Эд Макбейн - Snow White and Rose Red

“She was manifestly exhibiting many if not all of the first-rank symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, yes.”

“Which was what convinced you that it was necessary to sign a certificate for emergency admission under the Baker Act.”

“The need for admission to a mental facility seemed indicated, yes.”

“On the basis of the one and only time you saw Sarah Whittaker in a professional capacity?”

“Mr. Hope,” Helsinger said wearily, “I am a trained psychiatrist. I do not have to be run over by a locomotive to recognize schizophrenia when I encounter it.”

“you’d encountered it often before, is that true? Before that evening?”

“On innumerable occasions.”

“You mentioned earlier that you’d known Sarah before that evening, known the family, and, I believe you said, were — and are — a longtime friend of the family?”

“That’s true.”

“On any occasion — when you saw Sarah socially — did she seem mentally disturbed to you?”

“No, she did not.”

“Then the first clue you had to her illness was on the evening you saw her for the first time professionally. The evening of September twenty-seventh last year.”

“Yes.”

“And you were sufficiently alarmed that evening to sign a certificate for emergency admission and to deliver it personally to the Public Safety Building.”

“I was not ‘alarmed,’ Mr. Hope. I had examined a young woman who was manifesting many of the first-rank symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia — a woman, moreover, who had just attempted suicide. It was incumbent upon me to seek emergency admission. Now, Mr. Hope, I think you’ll recognize — as a fellow professional — that I’ve given you more than enough of my time, and that I’ve sat through your inquisition with more courtesy and patience than I might have were I in a court of law, under oath. I do have some calls to make, so if you’ll forgive me...”

“Of course,” I said. “Thank you for your time, Doctor.”

I rose and started for the door.

When my hand was on the knob, Helsinger said, “Mr. Hope?”

I turned.

“Yes?”

“Leave this alone,” he said gently. “Sarah is really an extremely sick person. Believe me,” he said. “Please believe me.”

I had occasion only much later to see the file on the Jane Doe who’d turned up in the Sawgrass River. I wish now that I had known earlier what course Bloom’s investigation was taking. But Calusa is a fair-size city where accidental meetings are rare, and I did not run into Bloom again after that meeting in his office on April 15. In reconstructing the investigation after the fact, it seems to me now that knowledge of it at the time might have spared everyone a great deal of grief.

The file consisted of photographs, bank statements, laboratory, forensic, and Detective Division reports, and verbatim transcripts of interviews in the field. When I finally saw the file, Jane Doe had long since been identified as Tracy Kilbourne. The folder was so marked: TRACY KILBOURNE. Recovered photographs of her, obviously taken while she was still alive, showed a tall blonde woman with light eyes and a slender figure. In all of the photos, she was smiling radiantly into the camera. When I saw her folder, it was still in the “open” file, which meant the case had not yet been solved.

On the morning of April 16, while I was in Dr. Helsinger’s waiting room talking to the man expecting rain, an assistant ME named Timothy Hanson was engaged in the gruesome task of examining Jane Doe’s corpse in an attempt at (a) identification and (b) establishing the cause of death and the postmortem interval.

The red dress the girl had been wearing had already been sent to the police laboratory for testing. She had been wearing no undergarments — neither panties nor brassiere — and no shoes. If she had drowned herself, she had either taken off her shoes before entering the water, or else the action of the river had washed them from her feet and deposited them somewhere else. A third possibility was that the alligators had eaten both her feet and her shoes. Hanson did not consider this a likelihood. Alligators are not sharks.

The body was badly decomposed.

In forensic pathology, a rule of thumb regarding the rate of postmortem decay equates a week in the air with either two weeks in the water or eight weeks in the soil. Even at a glance, Hanson could tell that this body had been in the water for a very long time. The head hair was entirely gone and marine animals had nibbled away the flesh around the lips, eyes, and ears. The action of the water itself had stripped away macerated flesh from the face, the hands, the arms, and the legs, but some of the fingers and one thumb were still intact.

When something is said to be adipose, it either contains animal fat or is like animal fat. If a body has lost its protective dermis and epidermis after submersion in water for a lengthy period of time, a waxy material develops in the outer layer of subcutaneous fat. Yellow-white in hue, dirty-looking, this formation is known as “adipocere,” and it is caused by the decomposition of animal fat into fatty acids. The corpse lying on Hanson’s table gave off the rancid odor typical of adipocere, but he tested several samples nonetheless — first in water, where a sample floated; next in alcohol and ether, where the second sample dissolved; and then with dilute copper sulfate, where his last sample gave off a pale greenish blue color. Hanson knew that adipocere developed first in the subcutaneous tissues and only later in the adipose tissues. The formation of adipocere in a submerged adult body would have been complete in anywhere from twelve to eighteen months. Examining Jane Doe’s corpse, Hanson estimated that it had been submerged for anywhere from six to nine months.

Although the corpse’s head hair was completely gone, there remained patches of hair in the pubic area, and samples of these were taken to support the finding that the victim had been blonde; she was, in fact, a “victim” in the police files, where suicide and homicide are investigated in exactly the same manner.

Hanson suspected she was a homicide victim.

That was because there was a bullet hole in her throat, clearly visible even though much of the skin there had been nibbled away by underwater creatures.

Suspicion, however, is not scientific evidence. Hanson was a detective only in a strictly circumscribed sense, and he was not paid to speculate, but only to deliver facts that might or might not help the police investigation. That he suspected this was a homicide had nothing at all to do with his objective approach to the examination. What he wanted to learn was whether or not this woman had died of a gunshot wound or of drowning, a determination that might mean nothing at all to the investigating detectives.

Hanson got down to serious work.

When a person is drowning, he or she inhales water into the air passages and the pulmonary alveoli. The cause of death in most drownings is asphyxia caused by this inhalation of water and the consequent exclusion of air from the lungs. Inhaled water circulates to the left side of the heart, altering the concentration of sodium chloride there. If someone dies by means other than drowning, he has not inhaled any water, and the sodium chloride content of the blood is equal on both sides of the heart.

The Gettler test is designed to reveal the relative concentrations of sodium chloride in the right and left sides of the heart, and is often conclusive — especially in cases of saltwater drowning — as to cause of death.

Jane Doe had been found floating in fresh water.

Normally, Hanson would have performed the Gettler test before disturbing or removing any of the organs. He would have wiped the surface of the heart dry. He would have punctured the heart with a dry knife. Using dry pipettes, he would have collected ten millimeters of blood from each side of the heart and placed the samples in clean, dry laboratory flasks. His chemicals would have been ready, as they were now: saturated picric acid, silver nitrate, starch nitrate, potassium iodide, sodium citrate, and sodium nitrite.