by Susan Dunlap
“In the morning, I guess.”
“Fine.” She stared back down at the sheet. No wonder Dowd was so nervous. “With his pants unzipped like this, no wonder—”
Dowd gasped.
She looked up at his ashen face. Now he really was shocked. Not at the state of Vanderhooven’s body, she suspected, but at the fact that he wouldn’t be spared dealing with the consequences. Why hire a detective and then hope she won’t see … But clients did that type of thing all the time. And Dowd came across as a man who could hope that his detective would somehow solve his problem without ever raising the question he so desperately wanted to avoid. “Bishop Dowd,” she said, “we need to be honest with each other. It’s not only the question of suicide you’re worried about. It’s the issue of sex. Autoerotic asphyxia.”
Dowd’s face went white. He sank back against the pew. “No! He couldn’t have …”
She peered closer at the tiny photos. “The knot by his hands, was it a slipknot?”
Dowd shook his head. “I told you I don’t know about knots.”
“Just a knot with a bight—with the tail looped through, so it could be pulled out quickly and the hands released.”
“There was. You’re—”
“Rats!”
“What?”
“That’s one sign of autoerotic asphyxia. When men do this to themselves, they’re not planning to die. The idea is to cut off the oxygen to the brain, experience the orgasm, and then pull the tail of the rope and free the hands before they strangle themselves.”
Dowd clung to the back of the pew. His face was sweaty, his skin whiter than Kiernan could have imagined possible. “You’re saying young Vanderhooven did this to himself? No! I can’t believe that.”
“I’m saying the slipknot and rope like his are essential to the procedure. If Vanderhooven concocted this himself, he would have used them.”
Suddenly Dowd smiled. “But Vanderhooven couldn’t have done that. With his hands behind him? There’s no way.”
He was so relieved, she almost hesitated to disillusion him. “Vanderhooven could have stepped through his arms. He could have tied the knot loosely, given himself enough slack on the standing end of the rope between the neck and the hands and stepped through.” She squinted at the photo, then shook her head. “Some men can do that, but it doesn’t look like Vanderhooven could. Not with the angle his humerus was coming out of his acromioclavicular joint. His shoulders were too tight.” She looked back at the photo. If Vanderhooven couldn’t pull his hands back there, then someone else did, and left him here, in the church, to become an object of scorn. “Let me see the body.”
5
“THE BODY’S IN THE fridge, Bishop. You know where that is. I don’t want nothing to do with this. I ain’t seen him; I don’t aim to. Door three. He’s all yours.” Leaving Dowd and Kiernan standing in front of an elevator, the sundried little man scurried away over the mortuary’s thick carpet.
Kiernan caught Dowd’s eye. “That’s what I mean about too many people.”
“Russ? Don’t worry about him. He can be trusted. He wouldn’t have his job if he couldn’t be. The diocese sends a lot of business here.”
Kiernan looked over at Dowd. “Everyone’s got his limits. Give Russ a few free drinks, then see how discreet he is.” She looked at the mortuary elevator. “We’re going down, I presume.”
Dowd pushed the button and the doors opened. They stepped in and descended in silence. The doors parted to reveal a hallway. Empty coffins on raised tiers stood to the left, their lids opened invitingly. The dead air was laced with an old-rose perfume that screamed “air freshener.”
Kiernan followed Dowd down the hallway to an unmarked door. Inside there was no rosy perfume, only the familiar smell of ammonia, antiseptic, and decay. And the cold. There had been ample comments on that in medical school: the icy fingers of death, the frozen-meat section.
She walked forward, rubber heels reverberating on the tile floor. Unlike a county morgue, where there would be rows of metal tables with scales and troughs and microphones, here there were no tables at all. The refrigerator, which filled half the floor space, did not look like a giant filing cabinet where the dead, stacked one upon another in drawers, waited to be slid out and hoisted onto autopsy tables by hydraulic lifts. Rather, the doors in this refrigerator could have opened to a meat locker.
Kiernan reached for door number three. Automatically, she began breathing through her mouth. It was a defense everyone connected with autopsies discovered sooner or later. She opened the door, exhaling against the stench, and pulled the metal table out. The naked body was lying on its side, the arms still extended backward. She had to steady the shoulder to keep the body from rolling face down.
She looked around for Dowd. He stood unsteadily at the hallway door, hand still on the knob, his face gray. “Is this Vanderhooven?”
Dowd swallowed, opened his mouth, then paused as if waiting for the words to come out of their own accord. Mouth still open, he nodded.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll take it from here. You can wait upstairs, or out in the car, if you prefer. I have to go over the body now. It’ll take me an hour or two.”
Dowd didn’t respond. He looked more in control than he had in the church, but still shaky.
She rested a hand on his arm. “Why don’t you go out and get yourself a cup of coffee, Bishop. I’m sure you could use it after a day like today.” What he needed was a stiff drink, but she wasn’t about to suggest that.
“No,” he choked out. He was breathing through his mouth, too.
“It doesn’t get any more pleasant. And the smell never lets up.”
“I can’t leave him. I must stay here with you.”
“There’s nothing you can do here. You’ll only be in the way.”
Dowd swallowed again. “I’m staying.” Eyeing the priest’s naked body, he muttered, “I am Father Vanderhooven’s superior.”
She sighed. “Very well. But the time is limited. It’s nearly midnight. I’ve had a long day and I need to devote all my concentration to him. Find yourself a chair.” She took off her jacket and slipped a set of green hospital scrubs over her slacks and shirt. Turning around, she clasped both hands on the side of the metal table and shut her eyes, using the dark to clear her mind. Then she stared down at the body, as she had so often in her years as a forensic pathologist. For a moment the silence in the room was unsettling, she missed the long-familiar sounds of autopsy rooms: the clatter of trays and equipment, the sloshings of fluids, the intermittent whir of the saw.
Allowing herself a luxury she would never have permitted had she been performing an autopsy, she looked down at the face. What had gone on in the mind behind it? Were these blue eyes and lank blond hair the features of a lonely, frustrated man who had been driven to suicide? Or was it the opposite case? Had he become so sexually jaded in his preclerical or clerical years that the fantasies of bondage and the thrill of anoxia-enhanced orgasm were all that turned him on? Desecrating the church—had that innovation created an exquisitely intense climax? One worth the risk of death? The face Kiernan studied was too distorted to give any clue.
Focusing her attention on what the body could reveal, she began, as she had so often: “Well-nourished Caucasian male, about thirty years old,” she murmured under her breath. “Slight cyanosis evident in the face. Tongue distended.” And the eyes were open and bulging, the pinpoint red petechial hemorrhages evident in the whites, and throughout the face.
She took hold of the arm and flexed the elbow. “Movement,” she said to herself. “Movement at the elbow.”
“Rigor mortis is gone?” Dowd asked.
She eased the corpse onto its back.
“How long has he been dead?”
Shaking her head, she withdrew her concentration from the body. “No way to say. Too many factors affect the onset of rigor, the speed with which it moves. Under normal circumstances a person is dead as long as six hours before ons
et, but if the temperature outside is hot …” She shrugged, reached for the leg, and flexed the knee. “Rigor has passed.”
“So that means how long?”
“Probably not less than twenty-four hours.”
“I could have told you that!”
“And you have,” she snapped. She took a moment, softened her voice and said, “Bishop, you’re going to have to let me work.”
With a grunt Dowd crossed his arms over his chest, but he didn’t move away or relax his vigil. Red blotches had appeared on his gray skin and despite the cold there was a line of sweat at his brow. He didn’t look a whole lot better than the corpse, Kiernan thought.
Returning her attention to the dead priest, she bent closer to the stomach. On the lower right quadrant she could make out a greenish discoloration, the first sign of bacterial decomposition as the microorganisms from the intestinal tract worked their way outward. Putting a hand on the belly, she could feel the swelling from the internal gases. Those signs merely suggested that Vanderhooven had been dead at least twenty-four hours, more likely forty-eight or a bit longer.
Holding his breath, Dowd bent closer. Suddenly he took a step toward the neck. “What’s this? The mark from the rope here, it stops at the back of his neck!”
“The ligature was pulled away from the skin there. The pressure was on the bottom of the ligature, not the top. You only need to have the throat constricted to die.”
“Oh.” It sounded like hope escaping from a balloon. He stepped back.
“There’s no indication there was padding under the rope. That’s a good sign. If he was in the habit of doing this—”
Dowd gasped.
“Bishop Dowd,” Kiernan said in exasperation, “men rarely do this type of thing just once, not unless they make a fatal mistake the first time. Usually they move cautiously. It’s carelessness that comes from the false security of months or years of adventures that leads them to forget to make the bight in the rope, or to leave the noose taut a second or two too long. My point about Vanderhooven is that if he were a regular practitioner of this type of thing, he would have put some padding between the rope and his neck. It would have been embarrassing for him if someone had seen rope burns every couple of weeks. I assume he didn’t wear a clerical collar all the time.”
She could hear Dowd’s quick intake of breath. Before he could ask another question, she said, “I need silence to work.”
He nodded.
She leaned over Vanderhooven’s arm.
“Now what are you doing?”
“Checking for defensive wounds,” she said, giving up her attempt to quiet the bishop. “I’m looking at his hands for scratches or wounds, like he would have gotten fighting an attacker. I don’t see any. In my bag there’s a magnifying glass. Get it for me, will you?” She squatted and, taking the glass from him, looked at Vanderhooven’s fingertips. “If there are any particles under his nails, they’re too small for me to see, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. The police will check.”
She stood. “Lividity—blood settled—in the hands, the feet, and in the penis.”
Dowd stared at the flaccid penis. His face flushed; he averted his eyes. “But he, um, he had an … in the church. I saw it. It—”
“Erections relax after death. What looked to you like an erection was the result of the blood settling to the low parts of the body. Because his back was arched blood had pooled in his penis, and the penis was hanging at an angle away from the body. It wasn’t erect.”
Dowd swallowed. “Then does that mean—”
“It doesn’t mean anything. The blood would have settled there whether he’d had an erection or not.”
“Oh.”
“But there’s no sign of lividity on the shoulder blades or the buttocks.”
“So he wasn’t killed lying down?” Dowd asked, clearly relieved at the change of subject.
“Right, and what the lividity tells us is that either he died arching forward like he was in your photos, or someone hoisted him up almost immediately after death.” She bent over the right hand.
“Now what are you doing?”
Kiernan sighed loudly. She found herself feeling more compassion for the bishop than she would have imagined possible. He had had an awful shock. Still, she couldn’t allow her sympathy to interfere with her concentration. She yearned for a regular autopsy room where visitors were kept out. She tried one last explanation. “Bishop, if he was murdered, the question is: How did his killer get him into that position? Even at gunpoint no one would calmly allow himself to be tied up like that—the outcome would be too obvious. But there are no signs of struggle, no defensive wounds, no fresh ecchymoses—bruises—unless they’re covered by the hair. That’s what I’m checking now. Then I’m going to check the body with a magnifying glass for needle marks. He could have been drugged. A needle would leave a microscopic depression.” She turned back to the scalp. No discoloration. Starting with the arms, she began the search for a puncture mark, knowing that she couldn’t stop even if she found one. After the first, she’d need to know how many. Only if there were none would she check the scalp again. It was a good place to camouflage the mark, but a difficult one to use. In an autopsy she would have deflected the scalp back to expose the skull and checked there, where the signs of trauma would have been clearer. But the pathologist would have to do that, after Dowd reported the death to the police.
As she scrutinized the front of the body inch by inch, she could hear Dowd pacing on the far side.
By the time she had checked the underside of the tongue, her back ached. There was no way to sit, nothing to do but bend over. She started the examination of the back. The chill of the room lay on her skin like a wet towel. At one-thirty A.M. she said, “That’s it. No needle marks.”
“You mean after all this, there’s no way to say how he died?” Strands of his pale chestnut hair hung over his forehead. His black shirt was limp against his stomach, which, itself, seemed to sag, as if his internal stuffing had given way.
“Nothing I’d go into court with.”
“But—”
“But that’s not what you’re paying me for. I can only do an external exam. He could have been drugged orally. The medical examiner can do a thorough toxicological screening, not just for the twenty to twenty-five common drugs. The problem with drugs is that with all the synthetics pharmaceutical houses are turning out, even an expert toxicologist needs to have some clue as to what to look for. Make sure you and Vanderhooven’s father demand as thorough a screening as they do here.”
“What are we paying you for, if they’re going to do the real work?”
“Have you been somewhere else for the past hour and a half?”
Dowd blanched.
Bedside manner, Kiernan reminded herself. But bedside manner had never been the emphasis for forensic pathologists. And the bishop had just about run through her meagre supply. “One of the things you’re paying me for is narrowing down the possibilities so the pathologist can order the right tests.”
Dowd sighed.
But Kiernan didn’t share his relief. “We’re not in the same county as Phoenix here, are we?”
“No. The line’s a few miles north.”
“Few big crimes, not much need for autopsies?”
“Coroner’s got a graduate he calls when he needs him.”
She nodded slowly. “Vanderhooven’s father can hire the best forensic pathologist in the country. But that’ll take time, more time than you’ve got. In the meantime, the coroner here will go with his own man. Inexperienced pathologists make mistakes. And chances are, with the rope marks and the hands tied, he’ll latch on to the idea of autoerotic asphyxia and he won’t be looking any further. Unless I can find something conclusive, chances are Vanderhooven’s really going to be hung.”
6
WHEN BISHOP DOWD BROUGHT her back to begin her search of Vanderhooven’s house, Kiernan expected him to follow her inside and dog her footsteps, d
emanding explanations for every drawer she opened, every paper she picked up. Instead, he announced he was leaving for the airport to pick up the dead man’s parents. It was two-thirty A.M.
The shutters had been drawn all day against the sun, but the desert heat had worked its way in. The hot stagnant air seemed thicker than it had when she’d been here with Dowd earlier this evening, yesterday evening. Surely, Father Vanderhooven would have had the air-conditioning on, but someone—Dowd?—had turned it off.
Kiernan located the thermostat, turned it on, and began her survey of the house—six rooms: waiting room, study, living room, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom. The living room, dining room, and kitchen could have been rooms in an Azure Acres display model. The study and waiting room she had seen earlier.
She paused at the bedroom door. Looking in she felt the same unpleasant rush she used to have when she had completed an external examination of a body and was poised to make the incisions that would uncover the pathology within. Every time she had felt a momentary nausea, an awareness of the ultimate invasion she was about to launch, to bring to light secrets its owner would never, very possibly could never, have admitted. Then, speaking into the microphone, she would begin: “Incising from left acromioclavicular joint to inferior sternum, from …” She would block out the humanity of the body on the table and force herself to see it as a cluster of organs to be clipped and severed, lifted off and sliced and tossed into specimen jars.
She felt that same momentary nausea as she looked into Vanderhooven’s bedroom. Unlike the other rooms, Vanderhooven’s bedroom had forest-green walls and mahogany furniture. A well-worn oval hooked rug waited for bare feet to be lowered over the side of the bed. A della Robbia hung above the headboard. It could have been a bedroom in any cramped house on Baltimore’s Rohan Street in the fifties, like the one she grew up in, except for the picture that hung over the table that Vanderhooven apparently used as a desk: a photograph of a herd of wildebeest racing across the barren desert. Fleeing. For her, that photo could have summed up her whole life in Baltimore.