by Kathy Reichs
Using her fingertips, Lisa gently teased free and laid back the outer layer of toweling. Then she rolled the bundle sideways, slowly revealing its contents.
A human baby is a very small biomass. Following death, the scarcity of body fat may lead to mummification instead of putrefaction. Such had been the case in the window seat.
The little corpse was tightly compressed, the head down, the arms and legs flexed and crossed over each other. Desiccated skin, muscle, and ligament wrapped the thorax, abdomen, and limbs, and stretched across the delicate bones of the face. The empty orbits held masses that looked like shriveled grapes.
Lisa was reaching for the Nikon when Pomier stuck his head through the door and spoke to me. “Dr. LaManche has a question.”
“Now?” Slightly annoyed.
Pomier nodded.
Though anxious to begin my analysis, I knew the chief would never interrupt with anything trivial.
“Shoot from every angle, close-up and overview,” I said to Lisa. “Then get a full set of X-rays.”
“All the bones will be superimposed. There is nothing I can do about that.”
“Taking measurements from the X-rays may prove impossible. But do your best. If I’m not back when you finish, unroll and photograph the second baby. Any questions, you know where to find me.”
Lisa nodded.
“Let’s go,” I said to Pomier.
Every morgue is characterized by its own blend of odors, sometimes subtle, sometimes overpowering, but always present. These smells have been a part of my life for so long, I sometimes imagine them in my sleep.
Bodies recovered from water are among the most pungent. In the corridor, the stench of Santangelo’s drowning victim was overtaking the ever-present aromas of disinfectant and deodorizer.
The bludgeoning victim lay on the far table in room three. The woman’s face was swollen and distorted, her left side purpled due to livor mortis, the postmortem settling of blood in a corpse’s downside.
Robitaille was picking through the woman’s hair, searching her scalp section by section. Pelletier was examining her toes.
LaManche and the SIJ photographer were at the near table. She was very tall and very pale. A tag on her shirt said S. Tanenbaum. I didn’t know her.
Not so the third party. Andrew Ryan.
As we crossed to him, LaManche tucked the baby’s right hand back to her side, lifted and studied her left. He made no comment, jotted no note.
I knew where the chief’s thoughts were pointed. No defense wounds. Of course not. The infant was far too helpless to take action to save her own life, and the manner of death probably had not involved a blow. There would not have been even reflexive reaction.
One thing struck me right off. Everyone in the room was working quietly, talking in hushed tones when a question was posed or an instruction was given. No jokes. No quips. None of the irreverent humor used to ease tension at crime scenes and autopsies.
The baby looked far too vulnerable lying naked on the cold stainless steel.
“Temperance. Thank you.” Over his mask, LaManche’s eyes looked weary and sad. “The child measures thirty-seven centimeters long.”
Haase’s rule: during the last five months of gestation, fetal length in centimeters divided by five equals the number of months of pregnancy. I did a quick calculation.
“She’s small for a full-term baby,” I said.
“Oui. Crown-rump length. Biparietal diameter. Every measure. The detective and I are wondering with what accuracy you can determine her age.”
I knew what LaManche wanted. A fetus is considered viable after seven months of gestation. If born earlier, survival is possible but unlikely without medical intervention.
“In case you find no abnormality but the mother claims the baby was premature and stillborn,” I said.
“That’s usually their story. The kid was dead, I panicked and stashed the body.” Ryan’s jaw muscles bunched, relaxed. “Without a witness or evidence to the contrary, such cases are bastards to prosecute.”
I thought a moment. “I haven’t looked at the attic baby yet, but the one from the window seat is desiccated and contorted. The tissue is so adhered, it will be tough removing the bones without damaging them. And standard X-rays will be of limited use due to bone and tissue superimposition. I’m thinking the best approach with the mummified remains might be MSCT.”
Four blank looks.
“Multislice computed tomography. I suggest we use it for this baby, too. That way I can measure and observe the skeleton while it’s articulated by soft tissue. A big advantage of MSCT is that it gives an isotopic image and doesn’t distort the anatomical reality. I can measure the long bones on 2-D reconstructions and get anatomical length directly without need for a correction factor. After we view the scans, you can proceed with your regular autopsy.”
As I spoke, my eyes roved the tiny girl on the table. She’d been brushed clean but not yet water-sprayed.
“It cannot hurt.” LaManche looked at Pomier. “The staff at St. Mary’s has been helpful in the past. Phone the radiology department. See if it is possible to use their scanner.”
In his haste to do as directed, Pomier pivoted too quickly. His shoe knocked a caster on a portable light snugged to one end of the table. The floor stand wobbled. Ryan grabbed and steadied the extension arm holding the halogen bulb.
As the light jumped, my eyes caught something my brain didn’t process.
What?
“Shift it again,” I said, leaning close to the baby.
Ryan did.
Yes. There. Where the right shoulder met the curve of the baby’s neck. Not so much a spot as an absence of luminosity, a dullness compared to the surrounding skin.
A few gray cells offered up a suggestion.
Hardly daring to hope, I crossed to the counter, grabbed a hand lens, and viewed the irregularity under magnification.
“Look at this,” I said.
“CLISSE,” LAMANCHE WHISPERED.
“You’re thinking print.” Ryan’s tone was so flat, I wondered if he was dubious or simply trying to be objective.
“ALS?” Pomier asked.
“Please,” I said.
“I’ll get the powder,” Tanenbaum said.
Both techs left, reappeared shortly. Pomier was carrying goggles and a black box with a handle on top and a flexible wand projecting from one end. Tanenbaum had a fingerprint kit.
“May we go dark for a few minutes?” I called down to Pelletier.
“No problem. Madame is going for X-rays.”
As I pointed out the area in question, Tanenbaum dusted bright orange powder onto the baby’s neck.
Pomier hooked up the CrimeScope CS-16-500, an alternate light source capable of providing wavelengths ranging from infrared to ultraviolet. When done, he distributed orange-tinted plastic goggles. LaManche, Ryan, Tanenbaum, and I donned them.
“Ready?” Pomier asked.
LaManche nodded.
Pomier killed the overheads, slipped on his goggles, adjusted dials on the CrimeScope, then positioned the wand over the baby.
Slowly, the light crept up the pale little feet. It probed the hills and valleys of the perfect toes, the knees, the groin, the belly. Lit the hollow from which the shriveled umbilical cord hung.
Here and there, filaments lit up like hot white wires. Hairs? Fibers? Maybe useful, maybe not. I tweezed and transferred each into a plastic vial.
Finally, the beam swept the gentle curve where the baby’s right shoulder met its neck. Pomier twisted a knob to return to the lower end of the green spectrum, then slowly moved up the wavelengths.
And there it was. An oval composed of concentric loops and whirls.
We all leaned closer.
“Bonjour,” Pomier said in the darkness.
“I’ll be damned.”
Ryan’s voice at my ear made me aware of decidedly nonmorgue smells. Bay Rum cologne, starched cotton, a hint of male perspiration.
Feeling awkward, I straightened. “Because the skin is so soft and finely textured, it’s easier to get a latent from an infant than from an adult,” I said crisply.
I heard rattling and knew Tanenbaum was placing an orange filter over the lens of her digital camera. We all waited out a long series of clicks. The next sequence of noises told me she was using an adhesive lifter to transfer the print.
“Je l’ai,” she said after several minutes. “I’ve got it.”
Though we worked another half hour in the dark, our efforts revealed nothing else of interest. Still, we were all pumped as hell.
Pomier restored the lights, then went to inquire about the use of the CT scanner at St. Mary’s Hospital.
Tanenbaum hurried off to run our prize through CPIC, the Canadian Police Information Center. Like the U.S.’s AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, CPIC functions as a database for fingerprints and other information critical to police investigations.
LaManche resumed his external examination of the baby. Ryan headed upstairs to check for responses to queries he’d circulated about Amy Roberts/Alma Rogers/Alva Rodriguez and Ralph Trees.
When I returned to autopsy room four, Lisa had finished photographing both LSJML-49277 and LSJML-49278. She’d also popped X-rays of the former onto light boxes ringing the room.
I moved through the films, pessimistic. I was right. The window-seat baby was so tightly constricted that overlap of the bones made assessment difficult and measurement impossible. Frustrated, I crossed to the table where LSJML-49278 now lay on its unrolled towel beside the window-seat baby.
The attic baby had been reduced to a skeleton and fragments of dry ligament. Lisa had arranged some of the bones to form a miniature person. Most lay to one side on the grimy green terry cloth.
I wasn’t surprised she’d failed to identify more. In a newborn, the cranial bones are unfinished and unfused. The vertebral arches are separate from the little disk bodies. Each pelvic half is composed of three disconnected bits. The long bones are amorphous shafts lacking the anatomical detail and joint surfaces that make femora, tibiae, fibulae, humeri, radii, and ulnae distinct. Ditto the teeny bones of the hands and feet.
Bottom line: most people wouldn’t recognize a fetal skeleton if it hit them on the head. Even with training in juvenile osteology, classification of specific elements can be tough.
I checked the clock. Already it was going on eleven.
“This will be slow,” I said to Lisa. “If you have things to do, I’m good working alone.”
She seemed undecided, then, “Call if you need me.”
I began by arranging the cranium in a pattern that looked like an exploded rose blossom. The frontal, the parietals, the sphenoid, the temporal and occipital segments. While sorting, I processed detail.
The occipital bone contributes to the back and the base of the skull. In a fetus, it consists of four pieces. The pars squama is the upper, rounded portion. The paired pars lateralis and the single pars basilaris lie down under, surrounding the foreman magnum, the hole through which the spinal cord enters the brain.
I used sliding calipers to measure the chunky little pars basilaris. Its width exceeded its length, placing the baby’s gestational age at over seven months.
I positioned the needles on each end of the left pars lateralis and read the dial. Its length exceeded that of the pars basilaris. That nudged the gestational age to eight months.
I selected the flat, serrate-edged portion of the temporal, the part that had formed the right side of the baby’s skull. A delicate circle of bone, the tympanic ring, was fused to an opening I knew to be the auditory canal.
Ring fusion bumped the gestational age to nine months.
Next I identified the facial bones. The maxillae and zygomatics, the ethmoid, the nasals, the palatines, the swirly little conchae from inside the nose. The mandible.
Until approximately one year postnatal, the human lower jaw remains unfused at the midline. As I examined the right and left halves, tiny teeth rolled around deep in the sockets. No surprise there. Tooth buds appear at nine to eleven weeks in utero. Though I could see the partially formed crowns, X-rays would be needed to evaluate dental development.
Moving on, I laid out the postcranial skeleton, measured the arm and leg bones, and compared the figures to a standardized chart. Each length supported the gestational age suggested by cranial development.
Satisfied that I’d learned what I could about age, I began teasing desiccated tissue from each tiny bone.
At noon Pomier popped in to report that St. Mary’s would make a scanner available after nine that night. A radiologist named Leclerc would meet us in the hospital lobby. Dr. Leclerc was urging discretion. Live patients. Dead babies. I was on the same page.
Lisa stopped by every half hour. Each time I told her I was fine working solo.
Which was true. I didn’t trust the emotions swirling inside me. Flashbacks to Kevin. Anguish for these infants. Fury at the woman who had killed them. I preferred to be alone.
By one I’d finished cleaning the bones. My stomach was growling, and a headache was gathering in my frontal lobe. I knew I should stop for lunch. Couldn’t. I felt driven to learn everything possible before returning the babies to the cold, dark cooler.
After placing a stool by the dissecting scope, I began the painstaking process of observing every bone under magnification. Millimeter by millimeter, I inspected each shaft, metaphysis, epiphysis, groove, foramen, suture, and fossa, looking for indications of disease, malformation, or trauma.
Just past three Ryan called to report that Ralph “Rocky” Trees had no sheet as an adult, but he did have a juvenile jacket. Though the record was closed, Ryan was requesting access.
Rocky’s story checked out. He drove pickup jobs for his brother-in-law, Philippe “Phil” Fast. The brother-in-law owned a small operation with a couple of trucks and a warehouse. Trees was away from Saint-Hyacinthe last Tuesday morning through late Sunday afternoon. Phil scoffed at the notion that Rocky might have a girlfriend.
That was it. No greeting. No “how are you doing.” No good-bye.
By four-forty my gut was acid, my head was a bongo, and my back was on fire. But I’d completed my analysis. Sadly, my form held scant information.
Sex: Unknown.
There are studies that claim jaw or pelvic shape or differentials in postcranial bone growth indicate the gender of a fetus or neonate. I’m not convinced.
Race: Unknown.
Though a broad, low nasal bridge and wide cheekbones hinted at non-European input, there was no way to verify ancestry.
Congenital abnormalities: None.
Pathologies: None.
Trauma: None.
Age: Full-term fetus.
So little to say. Such a short life.
Already in the cellar, my spirits sank further.
Rather than call Lisa or Tanenbaum, I shot a final set of photos myself. Then I gathered the bones into a small plastic tub and wrote LSJML-49278 on the lid and one side.
With robotic motions, I set the tub on the gurney and pushed it through the double doors to the morgue. “Good-bye, little one,” I said softly as the bay clicked shut.
I was wrapping LSJML-49277 in padded plastic sheeting when the desk phone rang. In no mood to talk or even be cordial, I ignored it.
I placed the window-seat baby inside a square plastic tub, packed it with more wadded sheeting, and marked the case number on the outside. Then I filled out and signed an evidence transfer form. Since the mummified baby would leave the morgue with me, chain of custody had to be maintained.
Finished with the remains, I turned to the towels.
Like the filaments I’d plucked from LaManche’s bathroom-vanity baby, the towels would be sent to the hair and fiber guys, perhaps to the folks in biology or DNA. Again, maybe useful, maybe not.
I sealed the attic towel in an evidence bag, jotted relevant information on the label, and set the bag to o
ne side on the counter.
When I lifted the window-seat towel, something dropped with the sound of a tiny bean bag. Curious, I picked the thing up.
Between my gloved fingers was a small velvet sack with a drawstring closure. I teased it open. Inside was what looked like coarse-grain gravel. I poured some onto my palm. In the mix were a few green pebbles measuring a couple centimeters at most.
“Yowza. This’ll crack the case wide open.” My sarcasm was lost on the empty room.
After taking a few photos, I sealed the inclusion in a vial and placed it in a second evidence bag with the yellow towel. Then I called Lisa.
No answer.
I looked at the clock. Six-ten. Of course she was gone. Everyone was gone.
Feeling a heaviness the atomic weight of uranium, I took the tub containing the window-seat baby to a morgue bay adjoining autopsy room three and placed it on a gurney beside the bathroom-vanity baby, now wrapped and sealed in its own container. Then I wound my way to the elevator.
The basement was deserted. So was the twelfth floor. The building hummed with that eerie after-hours quiet unique to abandoned workplaces.
At the desk in my lab, I left Lisa a message asking that she transfer the bagged towels to the trace evidence section. As I cradled the receiver, my eyes drifted to the expanse of glass above my desk.
A dozen floors down, I could see the tops of apartment buildings, church spires, small patches of green I knew to be gardens. In the distance, the Maison de Radio-Canada rose like a giant brick cylinder on boulevard René-Lévesque. Beyond it, the St. Lawrence River yawned gray and forbidding, even in June.
Past the black girders of the pont Champlain, the skyscrapers of centre-ville cut sharp silhouettes against the early summer dusk. I recognized Place Ville-Marie, Complexe Desjardins, the Centre-Mont-Royal, the Marriott Château Champlain.
The streets I’d searched for parking spaces that morning were clogged with traffic. Parents returning to the burbs for dinner and homework with the kids, lovers hurrying to nocturnal trysts, night-shifters dragging themselves to punch clocks on which time would seem to stand still.
How often Ryan and I had driven together from Wilfrid-Derome, discussing victims, suspects, aspects of a case. I can’t share my work with those close to me who are not on the job—Pete, Katy, Harry, my best friend, Anne. I can’t tell them what I’ve seen lying in a Dumpster or buried in a shallow grave. Can’t describe the congealed blood, the bloated body, the seething maggots. I missed having someone to talk to, someone who understood. Ryan had kept me balanced. Kept me caring.