Robert Knightly: The cold room

I was looking for shoe impressions, but what I found was a furrow that cut through the weeds and rubble. Made by the victim’s chin as she was dragged? Or by her foot? I glanced at the victim then, at her back and her buttocks, at the long stretch of her thin legs.

Except for small areas of blanching, her skin was a healthy, glowing pink, the pink of a cherub’s rounded cheeks.

I was startled, no doubt about that, but I’d seen this effect years before. A man whose name I’ve long forgotten had run a length of corrugated tubing from the exhaust pipe of his car through the back window, then stretched out on the seat to catch a final nap. By the time he was discovered in his garage, the force of gravity had pulled his blood down into the lower parts of his body, an effect called livor mortis. Ordinarily, the areas of the body suffused with blood are deep purple in color, but in this case, when I rolled him onto his back, one side of his face was cherry red. He looked as if he’d just been slapped.

I left the body undisturbed and walked the length of the mound, back and forth, but discovered nothing of interest. The grass and weeds were too dense to hold shoe impressions and whoever dumped the victim hadn’t been careless enough to leave a wallet behind. Still, I discovered one more piece of evidence before I approached the body. A single link of the fence separating the victim from the river had been cut through. The edges of this cut were sharp, the exposed inner metal of the fence shiny and smooth. Without doubt, the cut had been made recently, and with a tool designed for that purpose.

On impulse, I backed up a few yards, then scaled the fence, dropping down onto a concrete slab, one of several jumbled slabs leading to the water. To my right, behind Gambrelli amp; Sons Italian Furniture, a rickety wooden pier extended seventy-five feet into the river. Hauling a body up onto that pier would be no easy task, but if you did get that far, the pier would allow you to drop the body into water deep enough to carry it away. When the tide is running, the current in the East River tops five knots.

The river was quiet now, at low tide, its flat waters dominated by the glare of a sun that reached out for me in a jagged streak that seemed even brighter than its source. In the center of the main channel a dozen boats stood at anchor, their crews and passengers on deck. They’d come to watch the spectacle up on the bridge, no doubt. Perhaps, if their luck was running, somebody would fall off and they’d catch it on video tape.

When I finally approached the body for the first time, the expected cloud of angry flies rose up to circle my head and shoulders. I ignored them as best I could, as I’d been ignoring the waterfall of sweat running from my head to my shoes. By then, my shorts were glued so tight to my crotch, it felt like I was being groped. And none too gently, either.

The victim was lying face down, dressed in a shocking-pink halter and a crimson skirt, both garments of a type commonly associated with prostitutes. The halter was now around her neck, the micro-skirt above her hips. She wore no shoes or underwear, and except for small areas of blanching on her buttocks and shoulders, her torso and legs were a blotchy pink. I knew, now, that she’d been positioned on her back for eight to twelve hours following her death, then moved. Once lividity is fully set, the blood remains in place no matter how the body is turned.

I knew this was a homicide as well, a fact pointed out to me by Officer Murray Bloom when he’d briefed me earlier. ‘All you need to do,’ he told me before speeding off, ‘is take one look. She has a hole in her head, it’s gotta be four inches wide.’

The hole, when I finally squatted down to examine it, was almost exactly in the top of the woman’s skull, a wound very unlikely to have occurred accidentally. But what struck me was the mass of blond hair surrounding the wound. Though I would have expected the victim’s hair to be matted with blood and bits of torn scalp, it was as smooth and glossy as the mane of a runway model.

I left the flies to their dinner and walked back to my makeshift evidence kit, removing the Polaroid camera before tearing off another strip of cardboard off the box. The initial photos I took of the entire scene as viewed from Kent Avenue were adequate. At least the Polaroid was functioning. But I ran into serious trouble when I tried to record the tire impression at the bottom of the pothole. The sun was far too bright, the resulting photograph washed out, the tracks I wanted to record nearly invisible. My first thought was to place my body between the sun and the impression, but I re-considered. My head and hair were dripping sweat and the imprint so faint, no more than a few wavy lines, that a single drop of moisture would mar the pattern. I finally managed to shade the ridges with the piece of cardboard, but the results, although better, were still disappointing.

I briefly considered another appeal to Sgt. Sabado back at the Nine-Two. Maybe if I begged, he’d try to get me a CSU van. The Crime Scene Unit employed a number of techniques designed to enhance faint impressions — from laser sidelighting, to spraying with lacquer, to casting with dental stone — and they used high-end cameras to record the results. Meanwhile, my low-end digital camera was lying on a shelf in my closet where I’d put it years before, its batteries too dead even to illuminate the low-battery indicator.

In the end, I muddled along, knowing that even if Sabado was prepared to reward my humility, I wasn’t prepared to be humiliated. I’d worked in five different precincts over the past nine months, one in each of New York’s five counties. My peers wanted nothing to do with me, my bosses wanted only to be rid of me. As far as I could tell, my transfer out of any given precinct was in the works before I ever reported for duty.

I got several good shots of the cut in the fence, and a pair of shots from the wall of Yang Electrical that revealed the area behind the mound. The initial photos I took of the victim also came out well. Here I was less concerned about dripping sweat and I hovered over the body when I recorded the head wound. Finally, I put the camera and the photos to one side before reaching for a pair of latex gloves in my back pocket. I found them slick with sweat, the powder inside now the consistency of wet plaster, but I struggled into the gloves anyway. Then I squatted down to slide my hands under the victim’s right shoulder and hip. Her unyielding flesh was as hard as wood.

Intrigued, I withdrew my hands and manipulated the woman’s fingers and wrists, finding both supple. Rigor mortis first becomes apparent in the smaller muscles of the jaw and the extremities, then in the larger muscles of the torso. It recedes in the same order, first the extremities, then the denser parts of the body. In this case, the victim’s arms were supple, while her torso was hard, a state consistent with the end of the process and with my initial estimate of how long she’d been dead.

Again, I squatted next to the victim. I was feeling pretty good about myself as I considered my next move, as I again slid my hand beneath the victim’s shoulders and hips, as I casually rolled her onto her back. Maybe, I thought, I wouldn’t need the Crime Scene Unit after all.

I can’t say exactly how long it took before I realized that the hissing in my ears was coming from the back of my throat, and that I was standing absolutely still, as if any movement would unleash some unspecified demon. Or how long before I accepted the simple — and obvious — fact that somebody had run a knife along the victim’s abdomen, pulled the flaps aside, then gutted her.

I once knew a Homicide dick named McCann who claimed that all victims were the same to him. ‘I speak for the dead,’ he’d insisted, ‘no matter what they were in life.’