Archer Mayor - Scent of Evil

I glanced over my shoulder, straight across the water and up the opposite bank to where I could see Tyler and his team bent over their work. He didn’t know it yet, but Tyler’s day was going to be full of excavating. At least here, he’d be in the shade.

By late afternoon we were alone, the body and I, in the cool basement embalming room of the McCloskey Funeral Home on Forest Street. Along the walls were a sink and counters, a roll-around cart with a variety of nonsterile surgical instruments whose role here I didn’t want to know, and shelves stocked with row after row of identical plastic bottles filled with variously colored liquids, designed to be injected into bodies to give the skin a perking up. I was sitting in the corner on a metal folding chair. The corpse lay face up on a fiberglass table, the bottom of which sloped slightly, so that any fluids accumulating at his feet could be washed down a drainpipe that paralleled one of the table legs.

Not that there were any fluids. The black-rubber body bag had been completely unzipped, revealing a man still fully clothed in a pair of pale blue slacks and a polo shirt and covered with dirt. He looked like a well-dressed tunnel digger who’d chosen this incongruous spot to catch a couple of minutes of shut-eye.

The door-to-door canvass for witnesses was continuing, Dunn had finally returned to his office, and Tyler and his crew had switched from the retaining wall to under the bridge. I was waiting for the regional medical examiner, Alfred Gould, to get off the phone and start giving my roommate an external examination.

The autopsy would not be done in Brattleboro. Beverly Hillstrom, the state’s chief medical examiner, would do that in Burlington, where her office was located. Usually, in a homicide, Hillstrom traveled to the scene, wishing to keep the preliminary autopsy and the crime scene as close to one another as possible. But timing was a problem here; she’d made it clear that if we wanted results within the next forty-eight hours, the body would have to go north, soon.

It was an irritant. After all, we didn’t know who this man was, and we didn’t know what, or who, had killed him. All we had was the body and little time to pick up a fresh scent. Still, I wasn’t begrudging the point. Although Hillstrom had almost single-handedly made Vermont’s one of the best ME systems around, only her laboratory had all the proper facilities for a complete job. So I had negotiated a compromise: Gould was to do a preliminary once-over before shipping the body north. It was the best deal I could get.

Alfred Gould walked in, looking starchy and official in a white lab coat he’d borrowed from the funeral director. Examinations of this type were also done at Memorial Hospital, but McCloskey’s was far better for keeping out of sight of the press and other curiosity-seekers.

Gould smiled at me. “You look half-asleep.”

I laughed and got to my feet. “It’s the air-conditioning-first cool air I’ve felt in days. I’d move a bed down here if it weren’t for the company. You all set with Hillstrom?” I’d given him the phone after bargaining with her, so they could work out the details.

He was standing by the table now, his fingertips resting lightly on its edge, like a piano player preparing for a difficult solo. In the normal world, he shared a successful family practice with two other doctors. But I had only seen him in his medical-examiner capacity, and it made me feel odd to think of him working on live patients.

He nodded distractedly to my question. “Yeah. She’s busy right now on another case, but she’ll be ready in three hours or so.”

The trip up to Burlington took three hours. “So how long’re you going to spend on this?” I was disappointed. Time flies when you’re struggling to get clothes off a body, or turning it over to check for previously unseen wounds, especially when it’s as stiff as a board. It didn’t leave us much time to actually examine anything.

His eyes were sweeping back and forth across the body. “Thirty minutes at most. She can only fit it in today if we get it to her fast. It doesn’t matter; it looks pretty straightforward. I basically just want to draw some blood, lift his prints, and check for anything obvious.”

Gould had appeared at the Canal Street scene shortly after Tyler had finished his exhumation. He’d looked at the pupils, checked the temperature in and outside of the body, felt the jawline and extremities for rigor, and examined the man’s neck. It had taken all of seven minutes, and only because he’d moved slowly. I was growing anxious to find out what little he knew, but I was reluctant to rush him. Past experience had taught me he liked to keep his findings to himself until he was absolutely satisfied they were accurate.

So, suppressing my impatience, I stuck to quietly assisting him as he awkwardly stripped his uncooperative patient.

Dead bodies don’t bother me much, at least not emotionally. The horrifying realization that a once-vibrant human being can be reduced to a corpse in an instant had been beaten into me repeatedly during the Korean War. As a teenage warrior, I had seen friends and strangers shot, maimed, burned, blown up, and frozen to death until the shock and my tears had evaporated. Now, instead of the horror, I can’t help but see a corpse as a Chinese puzzle box.

Preliminary forensic examinations, like the one I was attending now, tend to open a few of the more obvious hidden compartments, answering the broader questions about the time and method of death. But the classic exams, the ones done by the true artists of the profession, can reveal far more, even, sometimes, the feelings, the motivations, and the calculations that once drove an individual through life. Hillstrom I considered such an artist.

The man Alfred Gould and I were undressing was not bad-looking. Of medium height and build, he was probably in his late twenties, with a strong upper torso and only the faint beginnings of a soft waistline. His hair had been carefully barbered, his fingernails were neat and evenly clipped, and, as I’d suspected at the gravesite, he was clean under his earth-soiled clothes, as a man might be who showered every day. The silver ring on his right hand was matched by a thin silver chain around his neck.

Twenty-five minutes after we’d begun, Gould muttered a small “huh.” The body was on its side, and Gould was peering closely at something near the dorsal side of the right shoulder, out of my line of sight. While Gould had conducted his examination, I’d been noting details I thought might come in handy later, like the pale outline of a watch across the body’s left wrist-a watch now missing-and the labels from his clothing, from L.L. Bean and Land’s End, both upwardly mobile catalog stores. I’d also noted the bloodless dime-sized puncture Ernie Wallers’s soil-boring tool had left on the corpse’s right forearm.

I raised my eyebrows at Gould from across the body. “What?”

He smiled. “I appreciate your self-restraint, Joe. One of these days, I’m going to walk out of the room without saying a word, just to see if you’ll wait a few days for the written report.”

“I’d shoot you in the foot first. What did you find?”

He straightened and motioned to me to come around the table and look. What I found was a small reddish patch of skin on the shoulder, a perfect circle about a half-inch in diameter.

“Bee sting?”

“I’d say an injection site; it’s called a ‘wheal.’”

I looked up at him. “So he OD’d on something?”

He shook his head. “My guess is that he died of acute cerebral ischemia.” He smiled at my expression. “Which means the blood flow to his brain was shut off suddenly.”