylolisthesis of C2, that is, a fracture of the spine, between cervical one and two, because the drop was not long enough. For the same reasons, I do not observe any severe ligature injuries. Again, all of this is consistent with a suicidal hanging.”

  “Thank you.”

  She turned to continue her work when a sensor chimed and the door was flung open by her boss.

  “Ah, Charlotte, I see you are well along!” The chief forensic pathologist spoke loudly as he strode into the room, filling it with the scent of Old Spice. “This is Charlotte,” he added condescendingly to the chief fed. “Our first African American pathologist. Top notch.” He turned back to her. “May I?”

  “Go ahead, sir,” said Fauchet, keeping her voice studiously neutral.

  She should have expected this. Naturally, he was all gowned up and ready to go, and he quickly moved in, crowding her back from the body, picking up a scalpel with a flourish, and starting to poke and prick and cut here and there, making disapproving noises—mostly, whether he realized it or not, relating to the hastily done 2007 autopsy.

  “The dissection of the carotid should be diagonal,” he told her. Naturally, he was wrong—that technique was twenty years old—but Fauchet had learned never to contradict her boss while the tape was running.

  He fussed and poked, slicing away in the neck area she had already half finished. She winced as she saw his scalpel make a hash of her work. “You forgot to fully expose the first cervical,” he said. “Let me do it.”

  She was about to say that she was in the middle of doing so, but again held her tongue.

  He worked for a few minutes as everyone watched. “I was speaking earlier about this case with ADC Pickett, here,” he said, “and it seems to me there are no surprises. Everything I see here is consistent with death by hanging. Do you agree, Charlotte?”

  “Yes.” And she did in fact agree.

  Moberly poked at the corpse a bit more, and then straightened up and looked around, pulling down his mask. “Agent Pickett warned me this would be a waste of our time, and it appears he was correct.” He looked around. “So, Charlotte—are we done with the gross examination?”

  She glanced at the neck. Her dissection was still not complete, even though Moberly had done his best to ruin an already-spoiled cadaver with his fancywork. “Just a few minutes more,” she said.

  To her surprise, the silvery-eyed fed leaned in toward her. “Dr. Fauchet, would you do me the favor of examining the hyoid bone?”

  “I’ve exposed most of it.” She stepped up and pointed her scalpel, using forceps to deftly expose the rest. “It’s fractured, if that’s your question.”

  “Is that normal in such a hanging?”

  “It depends. The hanging itself doesn’t normally fracture the hyoid, but in an incomplete hanging such as this, the violent struggles of the subject will sometimes result in such a fracture.”

  “But you see no reason to question the cause of death?” interjected the senior agent—the one named Pickett. “Suicide by hanging?”

  “No.”

  She could see Pickett shoot a poisonous glance at Pendergast. She was sorry her findings didn’t support whatever he was looking for—he seemed like a kind enough man.

  “Well, well,” said Moberly, “thank you, Charlotte, for your assistance.” He waved a hand. “You can wrap up here.”

  He led the group of feds toward the door. Just before leaving, the one named Pendergast glanced back at her with a sympathetic expression, and—if she hadn’t known better—she would have felt sure that he’d winked.

  Coldmoon did not enjoy autopsies, and this one had left him a little queasy. He followed Pendergast and Pickett out the hospital door. Once in the fresh air he breathed deeply, trying to flush the smell of formalin and death from his lungs.

  As they waited for a driver, Pickett turned to Pendergast. “Satisfied?”

  “I’m rarely satisfied.”

  “Well, I’m satisfied. Moberly is one of the top forensic pathologists in the country, and that assistant of his looked pretty sharp, too.”

  Pendergast paused. “I should like to go to Ithaca.”

  Pickett stared at him. “I’m sorry—what did you say?”

  “The Baxter death occurred on November seventh, 2006. The Flayley death on March twelfth, 2007. Four months apart.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “The timing appears unusually close. And both were Florida residents, killed outside of the state.”

  “Coincidence. You’ve been around long enough to know that cases like this throw up meaningless coincidences. Agent Pendergast, it’s crystal clear that both victims committed suicide. That’s the connection. Our guy has a fixation with suicide. Look how sorry he feels for them. Besides, the women didn’t know each other. A trip to Ithaca isn’t going to shed light on anything of relevance.”

  “Nevertheless, I would like to go.”

  Coldmoon listened to all this with an impassive face. He had to agree with Pickett. It was a waste of time to go to Ithaca, and he wasn’t about to go out on a limb again after getting burned the last time.

  “I can complete my investigation in a day,” Pendergast went on. “There and back.”

  Pickett hesitated, as if considering something. Then he shook his head in disbelief. “Very well. If you feel that stro
ngly, go ahead. No overnight—if Brokenhearts strikes again, you need to be here when it happens. But before you go, I want you to check in with the forensic lab to see if anything worthwhile has come up.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Agent Coldmoon, you’ll accompany Pendergast to Ithaca, of course.”

  “Yes, sir.” Coldmoon silently indulged in a lengthy, and highly descriptive, Lakota curse.

  Pickett’s car arrived and he got in. “I’m heading back to New York. It should go without saying I don’t want to have to come down here again.”

  He slammed the door without another word, and the car immediately sped off.

  18

  THEY MADE THEIR way down the icy East Avenue sidewalk, passing grim-looking administrative buildings, heading toward the Thurston Avenue bridge. Although upstate New York was not as cold as Maine had been a few days before, there were still plow-mountains of snow at the street intersections and in the corners of parking lots. Pendergast was again clad in his Snow Mantra coat, while Coldmoon was wearing his old down jacket, unzipped. He readjusted the satchel hanging off his right shoulder. Even for a chilly day in late March, the streets seemed quiet—apparently, it was spring break. Coldmoon had been through this town once or twice, several years back, and except for the Starbucks on the approaching street corner the place looked unchanged: gray and dejected, waiting for spring.

  They reached the intersection and stopped briefly beside a flagman for a crew fixing a water main break. Coldmoon took advantage of this pause to reach into his satchel, pull out a battered thermos decorated in red-and-black plaid, remove the cover that also served as a cup, and pour some of his camp coffee into it. One of the nice things about being a fed was not having to deal with TSA bullshit—they could show their creds at the airport security station, board with the pilots and flight attendants, and bring whatever they felt like in their carry-ons.

  As the delicious aroma of the burnt coffee wafted up, Coldmoon’s two companions turned toward him: Marv Solomon, a Cornell University security officer, in surprise, and Pendergast in displeased recognition. Coldmoon ignored them as he placidly sipped the tepid coffee; he had long since grown accustomed to such reactions.

  It looked like they’d be delayed at the intersection another minute or so. “One moment, please,” Pendergast said. Then he disappeared into the nearby Starbucks. He came out shortly holding a cardboard cup with a white plastic lid, which he handed to Coldmoon.

  Coldmoon took it in his free hand and examined it, turning the cup around.

  “Espresso doppio,” Pendergast told him. “Two shots of pure French roast, freshly ground. Not quite Caffe Reggio, but more than adequate for a civilized brew.” There was the faintest emphasis on the word civilized.

  Now Coldmoon had his hands full. He took another sip from his thermos lid.

  “Try the other,” urged Pendergast, kindly.

  He tasted—gingerly—the drink Pendergast had given him. He’d never had a Starbucks coffee before—it was too damn expensive. He quickly took another gulp of camp coffee, rinsing the taste from his mouth. Then he poured the espresso into a nearby snow pile and dropped the empty cup into a waste can.

  “Too civilized,” he said.

  The flagman waved them past and they continued down the hill. Now, directly ahead, lay the bridge. It was not especially impressive—just a pair of green steel arches rising gently toward the sky, the two-lane road between them passing over Fall Creek Gorge and disappearing into the snowy landscape beyond. Coldmoon could hear a faint rushing sound, almost like wind.

  “There she is,” Solomon, the security officer, said, waving toward the bridge as proudly as if he’d built it himself.

  They paused again and Coldmoon glanced at the man. He found it interesting that Pendergast had requested this Cornell security officer instead of a local cop to act as guide. Perhaps he’d been unimpressed by their reception in Katahdin. Or perhaps it was the fact that Solomon had been with the university two dozen years and had seen three bridge suicides firsthand. In any case, they’d already retrieved the case files from the Ithaca PD. They were now crammed into his satchel with the thermos, ready for examination on the flight home.

  He glanced at his watch. Twelve thirty. If they wanted to catch the plane home that evening, they’d better scramble. Even with the earliest Miami-to-Syracuse flight, it had still taken them almost four hours to get here. In addition, Coldmoon had requested they make an hour’s detour on the way back to the airport so he could take care of some personal business, and that further limited their time.

  “Let’s take a look,” he said.

  They crossed the street, Solomon leading, and went another hundred yards to the pedestrian walkway that spanned the eastern flank of the bridge. The Fall Creek Gorge fell steeply away beneath their feet, its prominences and stratifications fanged by long, menacing icicles. The base of the gorge lay far below, covered with flat boulders punctuated here and there by menhirs sculpted by water. Upstream, the falls were half-frozen, but gray-black cataracts of water, spurting defiantly from its middle passage, turned the rushing sound he’d noticed earlier into a roar. From this distance, it was clear the bridge supports were flanked by decorative iron fencing in the same green and, beyond that, sturdy netting, elaborately rigged, to catch any falling bodies.

  “Happened right there,” Solomon said, hitching up his pants and pointing just ahead. “I was doing perimeter tours that night and happened to be very near when the call came in. Got here within two minutes, before even the cops. Didn’t touch anything, of course. It was too late. I knew there was nothing I could do to save her.”

  Pendergast pulled a thin folder, which he’d appropriated from the stack of Ithaca PD case files, out of his parka. “Two students found her, I understand. Were they still there when you arrived?”

  Solomon nodded. “Yep. Both sitting down. Stunned. Guess I can’t blame them.” He paused. “It was a warm evening for March. Real pleasant. Coming on a new moon, too.”

  “You’ve got a good memory,” said Coldmoon.

  “I’m not likely to forget that night. Not the way she died.” And Solomon cast them a significant look. “This bridge is pretty famous for the so-called Cornell gorge suicides. Before they put up that netting, more than two dozen people—many of them students—jumped into the gorge. Flayley’s the only person that I know of who hanged herself instead of jumping.”

  “What else do you remember?” Pendergast asked.

  “She used yellow polypropylene rope. You know, the kind they rig boats and things with. Real strong for its weight. Tied one end around the railing, here—” He pointed. “Of course, the netting wasn’t in place at the time. They put that in a few years later.”

  Pendergast opened the folder and paged through it for a moment. “A very common brand of rope, I see. Available in most states.” He glanced up at Solomon. “Was she dead by the time you arrived?”

  The man hesitated. “Well, that’s hard to say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was…well, I saw her limbs twitch for a couple of seconds. Legs, mostly. Don’t think she was still alive, it was just…” He fell silent again for a moment. “The ones that called it in, they said she was struggling when they first got there. They were too freaked out to do anything. Hadn’t made the rope long enough to break her own neck, I guess.” He licked his lips. “Poor woman. What a way to go.”

  “Nobody saw her approach the bridge or jump off?”

  “No, sir. Like I said, it was a dark night. Quiet. Little traffic that late.”

  “How late?”

  “Ten past midnight.”

  Pendergast went back to the folder. Coldmoon wondered why he was asking these questions; most, if not all, of the answers would be in the case files. It was almost as if the man had to absorb something from eyewitnesses, or the scene itself—as if he were waiting for the very landscape to murmur its secrets to him.

  “And it was determin
ed that Ms. Flayley knew none of the university students or any Ithaca residents,” Pendergast said without looking up.

  “She knew nobody. Was just in town for one night. Had an interview at Cornell in the afternoon.”

  A so-so interview, too, Coldmoon knew; an expression of interest, but not a definite job offer. That’s what Pickett had said, and the HR department at Cornell backed him up. Agatha Flayley, thirty-one at the time of her suicide. Parents long deceased, no siblings or significant others. Place of residence: Miami. Place of employment: Outpatient Consulting, Mercy Miami Hospital. Interested in a position as patient advocate at Cornell Health. Who the hell moves voluntarily from Miami to upstate New York? Felice Montera, the first woman to have her heart rudely chopped out, had been in the health field, too, he remembered—a nurse at Mount Sinai. Connection?

  As Coldmoon mused, Pendergast had walked down the bridge alone, hands in his pockets. At the far end, he abruptly stopped and looked around. Again, Coldmoon was struck with the odd notion that the man was waiting for something. He mentally shrugged it off: whatever it was, it wasn’t any more peculiar than lying motionless on a hotel bed in Maine for a couple of hours. The agent’s eccentric behavior, the “Pendergast mystique” Pickett had warned him of, was something Coldmoon felt impervious to.

  Solomon, the security officer, was saying something. Coldmoon tuned in; realized he was talking about snow in the forecast; tuned it out again. Now Pendergast was coming back. Just before he reached them, he faced the bridge once more. For a split second, he seemed to freeze, and Coldmoon was certain he heard the agent draw in a sharp breath. But then he turned back, his expression as inscrutable as ever, and the moment—whatever it was—had passed.

  Pendergast nodded to the security officer. “Thank you, Mr. Solomon,” he said, slipping the file back into his parka. “I don’t think we need to take up any more of your time.”