Port Mortuary (2010)

by Patricia Cornwell

  I won’t let her get into it. It isn’t necessary to put her in a position like that, betraying the people who have betrayed me. I know what it feels like to be put in a position like that. It’s one of the worst feelings there is and promotes lying, overtly or by omission, and I know that feeling, too. An untruth that lodges intact in the core of your being like undigested corn found in Egyptian mummies. There’s no getting rid of such a thing, of undoing it, without going in to get it, and I’m not sure I have the courage for that, as I think of the worn wooden steps leading down into the basement of the house in Cambridge. I think of the rough stonewalls belowground and the fifteen-hundred-pound safe with its two-inch-thick composite triple-lock door.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve heard any rumors about where everybody is,” I then say. “When you were with Marino at McLean.” I begin the Y incision, cutting from clavicle to clavicle, then long and deep straight down with a slight detour around the navel and terminating at the pubic bone in the lower abdomen. “Did you get any idea of who is in our parking lot and what’s going on? Since I seem to be under house arrest for reasons no one has been inclined to make completely clear.”

  “The FBI.” Anne doesn’t tell me something I don’t know as she walks to the wall where clipboards hang from hooks next to rows of plastic racks for blank forms and diagrams. “At least two agents in the parking lot, and one followed us. Someone did.” She collects paperwork she needs and selects a clipboard after making sure the ballpoint pen attached to it by a cord has ink. “A detective, an agent. I don’t know who followed us to the hospital, but someone who clearly had alerted security before we got there.” She returns to the table. “When we rolled up at the neuroimaging lab, there were three McLean security guys, most excitement they’ve had in years. And then this person in an SUV, a dark-blue Ford, an Explorer or an Expedition.”

  Maybe what Benton just drove away in, and I ask Anne, “Did he or she get out of the SUV? I assume you didn’t talk to whoever it was?” I reflect back soft tissue. The man is so lean he has just the thinnest layer of yellow fat before the tissue turns beefy red.

  “It was hard to see, and I wasn’t going to walk right up and stare. The agent was still sitting in the SUV when we left and followed us back here.”

  She picks up rib cutters from the surgical cart and helps me remove the breastplate, exposing the organs and significant hemorrhage, and I smell the beginning of cells breaking down, the faintest hint of what promises to be putrid and foul. The odors emitted by the human body as it decomposes are uniquely unpleasant. It isn’t like a bird or an opossum or the largest mammal one can think of. In death we are as different from other creatures as we are in life, and I would recognize the stench of decaying human flesh anywhere.

  “How do you want to do this? En bloc? And deal with the metal after we have the organs on the cutting board?” Anne asks.

  “I think we need to synchronize what we’re doing inch by inch, step by step. Line things up with the scans as best we can, because I’m not sure I’m going to be able to see whatever these ferromagnetic foreign bodies are unless I’m looking right at them with a lens.” I wipe my bloody gloved hands on a towel and step closer to the video display, which Anne has divided into quadrants to give me a choice of images from the MRI.

  “Distributed a lot like gunshot powder,” she suggests. “Although we can’t see the actual metal particles because they canceled the signal.”

  “True. More blooming artifact, more voids at the beginning than the end. Greatest amount at the entrance.” I point my bloody gloved finger at the screen.

  “But no residue of anything on the surface,” she says. “And that’s different from a gunshot wound, a contact wound.”

  “Everything about this is different from a gunshot wound,” I answer.

  “You can see that whatever this stuff is, it starts here.” She indicates the entrance wound on the lower back. “But not at the surface. Just beneath it, maybe half an inch beneath it, which is really weird. I’m trying to imagine it and can’t. If you pressed something against his back and fired, you’d get gunshot residue on the clothes and in the entrance wound, not just an inch inside and then deeper.”

  “I looked at his clothes earlier.”

  “No burns or soot, no evidence of GSR,” she says.

  “Not grossly,” I correct her, because not being able to see gunshot residue doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

  “Exactly. Nothing visually.”

  “What about Morrow? I don’t suppose he came downstairs yesterday while Marino had the body in ID, printing him, collecting personal effects. I don’t suppose someone thought to ask Morrow to do a presumptive test for nitrites on the clothing, since we didn’t know at that time there could be GSR or that there was even an entrance wound that correlates with cuts in the clothing.”

  “Not that I know of. And he left early.”

  “I heard. Well, we still can test presumptively, but I’d be really surprised if that’s what we’re seeing on MR. When Morrow or maybe Phillip gets in, let’s get them to do a Griess test just to satisfy my curiosity before we move on to something else. I’m betting it will be negative, but it’s not destructive, so nothing lost.”

  It’s a simple, quick procedure involving desensitized photographic paper that is treated with a solution of sulfanilic acid, distilled water, and alpha-naphthol in methanol. When the paper is pressed against the area of clothing in question and then exposed to steam, any nitrite residues will turn orange.

  “Of course, we’re going to do SEM-EDX,” I add. “But these days it’s a good idea to do more than one thing, since slowly but surely lead is going to disappear from ammunition, and most of these tests are looking for lead, which is toxic to the environment. So we need to start checking for zinc and aluminum alloys, plus various stabilizers and plasticizers, which are added to the gunpowder during manufacturing. Here in the US, at any rate. Not so much in combat, where poisoning the environment with heavy metals is considered a fine idea, since the goal is to create dirty bombs, the dirtier the better.”

  “Not our goal, I hope.”

  “No, not ours. We don’t do that.”

  “I never know what to believe.”

  “I do know what to believe, at least about some things. I know what comes back to us when our service people are returned to Dover,” I reply. “I know what’s in them. I know what isn’t. I know what’s manufactured by us and what’s manufactured by others, the Iraqi insurgency, the Taliban, the Iranians. That’s one of the things we do, materials analysis to figure out who is making what, who is supplying it.”

  “So when I hear these things about weapons or bombs made in Iran…”

  “That’s where it comes from. It’s how the US knows. Intelligence from our dead, from what they teach us.”

  We leave it at that, our talk of the war, because of this other war that has killed a man who is too young to be finished. A man who took an old greyhound for a walk in the civilized world of Cambridge and ended up in my care.

  “They’ve developed some really interesting technology in Texas that I want us to look into.” I return to gunshot residue because it is safer to talk about that. “Combining solid phase micro-extraction with gas chromatography coupled with a nitrogen phosphorus detector.”

  “As Texas should, since it’s a state law that everybody carry a gun. Or is it that firearms are tax-deductible, like farming and raising livestock is around here?”

  “Well, not quite,” I reply. “But we’ll want to look into doing something similar at the CFC, since of all places I would expect a growing prevalence of green ammunition.”

  “Of course. Don’t pollute the environment while you’re doing a drive-by shooting.”

  “What scientists have come up with at Sam Houston can detect as little as one gunpowder particle, which isn’t relevant in this case, since we know this man has metal in him, almost at a microscopic level but plenty of it. Preliminarily, at any rate, Marino
should have used a GSR kit on the hands at least. Since this man was armed.”

  “I do know that he did that much before he printed him,” Anne says. “Because of the gun, although no sign it had been fired. But I saw him using a stub on the hands when I walked into ID at one point.”

  “But not the wound, because you discovered it later. It wasn’t swabbed.”

  “I haven’t done anything. I wouldn’t have. Not my department.”

  “Good. I’ll take care of it when I get to it, when we turn him over,” I decide. “Let’s take out the bloc so I can blot the raw surfaces of the injured track. I’m going to use the MRI as my map and blot as much of the metal material as I can, in hopes that even if we can’t see it, we’re getting some of it. We know it’s metal. The question is, what kind of metal and what is it from?”

  In wall-mounted steel cabinets with glass doors I find a box of blotting paper while Anne lifts the bloc of organs out of the body and places it on the dissecting board.

  “I can’t tell you what a problem it is these days, people with metal in them,” she comments as she collects organ fragments from the chest cavity, which is opened and empty like a china cup, the ribs gleaming opaquely through glistening red tissue. “Including old bullets of the non-green variety. We get these research subjects in after the hospital’s advertised for volunteers, and of course I mean the normals, right? All these people who come in and they’re just as normal as the day is long, right? And have nothing to report. Uh, right. Like it’s real normal to have an old bullet in you.”

  She returns fragments of the left kidney, the left lung, and the heart to their correct anatomical positions on the bloc of organs as if she’s piecing together a puzzle.

  “Happens more often than you think,” she says. “Well, not more often than someone like you would think, since we see things like that in the morgue all the time. And then you get the old routine that bullets are lead, and lead isn’t magnetic, so it’s fine to scan the person. Usually, one of the psychiatrists who doesn’t know any better and can’t seem to remember from one time to the next that, no, wrong again. Lead, iron, nickel, cobalt. All bullets, pellets, are ferromagnetic, I don’t care if they’re so-called green, they’re going to torque because of the magnetic field. That could be a problem if someone’s got a fragment in him that’s in close proximity to a blood vessel, an organ. God forbid something was left in the brain if some poor person was shot in the head eons ago. Paxil, Neurontin, or the like aren’t going to help the poor person’s mood disorder if an old bullet relocates to the wrong place.”

  She rinses a fragment of kidney and places it on the dissecting board.

  “We’re going to need to measure how much blood is in the peritoneum.” I’m looking at the hole in the diaphragm that I saw hours earlier when I followed the wound track during the CT scan. “I’m going to guess at least three hundred MLs, originating through the lacerated diaphragm, and at least fifty MLs in his pericardium, which normally might suggest some time interval before death because of how much he bled. But the severity of these injuries, which are similar to blast injuries? He had no survival time. Only as long as it took for his heart and respiration to quit. If I were willing to use the term instant death, this would qualify as one.”

  “This is unusual.” Anne hands me a tiny fragment of kidney that is hard and brown with tan discoloration and retracted edges. “I mean, what is that? It almost looks fixed or cooked or something.”

  There is more. As I pull a light closer and look at the bloc of organs, I notice hard, dry fragments of the left lung’s lower lobe and of the heart’s left ventricle. Using a steel beaker, I scoop pooled blood and hematoma out of the mediastinum, or the middle section of the chest cavity, and find more fragments and tiny, hard, irregular blood clots. Looking closely at the disrupted left kidney, I note perirenal hemorrhage and interstitial emphysema, and more evidence of the same abnormal tissue changes in areas closest to the wound track, areas most susceptible to damage from a blast. But what blast?

  “Reminds me of tissue that’s been frozen, almost freeze-dried,” I say as I label sheets of blotting paper with an abbreviation for the location the sample came from. LLL for left lower lobe and LK for left kidney and LV for left ventricle of the heart.

  In the strong light of a surgical lamp and the magnification of a hand lens I can barely make out dark silvery specks of whatever was blasted through this man when he was stabbed in the back. I see fibers and other debris that won’t be discernible until they are looked at under a microscope, but I feel hopeful. Something was deposited that likely was unintended by the perpetrator, trace evidence that might give me information about the weapon and the person who used it. I turn the fume hood on the lowest setting so there is nothing more than an exchange of air, and I begin gently blotting.

  I touch the sterile paper to the surfaces of fragmented tissue and the edges of wounds, and one by one lay the sheets inside the hood, where the gently circulating air will facilitate evaporation, the drying of blood without disturbing anything adhering to it. I collect samples of the freeze-dried-looking tissue and save them in plasticized cartons and also in small jars of formalin, and I tell Anne we’re going to want a lot of photographs and that I’ll ask colleagues of mine to look at images of internal damage and of the tannish tough tissue. I’ll ask if they’ve ever seen anything like it before, and as I’m saying all this, I’m wondering who I mean. Not Briggs. I wouldn’t dare send anything to him. Certainly not Fielding. No one who works here. No one at all comes to mind except Benton and Lucy, whose opinions won’t help or matter. It’s up to me whether I like it or not.

  “Let’s turn him over,” I say, and empty of organs, he is light in the torso and head-heavy.

  I measure the entrance wound and describe what it looks like and exactly where it is, and I examine the wound track through the bloc of organs, finding every area that was punctured by what I’m now certain was a narrow double- and single-edged blade.

  “If you look at the wound, you can clearly see the two sharp ends of it, the corners of the buttonhole made by two sharp edges,” I explain to Anne.

  “I see.” Her eyes are dubious behind her plastic glasses.

  “But look here, where the wound track terminates in the heart. Can you see how both ends of the wound are identical, both very sharp?” I move the light closer and hand her a magnifying lens.

  “Slightly different from the wound on his back,” she says.

  “Yes. Because when the blade terminated in the heart muscle, it didn’t penetrate as deeply; just the tip went in. As opposed to when these other wounds were made.” I show her. “The tip penetrated and was followed by the length of the blade running through, and as you can see, the one end of the wound is just a little blunted and slightly stretched. You especially can see it here, where it penetrated the left kidney and kept going.”

  “I think I see what you’re saying.”

  “Not what you would expect with a butterfly knife, a boning knife, a dagger, all of which are double-edged, both sides of the blade sharp from tip to handle. This brings to mind something spear-tipped—sharp on both sides at the tip but single-edged after that, like I’ve seen in some fighting knives or, in particular, something like a bowie knife or bayonet, where the top of the blade has been sharpened on both edges to make penetration easier in stabbings. So what we’ve got is an entrance that is three-eighths of an inch linear; both ends of the wound are sharp with one that is slightly more blunted than the other. And the width expands to five-eighths of an inch.” I measure, and Anne writes it down on a body diagram.

  “So the blade is three-eighths of an inch at the tip, and at its widest it’s five-eighths. That’s pretty narrow. Almost like a stiletto,” she says.

  “But a stiletto is double-edged, the entire blade is.”

  “Homemade? A blade that injects something that explodes?”

  “Without causing thermal injury, without causing burns. In fact, what we’re
seeing is more consistent with frostbite, where the tissue feels hard and is discolored,” I remind her as I measure the distance from the wound on the man’s back to the top of his head. “Twenty-six inches, and two inches to the left of the mid-spine. Direction is up and anterior, with extensive subcutaneous and tissue emphysema along the track, perforating the transverse process on the left twelfth rib paraspinally. Perforating paraspinal muscle, perirenal fat, left adrenal, left kidney, diaphragm, left lung, and pericardium, terminating in the heart.”

  “How long a blade for something to perforate all that?”

  “At least five inches.”

  She plugs in the autopsy saw, and we turn the body on its back again. I place a headrest under the neck and incise the scalp from ear to ear, following the hairline so the sutures won’t be visible afterward. The top of the skull is white like an egg as I reflect the scalp back and pull the face down like a sock, like something sad, the features collapsing as if he is crying.

  15

  Idon’t realize the sun is up and the arctic front has marched off to the south until I open my office door and am greeted by a clear blue sky beyond tall windows.

  I look down seven floors, and there are a few cars moving slowly on the white-frosted furrowed road below, and going the other way, a snowplow truck with its yellow blade held up like a crab claw as it scuttles along, looking for the right spot, then lowering the blade with a clank I can’t hear from up here and scraping pavement that’s not going to be completely cleared because of ice.

  The riverbank is white, and the Charles is the color of old blue bottle glass and wrinkled by the current, and beyond in the distance the skyline of Boston catches the early light, the John Hancock Tower soaring far above any other high-rise, overbearing and sturdy, like a solitary column left standing in the ruins of an ancient temple. I think about coffee, and it is a fleeting urge as I wander into my bathroom and look at the coffeemaker on the counter by the sink and the boxes of K-Cups that include hazelnut.