Robert Knightly: The cold room

‘Corbin,’ she asked, ‘what do you think would happen if I stood in front of the air conditioner for a moment or two?’

I don’t remember what I answered, or what I imagined, the end result being at least as grand as any fantasy I could muster. Her nipples became as hard as bullets, her breasts pimpled with little goose bumps that smoothed beneath my tongue. Prior to Adele, my adult relationships had been limited to a series of impulsive affairs that cooled as fast as they began. The pattern was so consistent that I’d pretty much resigned myself to a hit-and-run sex life. Meanwhile, after nine months with Adele, I was as infatuated as ever.

We made love in a frenzy, in a blur of manipulations. Adele is a very fit woman, but I’m also very fit and much larger. Toward the end, when I pinned her wrists to the bed, her legs circled my hips and tightened, commanding me forward, locking me into an arc of no more than a few inches. She was looking directly into my eyes then, her breath coming in short heaves, her mouth curled into a defiant grimace. When I bent forward to cover that mouth with my own, a shudder ran through her body, from the base of her spine up into her skull, and her eyes fluttered momentarily before closing. A moment later, I exploded inside her.

Pillow talk. After the showers and the changing of the sheets, as we lay side by side watching NY1, the cable news station, Adele laid her hand on my thigh and cleared her throat. They were doing the subway derailment on the little screen: the eight people dead, the ninety-seven injured, the EDP, the plain-clothes cop whose every move was now being judged by a media as anxious as its audience to cast blame. Predictably, the job was acting with caution. No details would be forthcoming until after a preliminary investigation was completed sometime within the next few days.

‘Corbin,’ Adele said, ‘the perp in the case I’ve been working decided to plead out today. It came as a big surprise.’

Something in her voice, a slight quaver, a hesitation, raised the hair on the back of my neck. ‘And?’

‘Well, I have nearly a week coming.’

‘Compensation for overtime?’

‘Exactly. And what I thought I’d do was visit Jovianna. I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon.’

I recoiled, literally, my head jerking back. Jovianna Littman was Adele’s sister, an unbearably competitive woman who used her several advanced degrees to lord it over her cop sibling. Ordinarily, Adele avoided Jovianna, who lived with her family in a gated community outside Baltimore, showing up only on the Jewish holy days of Passover and Yom Kippur. And then only for the sake of her parents, who lived nearby and whom she also disliked.

‘How will you get there?’ I knew the question was inane before the words were out of my mouth.

‘I decided to go by Amtrak, so I won’t have to put up with the security delays at the airport. The ride’s only six hours.’ She put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Jovianna called me this evening and we just got to talking. My mother hasn’t been feeling well, which I think I told you, and I haven’t seen them since April. Plus, I know how you get when you catch a case like this. A couple of days from now, you’ll barely remember my name.’

‘When are you coming back?’

‘Maybe in a few days. If I can stand Jovianna even for that long. By the end of the week for sure.’

There was nothing else to say, not unless I challenged Adele’s honesty. I wasn’t prepared to do that, although much of what she said rang false to my interrogator’s ear. So I told her to have a good time and got a hug before she turned out the light.

For the next fifteen minutes, until she fell asleep, I laid quietly beside her. Then I rolled out of bed and went into the living room. Of necessity, Adele and I lived separate lives. She worked normal business hours, while I toiled from four until midnight. I wouldn’t have been ready for sleep, even on a normal day, but now my brain was spinning.

I parked myself before the TV and tried to watch a movie, Ocean’s Eleven, but I couldn’t follow the convoluted plot. Somehow, I found my thoughts turning, not to Adele, but to the crime scene, to the flies and the body, the heat and the rain, to Clyde Kelly’s sad eyes and troubled conscience. Adele was running off to Maryland and there was nothing I could do about it. My Jane Doe was another matter. She was my responsibility. Only I could speak for her.

Eventually, I took those thoughts back to my computer and reworked her likeness. I rotated her head back and forth, tilted her chin up, played with her expression. I imagined her happy and sad, fearful and angry. What would she do with her eyes, her mouth, her nose, her brow, her chin? Finally, after printing what amounted to a model’s portfolio, I settled on a three-quarters shot of her right profile, adjusting her eyes until she was looking at me with a sideways glance at once timid and sly. I had no reason to believe that the finished product would be any more effective than the first photo I printed. I really didn’t care.

I don’t like autopsies and I don’t ordinarily attend them. I’m not an overly squeamish man, so neither the sounds, the plops, crunches and squishes, or the incredibly foul odor, bother me all that much. It’s more a question of loss. You’d think that when an individual is inflicted with an injury sufficient to end her life, there’d be nothing more to take from her. But you’d be dead wrong. At autopsy, murder victims are reduced to meat on a table, to the bare mechanics. The various organs — the ones sill left, anyway — are examined, measured and weighed on a scale that might be found in any butcher shop. The stomach is squeezed of its contents, like icing from a pastry bag. The scalp is peeled down and left to hang over the face. The ribs are cut away with shears that might be used to prune the dead branches of trees.

There is no dignity for the victim in any of this. There is only a further reduction, a second stripping away. The Buddhists say that the spirit lingers for a time after death, to watch over the body, to observe the rituals of mourning. As a rule, I’m not one to question another’s beliefs, but as I listened to the whine of a Stryker saw cutting away the top of my victim’s skull, I found myself hoping the Buddhists were wrong, that her spirit wasn’t hovering above that cold metal table, whispering ‘help me, help me, help me’.

Like I said, I don’t like to watch autopsies, and I didn’t watch this one. Though I was physically present on that Monday at three o’clock in the afternoon, a single glance at the victim, now in an advanced state of decomposition, was enough. The rest of the time, I kept my eyes on the floor. Nevertheless, I did learn a number of facts that were to play a key part in the later stages of the investigation. First, the victim was not in her twenties, as I’d concluded after examining her at the crime scene, but in late adolescence, between sixteen and nineteen years old. Dr Kim Hyong established this fact with an X-ray of the long bones of her forearm where they met her wrist.

I listened attentively while Hyong recorded this observation, speaking into a microphone clamped to the autopsy table, but I asked no questions. I was more interested in Hyong’s tone of voice, which remained matter-of-fact. There was no doubt in his mind, and nothing to be gained by challenging his conclusion, even if I’d had the expertise to frame a relevant question.

Hyong wound it up with an appropriately grisly flourish. The victim’s prints could not be taken because the skin on her fingertips had grown slack, a condition known as slippage. Hyong overcame this difficulty by peeling off the skin of each finger, then inserting his right forefinger into the resulting pouch. By gently stretching this pouch with his free hand, he was able to produce a credible set of prints. ‘It’s all in the wrists,’ he explained. ‘All in the wrists.’