Although he didn’t say anything, it was clear that Dr. Haggard could smell the smoke on Peter’s breath and Peter felt a pang of embarrassment. The doctor handed over a photograph to Peter, which showed an image of two intertwined roses on the surface of something stretched flat but ragged around the edges. Part of a word, the letters “M-A-R” appeared in the middle. Peter took a guess.
“So this is the tattoo you discovered on “Wally’s” arm? How did you manage to make it visible? It had just been a slightly darker area on the already dark surface that looked like beef jerky.”
Looking understandably pleased with himself, Dr. Haggard pointed out features on the photograph as he explained his efforts. “The first thing you must understand is that a tattoo is not imprinted onto the epidermis, the outermost layer of skin, as it would slough off over time as old skin cells are replaced by new cells that have not been colored by the inks. The permanent tattoo is actually injected into the dermis layer beneath the epidermis.
Peter nodded hoping this explanation wouldn’t go too far down a queasy-inducing road.
“In order to bring up a tattoo, it is necessary to remove the epidermis, exposing the dermis and its tattoo. In normal situations, the epidermis can be removed by carefully applying heat to the area, for example with one of those paint-stripping lights or heat guns. The heat will loosen the epidermis, which can then be wiped off, leaving the dermis exposed. This process is especially useful in dark-skinned persons, as the skin color is in the epidermis and so, comes off with the epidermis. I then have to be careful in situations involving hands or a face, in cases where the body is to be viewed by loved ones.”
Peter, trying to hide his building nausea, contorted his face into a quizzical look. “But that does not sound like a method that would help us much, does it?”
“I didn’t think so either. Just to be certain, though, I tried the process on a spot on ‘Wally’s’ other arm. All that happened was that the dry skin started to cook. The epidermis was not loosened and the tattoo would have been damaged. I decided that I would first rehydrate the skin, much as I did to the area around the neck where the garrote was applied.”
Peter nodded weakly.
“What you see in this photograph is the skin that I removed from the arm, cutting around the suspected tattoo and leaving one half inch between the incision and the edge of the tattoo. I then placed the skin into a dish containing a five per cent solution of sodium carbonate, which is commonly known as washing soda’ or ‘soda ash’. This dish was placed on a small agitator which can be set to occasionally shake the contents of the dish, slightly.
After nearly four days of immersion in this solution, the skin specimen became somewhat flexible, and the next morning, I was able to remove the specimen and rinse it under gently running water for several minutes. I then blotted up excess moisture and dried the skin. Enough of the epidermis had been rinsed off to give us this (pointing again at the photograph).”
Tanner Saint leaned forward and picked up the photograph from the desk. “You know, I feel like I’ve seen this pattern made by the stems and leaves of the roses somewhere before. Doesn’t it look just like the pattern on the half of the pendant that was on ‘Wally’s’ neck? And what is this part, Doc? Part of a word? It looks like M-A-R.”
Yes, those are the letters I was able to raise. The rest is obliterated, I’m afraid.”
Peter looked over Tanner’s shoulder. “Damn. I think you’re right about the pattern. I wonder if they were both done by the same guy or if one was copied from the other? If the word was centered within the stems and leaves, then there would only be room for two or three more letters.”
Tanner said, “We need to get someone with knowledge of Italian to give us a list of possible words fitting those parameters.”
“One comes to mind. Maria.”
Chapter 14
Shit, it’s cold!
Peter is standing out on 13 inches of ice at the south end of Lake George, wishing he could be anywhere else on Earth. It just so happened that an arctic cold front had come barreling through and the bitter north wind, originating in lands occupied by seals and polar bears was blasting south, directly down the 32 miles of the lake and gathering additional frigid teeth to its bite from the fully frozen lake surface.
Last night, the Glens Falls airport five miles to the south had reported the nation’s low temperature at 22 degrees below zero. Whenever that happened, Peter flashed back to his time in the Army stationed in Germany when he would sometimes see Glens Falls listed in Stars and Stripes newspaper, as one of the lowest temperatures in the country. Although he was wearing a down-filled coat, wool watch cap and insulated boots, they did not fully cover his dress suit, which offered no protection from these conditions. He might as well be naked from his waist to his ankles. Not the best area for frostbite.
Up until now, it had seemed somewhat important that they try to look for the item that little Vito Santon had seen thrown out into the lake, the night he witnessed what sounded like the murder of “Wally”. Given the current frigid weather conditions, Peter half-hoped that the dive teams from the Warren County Sheriff’s Department and the New York State Police would suddenly change their minds about this training exercise and postpone until spring.
Of course that wasn’t going to happen. To the divers, the temperature, once they dove in, would be the same regardless of the air temperature, and they routinely held at least one training session each year at this time. The only difference in this drill was that, instead of pretending to extricate a body from a submerged car or searching for a lost ice fisherman, they would be setting up and conducting an area search on the lake floor for an object resembling a hammer or hatchet.
While the State Police Dive Team had been well funded since its inception, both for training and for equipment, its local counterpart had not been so blessed. The Warren County Sheriff’s Department Dive Team had been formed by two officers in 1984. The team leader, a lanky and soft-spoken scuba enthusiast named Shawn Rossey and his diving partner, Gary Langon had built up the team using a combination of begging, borrowing and various forms of jury-rigging and bartering.
A prime example was the Sheriff Dive Team’s pride and joy, a converted bread delivery truck, that had been gutted and renovated by the Sheriff’s team members, along with a couple of welders and a very clever sheet metal worker. Shawn had designed it from top to bottom, consulting pictures of various military and New York City vehicles as his templates. It had racks with nylon harnesses along the walls for air tanks, benches for changing, with secure drawers underneath and various wall hooks for wet suits, dry suits and assorted other gear. An auxiliary heater, salvaged from a school bus was mounted on the roof, with a system of ductwork woven through the compartment to maximize equipment drying and diver comfort.
Last week, Peter accompanied Tanner Saint and Lieutenant Hall, as they met with the leaders of the two dive teams and their supervisors to discuss the possibility of adopting the search for the item that young Vito, the son of the restaurant owner, had seen thrown into the lake all those years ago, as their annual winter training exercise. As Peter had feared, the consensus of the divers was that an item such as a hammer or hatchet landing on the lake floor would almost certainly have settled into the silt at the bottom and would no longer be visible. The good news was that they would be looking for more than just the metal head.
One of the advantages of the present scenario was that the wooden handle would probably still be intact, even after being submerged for more than thirty years. A fairly unique feature of Lake George was that submerged wood did not rot as wet wood would do on land, or even in many other bodies of water. This was due to the fact that the temperature of the deeper reaches of the lake were about 39 degrees Fahrenheit all year, and that the lake actually had a current running from south to north, which prevented the buildup of organisms in the lake that would break down the wood. Both the temperature and the relative absence of nutrients an
d organisms were the result of numerous mountain streams feeding into the lake, which had originally been formed by the excavation of a moving glacier eons ago.
As a boy, Peter had noticed that as he swam in the lake, he would frequently pass through warm water into suddenly chilled water and back again. Peter recalled reading about this non-rot phenomenon in history books that were illustrated with underwater photographs of small military boats known as bateaux, that had sunk or been scuttled during the French and Indian War, more than two hundred years prior. In those photos, there was very little observable damage to the wooden craft due to decomposition. Several of those craft still sat on the bottom of the lake.
The dive teams had already conducted what they lightheartedly described as scientific tests to determine the extent of the search area. Early one Sunday morning, so as to limit questions from passing motorists, they cleared a spot in the snow covered field in front of the State Police substation and then cleared a wide path across the field with a large snow blower. They then stationed spotters along the cleared path, though some distance back. An especially large off-duty trooper, who had been in the family construction business before joining the State Police, was given a variety of hammers and hatchets which he then threw as far as he could down the path. After the distances had been recorded and charted, another, much smaller and older trooper repeated the procedure with his results then tallied. Taking these measurements and allowing for variations in accuracy, the teams created a diagram of a fan-shaped search area.
As Shawn later explained to Peter, the search area would resemble an elongated woman’s fan, like they used at the opera to cool themselves and to look alluring. The base end of the fan would be where they assumed the end of the dock was when the unknown man threw the hammer or whatever, out into the lake. It was certainly possible that the object was outside the calculated search area, but this was the best guess they could come up with.
The first attempt to locate the item in the lake would be conducted by a two-man team, armed with metal detectors, scanning back and forth across the search area, beginning at the closest point. Each diver would be tethered to a safety line and the first sweep would be marked out by placing two dive buoys at either end of the closest arc. The buoys were orange-colored Styrofoam balls attached to white rope lines connected to metal discs acting as anchors. The rope lines were not long enough to reach the surface, so the Styrofoam would be suspended underwater. When in place, these would act to limit the side-to-side travel of the diver, resembling the sweep of a windshield wiper.
Since it was much easier to plot out on the ice where the buoys should be positioned, the search area would be marked out on the ice and then a gasoline-powered auger would be used to drill holes through which the buoys would be dropped.
Once the first diver had traversed the arc, scanning the lake floor with his metal detector and he reached the end of his search band, the second diver would position himself five feet beyond his partner and would head back the other way, scanning his swath. Owing to the visibility limits, once the searching divers had done enough sweeps to be beyond sight of the buoys, the non-searching partner would position himself at the buoy line that the searcher was swinging toward. When the searcher’s safety line reached the end-of-arc buoy, the second diver would give the line two tugs, so that the searcher would know to stop.
The diver’s safety line also served a more basic purpose. With a solid roof of more than a foot of ice overhead, the only way out was through the hole they jumped through. Disorientation was unavoidable and no one was ever allowed to free dive under ice. Stationed back at the hole were the most important members of the dive team, the safety diver and the two line tenders. It was the safety diver’s function to keep tabs on each of the search divers and, if needed, go out and recover him. His station was at the opening in the ice, where the two line tenders, divers who would play out and draw back in the search divers’ tether lines as needed.
The line tender would keep his hand on the search diver’s tether at all times, maintaining a slight tension to the line. He would, in this particular exercise, pay out three feet of line each time his search diver did a sweep across the search area. If he felt two tugs on the line, he knew that his diver had ended a sweep. The safety diver also had his own safety line, which was double the length of each searching diver’s. If one of the line tender’s charges somehow became disconnected from his safety line, the line tender would feel the slack and would send the safety diver out to locate and retrieve the search diver.
Oddly enough, there were advantages to conducting a search for a small item under a canopy of ice. Because of the ice, there was no surface movement of the water that would cause ripples in the light reaching the bottom. While the ice itself dimmed the light getting through to the water slightly, it was only if there was a layer of snow on top of the ice that lights would be needed for a bottom search.
It was estimated that this sweep search would take several hours to complete and Peter learned that the manpower requirements were going to be a challenge. If divers were sent back into the water before they had completely warmed up, they would be dealing with “crash time”, the name given to the decreased amount of time for the diver to get cold again.
The two dive teams had a combined membership of eighteen and so could not put twenty divers into the water. It was agreed to run three shifts of five divers each and carefully check a returning team before reentering the water after forty minutes recovery. If more time was needed, then the hatchet or whatever it was would just have to wait.
Dive site preparation had been conducted the previous evening under Klieg lights borrowed from the NY State Department of Transportation. Everyone wanted to get this part of the operation done before the arrival of the predicted arctic front. It was just after dusk that the first of the support vehicles arrived. The wind was already picking up and was clearly veering from the west to the north. As the upper air was already introducing the colder temperatures, the snow that began to fall was fine and light, swirling and blowing. Within an hour, small drifts were building up on the north side of anything stationary, including the vehicles’ tires – and Peter’s boots.
As usual, Peter was simply observing the search so that he could, should the need arise, narrate the events through witnesses. It was the Sheriff’s Department van that first set up in the parking lot. Power cords were strung to a cooperative store adjoining the lot. Not only would this power the lights in the back of the van, but would also run the auxiliary air pump, used for refilling the divers’ scuba tanks.
***
Shawn stood next to Peter and explained the work going on before them under the lights which were alive with billowing snowflakes that reminded Peter of clouds of moths swarming at nighttime spot lights in summer.
“Rather than making the hole at the base of the arc, where the item would have been thrown from, it made more sense to cut the hole ten feet from the lowermost point of the search sweep, reducing the distance the divers would have to swim to reach the search site.” Shawn explained to Peter, who was already stamping his feet to keep warm.
“Okay” said Peter, “but why are they marking out a large triangle with the spray paint?”
“That will be the dive hole.” Shawn replied with a slight smile, as if he knew what the next question would be.
Peter went ahead with the next question anyway. “Now, wait just a minute there. I have seen a lot of Eskimos in cartoons cutting holes in ice with big hand saws and the hole is always round, so what gives?”
“It is much easier to get in and out of the water at a corner, and a triangle gives better angles than a square AND it means we have one less cut to make with the chainsaw.”
Sure enough, Peter saw two of the team walk out from one of the vans a few minutes later, with a large gas-powered auger which they then used to drill three inch holes to mark the search area and allow for the placement of the water buoys. They then returned to where Shawn and Pet
er were standing and drilled holes at each of the three corners of the triangle. They next moved the auger to another spot marked in paint about ten feet from the hole.
Peter beckoned with a stiff nod. “Why are they drilling over there?”
“That hole is where we will attach the anchor for our safety lines.”
Peter, who had always felt a fascination for clever and unique tools, watched as another team member approached that fourth hole with a large steel hoop, attached to a length of heavy chain with a two foot steel bar at the other end. It reminded him of something and a moment later, the image of a tie tack popped into his head.
Wiseguys in the Woods Page 20