Archer Mayor - The Disposable Man

“Gentlemen,” Hillstrom announced as the door swung shut behind us. “You all know Lieutenant Gunther, I believe?”

A chorus of mumbled greetings rose from the group, accompanied by Turner’s “Long trip, Joe. This guy special?”

The question was as much from simple curiosity as from the ME’s official law enforcement liaison, onto whose turf I’d just stepped. In times past, homicide victims especially were routinely accompanied by a department baby-sitter, equipped with pictures of the murder site for reference. As a goodwill gesture to everyone, however, the VSP had eventually assigned one of their own to gather whatever evidence the ME found, forward it to the crime lab in Waterbury, take photographs, lift prints, keep up the paperwork, and generally stand in for the often uneducated neophytes we’d all depended upon before. It had been such a success that the appearance of a cop like me, instead of a FedEx package bearing photos, was now as unusual as it had once been commonplace. And it obviously made Ed Turner wonder why.

“I don’t know,” I answered him. “I was just telling Dr. Hillstrom that we can’t find anything on him. We’re thinking he may be a foreigner, but that’s all we’ve got so far. My inner bloodhound got the better of me, I’m afraid. Hope you don’t mind.”

Turner’s face broke into a smile. “Hell, no. Good to see you again.”

Dr. Short was looking at me quizzically, entrails still cupped in his hands. “Why a foreigner?”

“The missing shoes and the clothing labels. If they’d been American, they wouldn’t have been removed.”

Short nodded thoughtfully. “Could be. The dental work reminds me of some of the horrors I saw in South America, out in the boonies-very crude.”

I approached the table and gazed down at the familiar face, cleaner now, slightly cut and blanched where the purplish lividity had been prevented by stones pressing against the flesh from the bottom of the shallow pool. Contrary to popular belief, floating bodies do so head-down, that part of their anatomy having the most mass. Hillstrom joined me.

“Right now, it appears cause of death was a ligature around the neck, as Dr. Gould surmised in his report,” she said. “Something as thin as piano wire-it’s almost an incision wound.”

“Never seen one of these before,” Ed Turner added, “’cept in that Godfather movie. Think it was a hit?”

I merely shrugged.

He pointed at a damp pile on a distant counter. “We ran an ultraviolet lamp over him before and after we undressed him, to check for trace evidence. We didn’t find anything, so I removed all the pockets for the lab. Thought there might be drug residue or something.” He paused and then added, “You been having any action like that back home?”

I shook my head. “Not really. Were you pointing a finger specifically at South America, Bernie? Or just saying the guy’s dental work was from out of the country?”

Bernie Short was now weighing his burden in a large, shiny bowl attached to a scale. “No, no. I’m not that much of a world traveler. You’d have to have a forensic dentist or someone analyze the alloys in the fillings-different countries have different amalgam mixes.” He paused and then hedged his bet. “For all I know, he might’ve grown up in West Virginia and had some horse doctor work on his teeth.”

“I don’t think so,” Beverly Hillstrom said softly. She was standing at the body’s feet, examining his toes. “Did anyone take note of this?”

We all gathered around her. Harry spoke first, “They look like tattoos-one on each toe. Pretty faded, though. I can’t make it out.”

“I shouldn’t think you would,” Hillstrom said. “Unless I’m mistaken, these are Cyrillic letters.”

A long silence greeted her remark. She left us and crossed over to a phone mounted on the wall. She quickly punched in a few numbers and waited a moment. “Betty? Find Timothy Cox in my Rolodex, and if you can reach him, tell him I’ve got a tattoo I need interpreted-soon as he can. Thanks.”

She hung up and faced us. “A neurologist friend. Works upstairs. Spent five years in Moscow teaching. It’s worth a try. If he doesn’t know, we can go through more formal channels.”

“Absolutely,” I agreed. “Can you tell me any more about the garroting?”

“Not much,” Bernie Short said. “It was done from behind. Death was almost instantaneous, although not quite. We found scratches around the neck wound and some tissue under the nails, indicating the victim tried to claw the garrote away. It’s probably his own skin, although we’ll test its DNA to make sure it doesn’t belong to someone else. But that’s basically it, excepting a small laceration to the top of the head. He was definitely dead by the time he went underwater. Judging from my findings and the documentation Al sent with the body, I’d say someone pitched him into the quarry from the top of the small cliff. As you know, time of death is always tricky. Al’s notes say the body temperature was the same as the environment, so cooling was complete. Yet rigor was still in full force.”

He’d removed the bowel from the scale and was opening it lengthwise on the counter with a scalpel, checking its contents. “Notice the slight discoloration around the abdomen-a shade of light green in the right lower quadrant?” he asked.

I did see something that looked like bruising.

“First signs of putrefaction. On the other hand, while the corneas are cloudy, they haven’t begun to bulge, which they would’ve later on. Also, there’s no insect infestation. ’Course, the only skin exposed to the air were the heels-the rest being either clothed or underwater-and blowflies don’t like that part of the body much.”

“So maybe more than a day, probably less than two or three?” I interpreted.

Hillstrom patted my arm. “Very good, Lieutenant. We’ll have you in a lab coat yet. Unfortunately,” she added, glancing at Bernie Short and obviously using me to caution him, “he may also have been placed in a freezer for three years and then thawed. For all the tricks of our trade, I can still only guarantee that someone’s time of death occurred sometime between when he was last seen alive and when his body was discovered.”

Visibly abashed, Short resumed in a slightly quieter voice, “Two other details you might like: it looks like he had a moderate meal just a few hours before he died, although what it was I don’t know; and according to the lividity pattern, he was dumped not long after death, so he didn’t spend the night in a car trunk or something, although lividity overall was lessened by some pretty serious blood loss-the garrote cut into the carotid.”

I tried to ease him out of his embarrassment. “Tell me more about the scalp laceration.”

Short made a discouraging face. “Can’t say if it happened before or after death. There was some vegetable matter caught in his hair near the site, but I don’t know if it was related to the wound. He was pretty grubbed up.”

Ed Turner cleared his throat and motioned to an evidence envelope nearby. “What we collected’s in there, if you want to take a look. It’s mostly tiny bits and pieces, though-probably crap already in the water.”

“Incidentally,” Hillstrom said, “don’t take the suggestion that this man ate shortly before death as gospel. They’ve done endless studies, trying to pin a predictable rate to the digestive process and have gotten nowhere. Depending on a person’s metabolism and state of mind shortly before death, food’s been found in the stomach, far downstream, and everywhere in between, even hours following ingestion.”

She smiled and let her protégé off the hook with one additional comment: “Which doesn’t mean he didn’t eat shortly before he died.”