Bad Karma In the Big Easy

by D. J. Donaldson

  For each collected body, the FEMA mortuary had provided the center with fingerprints and dental x-rays. At this stage of things, those items were of little value since family members reporting lost relatives weren’t likely to have records of either. A few of those who’d become separated from family members had been able to produce pictures of the missing. But because all the bodies coming in were already disfigured by decomposition, they would no longer resemble those photos. Far more useful were descriptions of tattoos, clothing, hair color, jewelry, and any old fractures repaired with metal pins.

  The three bodies in Broussard’s sights this morning had been wearing no jewelry, had no tattoos, and no repaired fractures. But the peculiar fact they were all nude seemed potentially as useful in identifying them as any item of clothing they might have been wearing. Even so, Broussard’s highest hopes lay with the silicone chin implant found on the whole body x-rays of 427. That seemed like something most family members would know about and mention when filing a report.

  Durbin turned to the bank of three rolling file cabinets beside the desk and pulled the middle one closer. She thumbed through the hanging files inside and selected the pertinent records, which were all still identified on the tab only by a number. “Sorry, no luck.”

  Durban handed the files to Broussard. “I’ll have the first one there in just a few minutes.”

  For all the noise the air conditioner made, it didn’t adequately cool the building. Which is why it was so hot in there during the afternoons. Today, even though it was still early morning, the place was barely tolerable, so as Broussard walked down to autopsy area 1, he wasn’t looking forward to putting on his mask and face shield.

  As each body moved through the facility, it was accompanied by an escort that served as a scribe and an extra pair of hands when needed. The body bag containing corpse 427 arrived promptly on a gurney pushed by Jeff Lyons, a husky young fire department paramedic and navy reserve pilot from Jesuit Bend who Broussard had worked with many times over the past few weeks. Broussard recognized him even though Lyons was gowned and already masked.

  The two men exchanged a brief greeting, then as Broussard donned his face protection, Lyons said, “You dream about any of this?”

  Broussard stepped in to help position the gurney so they could move the body onto the examination table sitting under a bank of fluorescent lights. Practically shouting now to be heard through his facial gear and over the air conditioner, Broussard said, “If you mean this kind of work in general, not usually, but I’ve had a few since the storm.” He unzipped the bag, unleashing a powerful smell that surged over the two men in an almost tangible cloud, once again kick-starting their smell receptors and making Lyons’s eyes water.

  Broussard moved around to the head and they pushed the bag down so they could reach the monstrously swollen body inside. Broussard leaned over and took hold of the cadaver’s shoulders, his hands sinking deeply into the macerated muscle beneath the skin. Lyons grasped the corpse’s ankles.

  “On the count of three,” Broussard said. “One, two, three...”

  As they lifted their loathsome burden, a filthy blond ponytail, clotted with mud and leaves and twigs, unfurled from the skull.

  With the transfer complete, Lyons said, “I was this one’s escort when she first came in. That ponytail is one of the things I been dreaming about... only in my dream it’s soft and clean. But her face... is still... like that. And... I’m in bed with her.”

  Broussard looked at the cadaver’s ruined features; the sunken eyes, the opaque corneas, the swollen skin a disgusting palette of red, purple and black all swirled together with green and yellow, blending like some grotesque artwork. Forgetting Lyons was even there, he moved around the table, bent down, and sighted along the plane of the cadaver’s facial skin.

  The feature he’d noticed when he’d initially seen the body weeks earlier was still there; a series of small elevations of the skin around the nose and mouth that were superimposed on the general facial swelling. Under these elevations, he thought there was a corresponding constancy of coloration as though she might have been injured in those areas before she died.

  When he’d first observed this many days ago, it hadn’t set off any mental alarm. She could have gone into the water, been hit by some floating debris as she struggled, then drowned a short while later. It was when he saw the same thing on bodies 428 and 429, both collected close to this one, both nude as this one had been when found, that his skullduggery sonar, already warming up, had begun beeping.

  Back then, he couldn’t do anything about it. The morgue’s prime directive in those early days was body identification. There had been little time for cause-of-death analyses. Considering how fast the bodies were arriving, he was lucky to have picked up on this suspicious discoloration. It’s likely that had he been able to follow up then on these cases, while he was still alert enough to avoid stepping in armadillo feces, he might have noticed one other unusual feature of the victim’s destroyed face. As it was, it slipped right by him then, and did so again this time.

  Realizing Broussard wasn’t going to respond to his comment about his dreams, Lyons pushed the gurney out of the way and changed gloves so he wouldn’t soil the records as he handled them.

  Broussard’s main goal now was to determine if this woman had really drowned. He had noted on his earlier examination of the body that the most reliable feature of drowning, a tenacious mushroom of foam issuing from the cadaver’s nose and mouth, formed by air, mucus, and water as the victim takes a last few breaths, was not present. Nor did pressure on the chest produce any. After so long in the warm water, the absence of this foam was not by itself surprising. He did clearly remember, though, that it was also missing on 428 and 429. Pressure on the chest of those cadavers, likewise, hadn’t produced any.

  What he needed now was a look at the lungs.

  When any body was first brought in, it was fingerprinted. In many cases, clear prints were difficult to obtain because of wrinkling and folding of the skin on the fingers. But there was a way around this. Most of the bodies, this one included, had been immersed long enough for the superficial layers of the skin of the hands to separate from the underlying tissues so the epidermis, nails included, could be peeled off like a glove. If someone with appropriate-sized hands then slipped the skin glove on, prints could easily be taken. The gloves belonging to this victim were lying on her stomach. Before proceeding any further, Broussard picked up those gloves and placed them on a nearby stainless steel table. Then he reached for a scalpel.

  Blade poised above the cadaver’s left shoulder, Broussard silently recited the mantra he had long ago adopted before making the first cut. What I do now, I do for you and for others.

  Chapter 2

  Kit Franklyn pulled off St. Charles Avenue into Audubon Park, and immediately saw where she was needed. About fifty yards ahead, Phil Gatlin’s old Pontiac was parked on the shoulder behind a single NOPD cruiser. Across the leaf and branch-littered grass to the left, Gatlin and a lone uniformed cop were standing next to a convertible that had apparently crashed into a huge old live oak. Had this been a normal Thursday in the city, there would have been more official cars and at least a small crowd of gawkers present. But with most of the city’s population gone and unable to return because of the flooding damage, Gatlin and the cop were the only two humans in sight.

  Kit parked behind the cruiser, picked up her little digital camera from the passenger seat, and got out of her car. For the last several years, she had worked for Broussard as a suicide investigator and occasionally, for the police, as a psychological profiler. At Broussard’s suggestion, she had recently completed a course in death investigation in St. Louis. Upon her return, she had become Broussard’s eyes and ears in all kinds of cases when he was too busy to personally work a scene.

  As she walked toward the crashed car, she thought briefly about how much she had changed since she’d met Broussard. Fresh out of graduate school when she had ta
ken the job with him, she’d cringed at much of what she saw in the morgue and at the scene of suspected suicides... on occasion had even become ill. When the Governor’s aid suggested she carry a gun on that undercover assignment it seemed so ridiculous... Kit Franklyn, with a concealed weapon. Now, here she was, that same Ladysmith .38 strapped to her calf, its presence as much a part of her as the tortoiseshell combs she used to keep her hair out of her eyes. Who would have predicted all this?

  Drawing nearer to the scene, her attention was drawn to something lying in the grass approximately thirty yards behind the crashed car. It almost looked like...

  She changed direction and headed for the object.

  With a few more steps, she was able to verify that it was exactly what she’d thought. Despite her years of experience in viewing the results of self inflicted, accidental, and intentional mayhem committed on one human by another, her stomach did a triple Axle. The object in the grass was a human head.

  Kit’s stomach was performing moves she’d never felt before, as she stepped up to the head and stared down at its clouded corneas visible through half-closed eyes. There was something so surreal about a head detached from its body. It almost seemed it wasn’t real at all, but merely a Hollywood creation.

  But it was real. Not so long ago those eyes had been bright and shining with life. Now they were opaque and dead.

  With great effort, she shifted her focus from the eyes to the rest of the face and let her mind shift into catalogue mode: male... receding hairline... prematurely silver hair... age: early fifties, most likely. It didn’t take any expertise at all to tell that the head had not been severed from the rest of the body, but had been pulled from it. The free margin of the neck was ragged and torn. And the event had not happened elsewhere, because the severed arteries and veins had leaked their contents onto the grass, fouling it with gore.

  Out of the corner of her left eye, she saw a loop of rope with a trailing end. The rope was not straight, but took a sinuous course back to a large oak, where the rope had been wound around the trunk and tied off.

  Good God. She didn’t even have to turn around and look back at the crashed car to know what happened. The guy had...

  “So, what do you think?” the voice of Phil Gatlin said, coming up on her from the direction of the crashed car. “Would you rather have dew on the grass in the morning or a human head?”

  Kit turned and saw the oldest homicide detective on the force strolling her way. At six four, he was also the tallest. When she’d first met him, his dark hair had been shot with gray. Now, gray was its only color. His untamed eyebrows then had been black as squid ink and oddly, still were, accenting his black eyes so he still looked as though he could see through even the most artfully conceived lie. With the city devastated, he could have been excused for not wearing the coat and tie the NOPD pre-storm regs required for detectives. But, he didn’t look any different than usual, which is to say, his ill-fitting suit was shiny with wear and his tie didn’t match.

  “Put me down for dew,” she said, answering his question about what she preferred on the grass. “I guess the rest of the body is behind the wheel of that car over there."

  “Yeah.”

  “Anyone in there with him?”

  “No.”

  “So one end of the rope is around his neck, the other around that tree... car takes off...”

  “We end up with a guy in two pieces.”

  Kit’s job was to determine if the case was a homicide or something else. If it was a homicide, she’d turn further investigation of it over to Gatlin. If not, she’d have to establish whether it was an accident or a suicide. To someone not schooled in the perversities of human behavior, it would seem there was no chance at all this could have been anything but an intentional act, either by the victim or a second party. But there were many cases of so called auto-erotic asphyxiation on record, where a male, while masturbating, would fashion some kind of ligature around his neck to decrease blood flow to his brain. The resulting denial of oxygen to the subject’s nerve cells would apparently heighten the sexual experience. Occasionally, things would go wrong and the victim would die of strangulation. Was this case just an extreme variation on that theme? Too soon to say. She was sure Gatlin had already decided what he thought it was, but wouldn’t express any opinion until she’d had a chance to see everything for herself.

  “Let me get some pictures here.”

  Kit took three shots of the head from different angles, then another of the looped end of the rope. She took a distant picture of the rope leading to the tree where it was tied off, then walked over to the tree and took a final frame of the knot on the rope.

  She went back to where Gatlin was waiting. “Okay, let’s see the rest.”

  At the crashed car, the cop guarding the scene stood with his back to it, hands in his pockets. He turned as Kit and Gatlin approached, and Kit could see he was just a kid, probably newly out of the academy. His uniform, dirty and unpressed, reflected the difficult days he’d been living through since the storm. He was also apparently having trouble coping with the close proximity of the headless corpse, because his face was the color of skim milk and his lips were dry.

  With a thick tongue he said, “Detective, I’d like to go back to my car and sit down, if that’s all right.”

  “You do that,” Gatlin said.

  Looking at Kit, who was heading for the driver’s side of the wreck, Gatlin said, “I remember when you were like that.”

  “Now I’m a rough, bad-ass veteran,” Kit replied, not looking at him.

  Gatlin nodded. “Not the way I would have put it, but yeah... the sentiment is there.”

  The body belonged to the medical examiner, the rest of the scene to the cops. On earlier cases, when some of the other homicide detectives arrived before Kit did, they’d move the corpse, creating a need to question them to make sure she wasn’t noting a circumstance they had created. But Gatlin knew the rules and observed them, so she didn’t need to ask him if he’d crossed into her territory. That was good because Gatlin was Broussard’s best friend, and it would have been extremely awkward to be at odds with him. As it was, she liked and respected him almost as much she did Broussard.

  The corpse was slumped over the wheel of the wrecked car in exactly the correct position for the way the vehicle had come to an abrupt stop. Because there was no head to crash through it, the windshield was intact. But on the driver’s side it was covered with a thick layer of clotted blood, apparently painted by spurts from the large arteries in the stump of the neck as the heart continued beating for a few seconds after the head was torn off.

  She looked back at the end of the rope thirty yards away. At first, it seemed hard to believe the heart could have continued pumping while the car covered that distance, and then kept working long enough to bloody the windshield. But then she remembered the famous chicken that had lived for several years after having its head chopped off. The cut had gone above the brainstem, preserving the primitive parts of the brain that regulated the basic body functions of heart rate and respiration. Except for having to be fed by hand directly into its esophagus through an eyedropper, the bird seemed no worse off for the experience. So stranger things than what she was seeing here had happened. It was all a function of where the brainstem was damaged.

  Despite being a bad-ass veteran, the thought of a man being fed with an eyedropper made her shudder.

  She took a half dozen photographs of the corpse and a few more of the car where it was enveloping the tree. Then she looked at Gatlin, who was standing back and watching her work. “Would you mind moving the body so I can see his clothes in front? Or I’ll do it and you can take the pictures.”

  “You know your camera. I’ll move him.”

  Gatlin shucked off his jacket and laid it over a nearby shrub. He rolled up his sleeves and tucked his tie into his shirt, then pulled on a pair of rubber gloves from his pants pocket. He moved to the car and reached over the top of the door
. He grabbed the corpse by the shoulders and pulled him back against the seat.

  The victim was wearing a long-sleeved blue button-down oxford cloth shirt that had about as much blood on the front as on the shoulders and back. Kit leaned in and looked at the front of his khaki trousers...

  “Zipper’s up,” she said, so Gatlin could share the moment.

  She took several pictures of the corpse from that angle, then said, “Okay, you can put him back where he was.”

  While Gatlin did that, she went around to the other side of the car and looked at the ignition, where she saw that the keys were still in it. They were in the ON position. This was another reason she liked Gatlin. He understood that for her to make the correct decision about what had happened at a scene, she often needed information that didn’t come from the body. So he would make sure the integrity of the scene was maintained until she’d had a look.

  She photographed the keys, then, just to be sure all the facts fit, she walked back toward the rope, looking along the route for blood spatters. They were there... little clotted gouts of red tracking back to the point where the head lay in the grass.

  Ordinarily, she would have had Glen Fry, one of the autopsy assistants, with her, but after his home was destroyed, he and his family had evacuated to Dallas. There would have also been a crime scene team to impart their views on what happened, but the crime scene vans had been flooded to the rooftops. Most of the techs were still in other cities, waiting for FEMA to bring in those trailers everyone was expecting. So she and Gatlin and the sick young cop in his cruiser were all the attention this case was going to get.

  She slipped her camera into her pants pocket and walked back to the crash site. She snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and said to Gatlin, “Let’s get him out of there.”