The Disposable Man

by Archer Mayor

  He reached under the body’s chin and spread the flesh at the throat with his latex-gloved fingertips. A deep but grotesquely bloodless wound yawned open like a slice into a large piece of fish, extending across the neck to below each ear.

  “I’d say he was garroted, probably with a thin wire. Not what I’d call a weapon of opportunity.”

  “And he’s not the typical age for a crime of violence, either,” I muttered, as Gould grabbed each of the body’s arms and folded them in with a loud cracking sound so he could close the bag.

  Ron Klesczewski, by far the most sensitive of my crew, let out a small groan. “So he was dumped. Why the bare feet?”

  Tyler, his preliminary photographs, site maps, and measurements completed, was wasting no time getting back to work after waiting for Gould to finish. Straddling the body bag like a strawberry picker astride a row of plants, he rummaged through the soggy clothing, looking for anything interesting.

  “That’s easy,” he said without looking up. “We might’ve been able to trace his shoes, at least to country of origin—same reason all the labels have been cut out of his clothes.”

  Gould looked back at the body, his brow furrowed. “You think he’s a foreigner?”

  Tyler straightened. “It’s just a guess. Why else would you remove those kinds of identifiers but leave the fingertips and face intact? We could run print checks till next Tuesday and get nowhere if we don’t even know what country he’s from.”

  “There’s Interpol,” Ron suggested.

  “They need a country reference, too. There’s no such thing as a central international print file. Anyhow,” he added, stooping over again, “there’re a ton of places that don’t share with Interpol or anyone else—either that or they’re so disorganized it amounts to the same thing.”

  We silently watched him as he continued his search. The sticky mud and strands of vegetation clinging to the corpse sent up a cloying odor of rot.

  “Maybe the Fish Cops’ll come up with something,” Ron persisted, the perpetual optimist.

  Tyler, his voice showing frustration, spoke directly to the body again. “They better, ’cause I’m getting squat here—not a fiber, not a ticket stub, not a candy wrapper. Nothing. But I won’t be surprised if they don’t.” He swung his head around and glanced at me suddenly, repeating a theme he’d introduced earlier. “Whoever did this knew what he was doing.”

  His hands at the victim’s belt buckle, he abruptly froze. “Uh, oh.”

  There was a small clicking sound as he manipulated the buckle and smoothly extracted a nasty-looking knife blade. He held it up in his gloved hand so the sun reflected off its short, lethal double edges. “Cute,” he said.

  I leaned forward and looked at it carefully. “I guess we can rule him out as a lost tourist.”

  · · ·

  The facilities of the state’s medical examiner were brand new. After years of borrowing clinical space in Burlington’s Fletcher Allen Health Center, and doing her paperwork in a rented office above a dentist on Colchester Avenue, the ME had finally come into her own.

  She greeted me at the door of the waiting room with an unusually gregarious smile, simultaneously shaking my hand and lightly patting me on the back. A tall, blonde, formal woman of indeterminate age and occasionally formidable frostiness, Beverly Hillstrom was also a doggedly curious perfectionist, traits I’d never shied from aiding and abetting. Frequently in the past, she had waived fees, brought in outside consultants, and spent extra time on cases when she’d thought I might benefit. I had no idea if she did this for other departments or investigators. I’d heard some cops refer to her as a coldhearted, bureaucratic bitch. I expected, however, that she repaid in the currency she was dealt—coin for coin. Over the years, we’d become close and trusted colleagues, despite the fact that we still only referred to one another by our official titles.

  “This is an unexpected pleasure, Lieutenant,” she said, guiding me through a general office area to a coffee machine, where she offered me a cup. “Were you just in town, or did word of our Taj Mahal finally prove irresistible?”

  I smiled and shook my head to the coffee. “I was curious, I will admit.”

  “We are the unlikely beneficiaries of a market-driven, politically sensitive war between the Dartmouth—Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire and this place.” She waved her hand overhead. “The entire hospital has been overhauled to compete. We just caught hold of the coattails. Actually, half our facility is shared with either the hospital or the university, but considering what we got, I’m not begrudging them a single square foot.”

  She suddenly looked at me over her reading glasses, belatedly struck by the unlikeliness of my merely dropping by. “We haven’t completed your John Doe, by the way.”

  I smiled at the veiled warning. “I’m not here to speed things up.”

  The warmth returned to her eyes. “Interesting answer—meaning it warranted a three-hour drive over a five-minute phone call. Must be big.”

  This time, I laughed outright. “Don’t I wish. I’m afraid ‘weird’ is a better word. We found this guy over eight hours ago, and we still have no idea who he is, where he’s from, how he ended up where we found him, or even how he came into our jurisdiction. It’s almost like he fell from a balloon.”

  Hillstrom opened a rear door onto a broad, brightly lit hallway and turned left, leading us past an enormous scale, mounted flush with the floor. She didn’t comment on it, but I recognized the significance of that item alone. In the past, cadaver weights had been estimated—everyone in the autopsy room had been allowed a guess, and the median had appeared in the formal report. That scale was a sign that Vermont’s medical examiner had finally been paid some respect.

  “Well,” she said, rounding a corner and heading for a broad door at the end of the hall, “if it’s any help, the balloon couldn’t’ve been too far off the ground, because there’s no evidence of any fall beyond the height of the quarry wall. And that was postmortem, by the way. He was killed earlier, and probably elsewhere.”

  She fitted a key to the door and swung it back, ushering me across the threshold. We entered a large, high-ceilinged, well-lit room equipped with a skylight and two complete workstations—twin autopsy tables attached to a long, single counter like boats nosed up to a dock. There were four people in the room: Harry, the pathology assistant; Dr. Bernard Short, Hillstrom’s young and brand-new second in command, whom I’d met only once before; Ed Turner, the ME’s investigator on loan from the Vermont State Police; and my blotchy-faced acquaintance from the quarry, who was lying naked on the far table with his torso split open. Dr. Short was holding his small intestine in both hands.

  “Gentlemen,” Hillstrom announced as the door swung shut behind us. “You all know Lieutenant Gunther, I believe?”

  A chorus of mumbled greetings rose from the group, accompanied by Turner’s “Long trip, Joe. This guy special?”

  The question was as much from simple curiosity as from the ME’s official law enforcement liaison, onto whose turf I’d just stepped. In times past, homicide victims especially were routinely accompanied by a department baby-sitter, equipped with pictures of the murder site for reference. As a goodwill gesture to everyone, however, the VSP had eventually assigned one of their own to gather whatever evidence the ME found, forward it to the crime lab in Waterbury, take photographs, lift prints, keep up the paperwork, and generally stand in for the often uneducated neophytes we’d all depended upon before. It had been such a success that the appearance of a cop like me, instead of a FedEx package bearing photos, was now as unusual as it had once been commonplace. And it obviously made Ed Turner wonder why.

  “I don’t know,” I answered him. “I was just telling Dr. Hillstrom that we can’t find anything on him. We’re thinking he may be a foreigner, but that’s all we’ve got so far. My inner bloodhound got the better of me, I’m afraid. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Turner’s face broke into a smile. “Hell, no. Goo
d to see you again.”

  Dr. Short was looking at me quizzically, entrails still cupped in his hands. “Why a foreigner?”

  “The missing shoes and the clothing labels. If they’d been American, they wouldn’t have been removed.”

  Short nodded thoughtfully. “Could be. The dental work reminds me of some of the horrors I saw in South America, out in the boonies—very crude.”

  I approached the table and gazed down at the familiar face, cleaner now, slightly cut and blanched where the purplish lividity had been prevented by stones pressing against the flesh from the bottom of the shallow pool. Contrary to popular belief, floating bodies do so head-down, that part of their anatomy having the most mass. Hillstrom joined me.

  “Right now, it appears cause of death was a ligature around the neck, as Dr. Gould surmised in his report,” she said. “Something as thin as piano wire—it’s almost an incision wound.”

  “Never seen one of these before,” Ed Turner added, “’cept in that Godfather movie. Think it was a hit?”

  I merely shrugged.

  He pointed at a damp pile on a distant counter. “We ran an ultraviolet lamp over him before and after we undressed him, to check for trace evidence. We didn’t find anything, so I removed all the pockets for the lab. Thought there might be drug residue or something.” He paused and then added, “You been having any action like that back home?”

  I shook my head. “Not really. Were you pointing a finger specifically at South America, Bernie? Or just saying the guy’s dental work was from out of the country?”

  Bernie Short was now weighing his burden in a large, shiny bowl attached to a scale. “No, no. I’m not that much of a world traveler. You’d have to have a forensic dentist or someone analyze the alloys in the fillings—different countries have different amalgam mixes.” He paused and then hedged his bet. “For all I know, he might’ve grown up in West Virginia and had some horse doctor work on his teeth.”

  “I don’t think so,” Beverly Hillstrom said softly. She was standing at the body’s feet, examining his toes. “Did anyone take note of this?”

  We all gathered around her. Harry spoke first, “They look like tattoos—one on each toe. Pretty faded, though. I can’t make it out.”

  “I shouldn’t think you would,” Hillstrom said. “Unless I’m mistaken, these are Cyrillic letters.”

  A long silence greeted her remark. She left us and crossed over to a phone mounted on the wall. She quickly punched in a few numbers and waited a moment. “Betty? Find Timothy Cox in my Rolodex, and if you can reach him, tell him I’ve got a tattoo I need interpreted—soon as he can. Thanks.”

  She hung up and faced us. “A neurologist friend. Works upstairs. Spent five years in Moscow teaching. It’s worth a try. If he doesn’t know, we can go through more formal channels.”

  “Absolutely,” I agreed. “Can you tell me any more about the garroting?”

  “Not much,” Bernie Short said. “It was done from behind. Death was almost instantaneous, although not quite. We found scratches around the neck wound and some tissue under the nails, indicating the victim tried to claw the garrote away. It’s probably his own skin, although we’ll test its DNA to make sure it doesn’t belong to someone else. But that’s basically it, excepting a small laceration to the top of the head. He was definitely dead by the time he went underwater. Judging from my findings and the documentation Al sent with the body, I’d say someone pitched him into the quarry from the top of the small cliff. As you know, time of death is always tricky. Al’s notes say the body temperature was the same as the environment, so cooling was complete. Yet rigor was still in full force.”

  He’d removed the bowel from the scale and was opening it lengthwise on the counter with a scalpel, checking its contents. “Notice the slight discoloration around the abdomen—a shade of light green in the right lower quadrant?” he asked.

  I did see something that looked like bruising.

  “First signs of putrefaction. On the other hand, while the corneas are cloudy, they haven’t begun to bulge, which they would’ve later on. Also, there’s no insect infestation. ’Course, the only skin exposed to the air were the heels—the rest being either clothed or underwater—and blowflies don’t like that part of the body much.”

  “So maybe more than a day, probably less than two or three?” I interpreted.

  Hillstrom patted my arm. “Very good, Lieutenant. We’ll have you in a lab coat yet. Unfortunately,” she added, glancing at Bernie Short and obviously using me to caution him, “he may also have been placed in a freezer for three years and then thawed. For all the tricks of our trade, I can still only guarantee that someone’s time of death occurred sometime between when he was last seen alive and when his body was discovered.”

  Visibly abashed, Short resumed in a slightly quieter voice, “Two other details you might like: it looks like he had a moderate meal just a few hours before he died, although what it was I don’t know; and according to the lividity pattern, he was dumped not long after death, so he didn’t spend the night in a car trunk or something, although lividity overall was lessened by some pretty serious blood loss—the garrote cut into the carotid.”

  I tried to ease him out of his embarrassment. “Tell me more about the scalp laceration.”

  Short made a discouraging face. “Can’t say if it happened before or after death. There was some vegetable matter caught in his hair near the site, but I don’t know if it was related to the wound. He was pretty grubbed up.”

  Ed Turner cleared his throat and motioned to an evidence envelope nearby. “What we collected’s in there, if you want to take a look. It’s mostly tiny bits and pieces, though—probably crap already in the water.”

  “Incidentally,” Hillstrom said, “don’t take the suggestion that this man ate shortly before death as gospel. They’ve done endless studies, trying to pin a predictable rate to the digestive process and have gotten nowhere. Depending on a person’s metabolism and state of mind shortly before death, food’s been found in the stomach, far downstream, and everywhere in between, even hours following ingestion.”

  She smiled and let her protégé off the hook with one additional comment: “Which doesn’t mean he didn’t eat shortly before he died.”

  “There’s nothing else?” I asked in the brief silence following.

  Short readied himself to cut through the scalp from ear to ear, just above the occipital portion of the dead man’s head, in order to expose the cranium and subsequently the brain.

  “There might be,” Hillstrom admitted, nodding in his direction. “We’re not quite finished, and there are some tests to be done. We’ve taken blood, bile, vitreous humor, and urine samples for tox scans, along with a blood standard for DNA typing. It’s possible we’ll pick up something later as a result, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

  Short, having finished his incision, peeled the face down under the victim’s chin like a rubber mask. He pointed to a small bloody stain on the glistening skull while Harry took a picture. “Definitely looks like that head laceration was perimortem.” He hesitated slightly under Hillstrom’s gaze and added, “I would guess it happened as he fell, since it’s not compatible with an attack wound—too minor. ’Course, that’s just a guess. He could’ve bumped his head before he even set eyes on the person who killed him.”

  Hillstrom smiled. “No, I would agree with the first suggestion. It’s reasonable and logical.”

  Short let out a small sigh and reached for the bone saw. As its high-pitched whine filled the room, Hillstrom resumed her conversation with me. “We took a complete set of X-rays and made a listing of all moles, scars, and signs of prior surgery for future reference, but I imagine his teeth and fingerprints alone will suffice if you ever come up with a possible identification.”

  “Are you going to include a hair sample with the tox scans?” I asked.

  She gave me a surprised look. Her answer, I guessed, was as much an olive branch to Short as a response
to me. “That’s a good idea. I wouldn’t have thought of it, since drugs weren’t a known factor. But where identification is the goal, everything should be considered.”

  I noticed Short smiling as he put aside the saw and began working the top of the cranium loose, and I realized that despite their curious way of communicating, they probably made a good team.

  Bernie freed the skullcap and held its bowl-like interior up to the light. “Yeah—there’re no signs that blow to the head caused any cerebral damage.”

  Hillstrom moved to look more closely, suddenly interested. “Yes, but see that yellow-green color on the inner table of the calvaria?”

  “Tetracycline?” Short asked.

  “Right,” she agreed, and explained to me, “tetracycline leaves a permanent stain here on everyone who’s ever used it. It’s a common enough finding in the U.S., where it’s routinely prescribed for infections, but it’s rarer in less developed countries. If the assumption is correct that this man is a foreigner, and of Slavic origins as his features suggest, this could be an interesting finding.”

  “Can you determine what caused the infection?” I asked.

  Short began to shake his head, but Hillstrom, for once not watching him, merely shrugged her shoulders, making him instantly freeze.

  She was smiling as if to herself and said, “Well, there is one small test we could try—more for fun, really.”

  She picked up a long, thin probe from the counter by her side, and stepped up to the corpse’s midriff. She took his uncircumcised penis in one hand and gently inserted the probe up his urethra. After a minute, she withdrew the probe and laid it back on the counter.

  “Strictures?” Short asked.

  She looked pleased. “Yes.” She turned to me. “I found an obstruction—probably scarring caused by a bout of gonorrhea, which could have been treated with tetracycline. It’s entirely conjectural, of course, so don’t take it too seriously. We have no way to really prove it. I just thought of it because of the tattoos and the man’s age. In a rough-and-tumble life, a man is likely to contract an STD at least once before he goes.”