Robert Walker - Blind Instinct

“Hours,” she chorused. “Exactly how many hours did Dr. Schuller surmise?”

“What difference?”

“I merely wondered if he'd been suffering from any malady before his death. If so, perhaps Mr. Burton thwarted the killer.”

“How is it do you mean?”

“Any abnormality may have contributed to a curtailing of the Crucifier's fun and games, as well as to a lessening of the victim's suffering.” On the defensive now, Dr. Schuller's assistant replied, “What good does that information do in circumstances of this nature?”

Jessica examined the assistant more carefully. He was a black-eyed, black-haired little man. Somewhat round, his skin was pockmarked and rough, his attitude both subservient and challenging all at once. The small man's eyes bore into her, watching her every move, suspicious perhaps, and from his tone of voice, obviously unimpressed with her.

Sharpe wanted to hear more on this matter. “We brought Dr. Coran from America because of her reputation, Dr. Raehael.”

“Yes, we have all heard at Scotland Yard how attention to detail is your trademark, Dr. Coran. However, the man's illnesses or lack of illnesses-had we done tests to ascertain either-hardly contributed to his slow, heinous, and torturous death. Does your FBI still rank the degree of torture to the victim as the most important fact in prosecuting offenders?”

Evasive fellow, Jessica thought even as she replied. “We still have a torture chart with levels to plot out the extent of torture endured by a victim, yes. This would-given the amount of time the victim suffered-be calculated in the upper levels, something of a tort nine, perhaps even a ten.”

Sharpe directed the conversation back on course, telling Raehael, “Dr. Coran didn't say that Burton's condition and health before his crucifixion would have contributed to his death, quite the contrary,” corrected Sharpe. “What Dr. Coran is suggesting, if I'm hearing her correctly, is that Burton may have died a less torturous death-at least in terms of time in suffering-if he were in a weakened condition to begin with.”

“That about sums it up,” Jessica agreed.

Sharpe continued for Raehael's sake while the small, dark man nodded appreciatively and in silence. “The healthier our victim, in this case, the more time on the cross. Is that not what you're saying, Dr. Coran?”

“Precisely.” Jessica bit back her anger at the complacency of the assistant M.E. and turned her attention back to the deceased, wondering why the dead man spoke to her-even in his serene and solemn silence-more intelligently than the living man standing across from her. Still, the body, like a ship with a hardened outer shell now, defied the scalpel- defied her as well-to unlock its secrets. Secrets locked away in a dark chamber called death. Nothing new in and of itself, but something more seemed at play here. Something grimly pleasant about the dead man's expression also defied logic; he appeared at absolute peace.

As if reading her thoughts, Sharpe broke in with, “Odd, that expression on his face, wouldn't you say, Doctor?”

“Death wears any number of masks,” she replied, reminding herself of a favored Holcraft quote: “Even bodies with the rictus smile-that ugly, snakelike crease-had nothing whatever to do with the victim's frame of mind, as it was a natural alignment of the muscles of the jaw that occurred in not all but many cases of death. “So why should a pleasant smile be questioned any more than a horrid smile?

She almost heard the long-silenced voice of her old teacher and mentor, Dr. Asa Holcraft, mimicking her thoughts as if standing alongside her. Now she knew she needed to get more sleep.

Still, like a persistent hologram, Holcraft's apparition stood nodding his pleasure at her concern. He agreed with her, up to a point, but then he had also always staunchly maintained, “A strong spiritual element, a filamentlike thread of spirit, remains even in the decaying corpse. “

Asa had always believed that spirit resided not only in the living but also in the dead. He had felt that at least some semblance of the spirit remained, and this spirit remnant could be found, perhaps understood, if only the doctor gave enough of himself or herself over to the task. Holcraft had even believed that it was the job of the M.E. to hold firm and seek out all spiritual connection between medical examiner and corpse, even in severe cases of fire, bombings, and explosive airplane crashes.

“So what of the crucified?” she muttered aloud.

“What?” asked Sharpe.

“Oh, nothing.” Jessica also believed that some spirit element hovered about the body, doing all it could to communicate with the pathologist. She believed it the key element in so many of her instinctual leaps of faith in discerning the true nature of a crime. She owed a great deal to Asa for that.

She recalled just how good Holcraft had been as a teacher and as a medical examiner. He had had her looking for spirits in every cadaver she handled. “Some of the spirits you'll find not to your liking, others tender,” he had once confided with a Kriss Kringle twinkle in his eyes, his white beard bobbing up and down.

She focused in again on the body itself, seeing the familiar, large, Y-shaped scar from each shoulder to the groin area, the universal Y-cut, understood by every mortician and pathologist and medical examiner. Dr. Schuller's work greeted Jessica every step of the way; the autopsiest had already taken samples and weights of all the major organs during the initial autopsy, but the toxicological and medical tests that Schuller ran had been, by Dr. Schuller's own admission, limited to a few serum and toxicology reports. No one had run a full workup on the cadaver. Such tests ran up bills… and Burton was no member of the Royal elite. No going the extra mile for Burtie.

Dr. Karl Schuller, while not present, made his presence felt throughout this crime lab like a well hung, saturated blanket. The paperwork on Burton felt rushed. She wondered if he had any prejudice against Burton, if it at all entered into the man's work over the body of Theodore Burton, who had been bom Emil Burlinstein. She feared that Dr. Karl Schuller hadn't been as thorough as he might have been in such a capital murder case. Still, Jessica doubted that raising such questions could be of any possible use at this late date. It might be best at this point to leave it alone. If she did pursue the issue of shoddy work in the Scotland Yard crime lab, she would do so vigorously, as Holcraft whispered in her ear; “Order a full toxicological and tissue mapping of the cadaver to determine the condition of the man's body, health, and well-being. Frequently, what is central to the cause of death, existed before death. Often, such total, complete, and expensive measures added some nuggets of information otherwise lost to an investigation, and just as often the effort netted nothing. “Something troubling you, Doctor?” asked Sharpe near her ear. “Yes, something is nagging at me about the sudden loss of weight signaled by the folds of loose skin.”

“I see.”

“A forensic profiler often begins with the physical as well as the mental health of the victim.”

“So, you surmise that perhaps Burton's state of mind had something to do with the way in which he met his end?”

“And if his body had been in a shutdown mode, then perhaps this led him to some extreme measures in search of a cure. Perhaps in search of miracles and miracle drugs, the man reached out in desperation.”

“Which led him down a particularly nasty lane.”

“As perhaps it did in the cases of Lawrence Coibby and the Crucifier's first victim, the woman.”

“O'Donahue.”

“Maybe all three, for instance, sought out medical help at the same clinic or pharmacy. If each had been lured into some sort of web, partially of the victim's own spinning due to ill health or depression, then perhaps somewhere along the complex of each life-web, they crossed paths, and if I-or we, rather-can find some interconnecting thread…”