Эд Макбейн - Snow White and Rose Red

Normally the Gettler test would have told Hanson what he’d wanted to know.

But Jane Doe had been in the water for too long a time.

Postmortem putrefaction was too far advanced.

Gases had forced the blood out of the heart.

His pipettes came up dry.

Free now to examine the other viscera, Hanson went ahead with his exploration. Because the body had been submerged for such a long time, he did not expect to find any stiff foam or frothy liquid in the nasal or bronchial air passages, and he did not. Moreover, the alveolar structure of the lung had been severely damaged by decomposition so that the lung had shrunk and appeared waterlogged, dirty, and red — making it virtually impossible to detect inhaled water. He did find some bloodstained fluid in the pleural cavities, but he knew that this was not conclusive of drowning in that the same sort of fluid was often found in decomposed bodies that had not drowned. In short, he could not state conclusively that this was a drowning victim.

There remained the bullet hole in the dead girl’s throat.

According to the reports that had been delivered together with the unidentified body, the police had recovered no firearm at the scene. There was no question that this was a bullet hole, but because of the severe decomposition of the body, Hanson was unable to tell whether the wound was a contact wound, a near-contact wound, a close-up wound, or a distant wound. He knew for certain that a shotgun could not have produced this type of wound, but he was unable to determine — again because of the advanced state of decomposition — whether the weapon had been a pistol or a rifle. Nor did he, upon examination, find a bullet in the neck or the head. This did not surprise him; there was an exit wound at the back of the neck between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae.

Hanson still did not know the cause of death.

It seemed to him that there were four possibilities, none of them scientific:

1. The woman had waded into the river, gun in hand, had shot herself in the throat, and — wounded but still alive — had collapsed into the water and drowned. Cause of death: drowning.

2. The woman had similarly waded into the river, shot herself in the throat, and collapsed into the river — already dead. Cause of death: gunshot wound.

3. Someone else had wounded her and thrown her into the river to drown. Cause of death: drowning.

4. Someone else had shot her mortally and then thrown her into the river to dispose of her body. Cause of death: gunshot wound.

However you sliced it — and Hanson forgave himself the unintentional pun — the girl had been in that river for from six to nine months, and probably had been shot before her submersion in water. He could not tell the police anything more concrete about the cause of death.

Somehow, he felt like a failure.

Sighing, he picked up a scalpel and cut off the undamaged fingers on the girl’s right and left hands, and the undamaged thumb on her right hand. Then he began working to determine age, height, weight, and whatever other vital statistics the corpse on the table might reveal.

The first thing he discovered was that the corpse had no tongue.

Someone had cut out the girl’s tongue.

By one o’clock that afternoon, the thumb and four fingers dissected from the corpse of Jane Doe had been delivered to the police laboratory for fingerprinting by a technician named Larry Soames.

Soames had fingerprinted a lot of corpses in his lifetime. He had also fingerprinted a great many fingers dissected from corpses. With all the water here in Florida, he got a lot of floaters, too, and he had printed his fair share of those. The ease of fingerprinting a floater depended entirely on how long the body had been in the water. What he usually did — when he got a body that hadn’t been submerged too long and where the so-called washerwoman’s skin wasn’t too bad — was to dry the fingers with a towel, inject glycerin under the fingertips to smooth them out, and then ink and print each finger. Where the body had been in the water a longer period of time — say three or four months — he dried the dissected finger over an open flame. Actually, unless he wanted to cook the damn thing, he just kept passing it back and forth lightly over the flame, sort of a sweeping motion, until it shrank up and dried. Then he applied his ink and took his prints in the usual way. In a case like this one, though — the ME’s report estimated she’d been in the water some six to nine months, friction ridges all gone — what he had to do was to cut himself some skin shells and then ink and print those. He had to be careful detaching the skin, of course, but Soames was by nature a very careful man.

The fingers Hanson had sent him were tagged 1R, 3R, and 4R respectively (for the right-hand thumb, middle finger, and ring finger) and 7L and 9L respectively (for the left-hand forefinger and ring finger). Using a scalpel and an illuminating magnifying glass, Soames carefully peeled each fingertip until he had the skin shells he needed. He placed these shells in separate test tubes containing formaldehyde solution, each tube marked to correspond with Hanson’s tagging at the morgue. When the shells were ready for printing, he slipped a rubber glove onto his right hand, and then placed each shell in turn over his own index finger — an extension of his finger, in effect — and rolled it onto the inking plate and then onto the fingerprint record card. He sent the card over to the Identification Section, where, if they got lucky, the dead girl would have been fingerprinted sometime or other for a criminal offense, a security job, or admission to the armed forces.

He looked at the information chart he had received from the morgue. As far as Hanson had been able to judge from his examination of the badly decomposed remains, the girl had been somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two years old, blonde, approximately five feet eight inches tall, and had weighed between 115 and 120 pounds.

Soames wondered how many young girls fitting that description were missing in the state of Florida.

In another section of the police laboratory, a technician named Oscar Delamorte was examining the dress he’d received earlier that day. It was only an occupational coincidence that Delamorte (whose name meant “of the dead” in Italian) often examined garments or objects that had once belonged to dead people. Delamorte made notes as he worked. These notes would later be typed up and sent to the Detective Division. He hoped the dress would give them some help, but you never knew.

The dress’s exposure to water and sunlight had caused it to fade from what Delamorte assumed had once been a brighter red than it was now. In his notes he wrote simply, “reddish in color.” He also noted that the action of the water had badly frayed the dress in some places and that snagging on a tree or rock had caused a tear near the hemline. He noted that there was a dark spot some four inches below the waist of the dress — what would have been the lap of the dress if its wearer had been seated — and although he tested the spot he was unable to determine what had caused it. His guess, because of its permanency, was that the spot was an ink stain.

The label on the dress indicated that it had been manufactured by a company called Pantomime, Inc., but he had no idea whether this was a firm in Calusa or indeed anywhere in Florida. He guessed not; America’s ready-to-wear garment industry was located in New York City. This same label told him that the dress was fabricated of eighty percent nylon and twenty percent cotton. The dress was sleeveless and styled as a wraparound garment, its wearer putting it on in much the same way one might a robe. Slip your arms into it, close it across the waist so that one side overlaps the other, and fasten it with a sash or belt. There were red thread loops for a belt on the dress, but no belt had been found in the water. One of the loops was torn. There was no retail outlet label in the dress; Delamorte could not zero in on a department store, a boutique, or any of the discount places that bordered both sides of Route 41. A second label in the dress, however, advised the wearer that the garment could either be washed or professionally dry-cleaned, and gave detailed instructions for laundering. Delamorte searched the dress for visible or Phantom Fast laundry marks and found none. He did find a dry cleaner’s mark, though, and when he checked against the file in the Identification Section, he discovered that the dress had been cleaned by a place called Albert Cleaners.