Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  I don’t ask how long that’s been going on or who the “others” are. Who else has been working from home? This is a state government facility, a paramilitary installation, not a cottage industry, I feel like saying.

  “Damn Fielding,” Marino then mutters. “He’s fucking up everything.”

  I don’t answer. Now is not the time to discuss how fucked up everything is.

  “You know where I’ll be.” Lucy walks off toward the elevator, and with an elbow pushes a hands-free oversized button. She disappears behind sliding steel doors as I pass my thumb over another biometric sensor and the lock clicks free.

  Inside the control room, forensic radiologist Dr. Oliver Hess is seated at a work station behind lead-lined glass, his gray hair unruly, his face sleepy, as if I got him out of bed. Past him, through an open door, I can see the eggshell-white Siemens Somatom Sensation and hear the fan of its water-cooled system. The scanner is a modified version of the one used at Dover, equipped with a custom head holder and safety straps, its wiring subsurface, its parameter sealed, its table covered by a heavy vinyl slicker to protect the multimillion-dollar system from contaminants such as body fluids. Slightly angled down toward the door to facilitate sliding bodies on and off, the scanner is in the ready status, and technologist Anne Mahoney is placing radio-opaque CT skin markers on the dead man from Norton’s Woods. I get a strange feeling as I walk in. He is familiar, although I’ve never seen him before, only parts of him on recordings I watched on an iPad.

  I recognize the tint of his light-brown skin and his tapered hands, which are by his sides on top of a disposable blue sheet, his long, slender fingers slightly curled and stiff with rigor.

  In the video clips I heard his voice and saw glimpses of his hands, his boots, his clothing, but I did not see his face. I’m not sure what I imagined but am vaguely disturbed by his delicate features and long, curly brown hair, by the spray of light freckles across his smooth cheeks. I pull the sheet back, and he is very thin, about five-foot-eight and at most one hundred and thirty pounds, I deduce, with very little body hair. He could easily pass for sixteen, and I’m reminded of Johnny Donahue, who isn’t much older. Kids. Could that be a common denominator? Or is it Otwahl Technologies?

  “Anything?” I ask Anne, a plain-looking woman in her thirties with shaggy brown hair and sensitive hazel eyes. She’s probably the best person on my staff, can do anything, whether it is different types of radiographic imaging or helping in the morgue or at crime scenes. She is always willing.

  “This. Which I noticed when I undressed him.” Her latex-sheathed hands grip the body at the waist and hip, pulling it over so I can see a tiny defect on the left side of the back at the level of the kidneys. “Obviously missed at the scene because it didn’t bleed out, at least not much. You know about his bleeding, which I witnessed with my own two eyes when I was going to scan him early this morning? That he bled profusely from his nose and mouth after he was bagged and transported?”

  “That’s why I’m here.” I open a drawer to retrieve a hand lens, and then Benton is by my side in a surgical mask and gown and gloves. “He’s got some sort of injury,” I say to him as I lean close to the body and magnify an irregular wound that looks like a small buttonhole. “Definitely not a gunshot entrance. A stab wound made by a very narrow blade, like a boning knife but with two edges. Something like a stiletto.”

  “A stiletto in his back would drop him in his tracks?” Benton’s eyes are skeptical above his mask.

  “No. Not unless he was stabbed at the base of his skull and it severed his spinal cord.” I think of Mark Bishop and the nails that killed him.

  “Like I said at Dover, maybe something was injected,” Marino offers as he walks in covered from head to foot with personal protective clothing, including a face shield and hair cover, as if he’s worried about airborne pathogens or deadly spores, such as anthrax. “Maybe some kind of anesthesia. A lethal injection, in other words. That could sure as hell drop you in your tracks.”

  “In the first place, an anesthesia like sodium thiopental is injected into a vein, as are pancuronium bromide or potassium chloride.” I pull on a pair of examination gloves. “They aren’t injected into the person’s back. Same thing with mivacurium, with succinylcholine. You want to kill somebody decisively and quickly with a neuromuscular blocker, you’d better inject it intravenously.”

  “But if they were injected into a muscle, it would still kill you, right?” Marino opens a cabinet and gets out a camera. He rummages in a drawer and finds a plastic six-inch ruler for size reference. “During executions, sometimes the injection misses the vein and goes into the muscle, and the inmate still dies.”

  “A slow and very painful death,” I reply. “By all accounts, this man’s death wasn’t slow, and this injury wasn’t made by a needle.”

  “I won’t say the prison techs do it on purpose, but it happens. Well, it’s probably on purpose. Just like some of them chill the cocktail, making sure the dirtbag feels it hit, the ice-cold hand of death,” Marino says for Anne’s benefit, because she is passionately anti–capital punishment. His way of flirting is to offend her whenever he can.

  “That’s disgusting,” she says.

  “Hey. It’s not like they cared about the people they whacked, right? Like they cared if they suffered, right? What goes around comes around. Who hid the damn label maker?”

  “I did. I lie awake at night figuring out ways to get you back.”

  “Oh, yeah? For what?”

  “For just being you.”

  Marino digs in another drawer, finds the label maker. “He looks a hell of a lot younger than what the EMTs said. Anybody notice that besides me? Don’t you think he looks younger than his twenties?” Marino asks Anne. “Looks like a damn kid.”

  “Barely pubescent,” she agrees. “But then, all college kids are starting to look like that to me. They look like babies.”

  “We don’t know if he was a college student,” I remind everyone.

  Marino peels the backing off a label printed with the date and case number, and sticks it on the plastic ruler. “I’ll canvas the area over there by the common, see if any supers in apartment buildings recognize him, just do it my damn self to keep the rumor mill quiet. If he lives around there, and it sure seems like it, based on what’s on the videos, someone’s got to remember him and his greyhound. Sock. What kind of name is that for a dog?”

  “Probably not his full name,” Anne says. “Race dogs have these rather elaborate registered kennel names, like Sock It to Me or Darned Sock or Sock Hop.”

  “I keep telling her she should go on Jeopardy,” Marino says.

  “It’s possible his name might be in a registry,” I comment. “Something with Sock in it, assuming we have no luck with a microchip.”

  “Assuming you find the damn dog,” Marino says.

  “We’re running his prints, his DNA. Right away, I hope?” Benton stares intently at the body, as if he’s talking to it.

  “I printed him this morning and no luck, nothing in IAFIS. Nothing in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. We’ll have his DNA tomorrow and run it through CODIS.” Marino’s big gloved hands place the ruler under the man’s chin. “It’s kind of strange about the dog, though. Someone’s got to have him. I’m thinking we should put out info for the media about a lost greyhound and a number people can call.”

  “Nothing from us,” I reply. “Right now we’re staying away from the media.”

  “Exactly,” Benton says. “We don’t want the bad guys knowing we’re even aware of the dog, much less looking for it.”

  “‘Bad guys’?” Anne says.

  “What else?” I walk around the table, doing what Lucy calls a “high recon,” looking carefully at the body from head to toe.

  Marino is taking photographs, and he says, “Before we put him back in the fridge this morning, I checked his hands for trace, collected anything preliminarily, including personal effects.”


  “You didn’t tell me about personal effects. Just that he didn’t seem to have any,” I reply.

  “A ring with a crest on it, a steel Casio watch. A couple keys on a keychain. Let’s see what else. A twenty-dollar bill. A little wooden stash box, empty, but I swabbed it for drugs. The stash box on the video clip. For a second you could see him holding it right after he got to Norton’s Woods.”

  “Where was it recovered?” I ask.

  “In his pocket. That’s where I found it.”

  “So he took it out of his pocket at the park and then put it back in his pocket before his terminal event.” I remember what I watched on the iPad, the small box held in the black glove.

  “I’d say we should be looking for the snorting or smoking variety,” Marino says. “I’m betting weed. Don’t know if you noticed,” he says to me, “but he had a glass pipe in an ashtray on his desk.”

  “We’ll see what shows up on tox,” I reply. “We’ll do a STAT alcohol and expedite a drug screen. How backed up are they up there?”

  “I’ll tell Joe to move it to the head of the line,” Anne refers to the chief toxicologist, who I brought with me from New York, rather shamelessly stole him from the NYPD crime labs. “You’re the boss. All you’ve got to do is ask.” She meets my eyes. “Welcome back.”

  “What kind of crest, and what does the keychain look like?” Benton asks Marino.

  “A coat of arms, an open book with three crowns,” he says, and I can tell when he enjoys having Benton at a disadvantage. The CFC is Marino’s turf. “No writing on it, no phrase in Latin, nothing like that. I don’t know what the crests for MIT and Harvard are.”

  “Not what you described,” Benton answers. “Okay if I use this?” He indicates a computer on the counter.

  “The keychain is one of those steel rings attached to a leather loop, like you’d snap around your belt,” Marino goes on. “And as we all know, no wallet, not even a cell phone, and I think that’s unusual. Who walks around with no cell phone?”

  “He was taking his dog out and listening to music. Maybe he wasn’t planning to be out very long and didn’t want to talk on the phone,” Benton says as he types in search words.

  I pull the body over on its right side and look at Marino. “You want to help me with this?”

  “Three crowns and an open book,” Benton says. “City University of San Francisco.” He types some more. “An online university specializing in health sciences. Would an online university have class rings?”

  “And his personal effects are in which locker?” I ask Marino.

  “Numero uno. I got the key if you want it.”

  “I would. Anything the labs need to check?”

  “Can’t see why.”

  “Then we’ll keep his personal effects until they go to a funeral home or to his family, when we figure out who he is,” I reply.

  “And then there’s Oxford,” Benton says next, still searching the Internet. “But if the ring he had on was Oxford, it would have Oxford University on it, and you said it didn’t have any writing or motto.”

  “It didn’t,” Marino replies. “But it looks like someone had it made, you know, plain gold and engraved with the crest, so maybe it wouldn’t be as official as what you order from a school and wouldn’t have a motto or writing.”

  “Maybe,” Benton says. “But if the ring was made, I have a hard time imagining it’s for Oxford University, would be more inclined to think if someone went to an online college he might have a ring made because maybe there’s no other way to get one, assuming you want to tell the world you’re an alum of an online college. This is the City University of San Francisco coat of arms.” Benton moves to one side so Marino can see what’s on the computer screen, an elaborate crest with blue-and-gold mantling, and a gold owl on top with three gold fleur-de-lis, then below three gold crowns, and in the middle an open book.

  Marino is holding the body on its side, and he squints at the computer screen from where he’s standing and shrugs. “Maybe. If it was engraved, you know, if the person had it made for him, maybe it wouldn’t be that detailed. That could be it.”

  “I’ll look at the ring,” I promise as I examine the body externally and make notes on a clipboard.

  “No reason to think he was in a struggle, and we might get a perp’s DNA or something off the watch or whatever. But you know me.” Marino resumes what he was saying to me about processing the dead man’s personal effects. “I swabbed everything anyway. Nothing struck me as unusual except that his watch had quit, one of those self-winding kind that Lucy likes, a chronograph.”

  “What time did it stop?”

  “I got it written down. Sometime after four a.m. About twelve hours after he died. So he’s got a nine-mil with eighteen rounds but no phone,” he then says. “Okay. I guess so unless he didn’t leave it at home and in fact somebody took it. Maybe took the dog, too. That’s what I keep wondering.”

  “There was a phone on a desk in the video clips I saw,” I remind him. “Plugged into a charger near one of the laptops, I believe. Near the glass smoking pipe you mentioned.”

  “We couldn’t see everything he did in there before he left. I figured he might have grabbed his phone on his way out,” Marino supposes. “Or he might have more than one. Who the hell knows?”

  “We’ll know when we find his apartment,” Benton says as he prints what he’s found on the Internet. “I’d like to see the scene photos.”

  “You mean when I find the apartment.” Marino puts the camera down on a countertop. “Because it’s going to be me poking around. Cops gossip worse than old women. I find where the guy lives, then I’ll ask for help.”

  8

  On a body diagram, I note that at eleven-fifteen p.m. the dead man is fully rigorous and refrigerated cold. He has a pattern of dark-red discoloration and positional blanching that indicates he was flat on his back with his arms straight by his sides, palms down, fully clothed, and wearing a watch on his left wrist and a ring on his left little finger for at least twelve hours after he died.

  Postmortem hypostasis, better known as lividity or livor mortis, is one of my pet tattletales, although it is often misinterpreted even by those who should know better. It can look like bruising due to trauma when in fact it is caused by the mundane physiological phenomenon of noncirculating blood pooling into small vessels due to gravity. Lividity is a dusky red or can be purplish with lighter areas of blanching where areas of the body rested against a firm surface, and no matter what I’m told about the circumstances of a death, the body itself doesn’t lie.

  “No secondary livor pattern that might indicate the body moved while livor was still forming,” I observe. “Everything I’m seeing is consistent with him being zipped up inside a pouch and placed on a body tray and not moving.” I attach a body diagram to a clipboard and sketch impressions made by a waistband, a belt, jewelry, shoes and socks, pale areas on the skin that show the shape of elastic or a buckle or fabric or a weave pattern.

  “Certainly suggests he didn’t even move his arms, didn’t thrash around, so that’s good,” Anne decides.

  “Exactly. If he’d come to, he would have at least moved his arms. So that’s real good,” Marino agrees, keys clicking as an image fills the screen of the computer terminal on a countertop.

  I make a note that the man has no body piercings or tattoos, and is clean, with neatly trimmed nails and the smooth skin of one who doesn’t do manual labor or engage in any physical activity that might cause calluses on his hands or feet. I palpate his head, feeling for defects, such as fractures or other injuries, and find nothing.

  “Question is whether he was facedown when he fell.” Marino is looking at what Investigator Lester Law e-mailed to him. “Or is he on his back in these pictures because the EMTs turned him over?”

  “To do CPR they would have had to turn him faceup.” I move closer to look.

  Marino clicks through several photos, all of them the same but from different perspectiv
es: the man on his back, his dark-green jacket and denim shirt open, his head turned to one side, eyes partly closed; a close-up of his face, debris clinging to his lips, what looks like particles of dead leaves and grass and grit.

  “Zoom in on that,” I tell Marino, and with a click of the mouse, the image is larger, the man’s boyish face filling the screen.

  I return to the body behind me and check for injuries of his face and head, noting an abrasion on the underside of the chin. I pull down the lower lip and find a small laceration, likely made by his lower teeth when he fell and hit his face on the gravel path.

  “Couldn’t possibly account for all the blood I saw,” Anne says.

  “No, it couldn’t,” I agree. “But it suggests he hit the ground face-first, which also suggests he dropped like a shot, didn’t even stumble or try to break his fall. Where’s the pouch he came in?”

  “I spread it out on a table in the autopsy room, figured you’d want to have a look,” Anne tells me. “And his clothes are air-drying in there. When I undressed him, I put everything in the cabinet by your station. Station one.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  “Maybe somebody punched him,” Marino offers. “Maybe distracted him by punching or elbowing him in the face, then stabbed him in the back. Except that probably would have been recorded, would be on the video clips.”

  “He would have more than just this laceration if someone punched him in the mouth. If you look at the debris on his face and the location of the headphones”—I’m back at the computer, clicking on images to show them—“it appears he fell facedown. The headphones are way over here, what looks like at least six feet away under a bench, indicating to me that he fell with sufficient force to knock them a fair distance and disconnect them from the satellite radio, which I believe was in a pocket.”