Donald Harstad: A Long December

“What?”

“We need your tires. They’ve been in our, uh, evidence. There may be small fragments and tissues adhering to them.”

“You have to be shitting me.” Gary was astonished.

“I assume you have to get permission,” said Dave.

Dave was right. The tires had been in the blood and bone fragments, and some of that material was now transferred to them. The lab crew was going to take all four, as it turned out, and Gary was pretty disgusted. He’d have to get permission from high up, get the wrecker and four new tires ordered out to the scene. It was probably going to affect the maintenance budget for his entire post, and would reflect on his personal stats, as well. All just because he stopped a few feet closer to the body, in a well-intentioned effort to protect the scene.

“Don’t let it bother you,” said Lamar. “We’ll get a receipt for the tires to you. And you ought to get ‘em back in, oh, what you think, Carl? Three-four years?”

“Not any longer than that,” I said.

I don’t think it took any of the sting out.

“Look at that,” said Lamar, pointing to the mobile crime lab truck. “I wonder when they got that?”

The lab crew had set up a portable generator with halogen lights attached to an extendable aluminum tripod, so we had truly exceptional lighting for our first real look at the extended debris field.

“Wow,” I said. “Cool.”

“Those halogens set somebody back,” grumbled Lamar as he moved closer to take advantage of the brilliant lighting.

The debris field, if you could call it that, was roughly fan-shaped, with the small end closest to the body. There was blood, naturally, but a lot of it had been distributed in the form of a reddish haze by the blast, and we were confronted by mostly large droplets as opposed to pools of the stuff. It was a lot like spatter painting. There were two relatively large sections of skull, with the attached skin and hair. That would be a big help. The hair appeared to be either black or very dark brown. At that point, I appreciated any identifiers at all. There were a couple of chunks of bony tissue that would eventually be identified as parts of the maxilla. Most of the teeth were still attached, but some appeared to have been sheared off by the blast. They eventually salvaged four good upper teeth. “Good” in the sense that a dentist could use them to attempt to identify the former owner. There really wasn’t an identifiable clump of brain tissue, except for one section about four inches by three that was near the far end of the debris field.

“This piece carried further, because it had more mass than the smaller fragments,” said Bob, the younger lab member.

“Um hum,” said Hester. She knew that, of course. It was just a matter of basic ballistics.

“That’s the cerebellum, there,” said Doc Zimmer. He got a quizzical look from Bob. “I’m no expert, but if it was a contact shotgun wound to the back of the head, we’d see the blast effect distributing the majority of the brain tissue.” He peered more closely at the yellowish gray matter. “Whereas this bit was probably sucked out by the vacuum caused by the gases from the bore, and wasn’t damaged all that much.” He shrugged. “The brain divides pretty naturally into sections, with enough trauma.”

“I’ve got some teeth and fragments of teeth scattered up here,” said Dave, the older lab man. “Some still in pretty good shape, at least the tops.”

“Maybe another fragment of jaw?” asked Bob, pointing to a light grayish item that was speckled with blood.

My turn. “Nope. That’s the plastic wadding from the shotgun shell,” I said. The plastic wadding holds the shot pellets and butterflies out as soon as it leaves the barrel. That was a good find, as it would enable us to nail down the exact caliber or gauge of the shotgun.

Our luck held, as we found about half an eyeball, mostly the retina.

“Looks like he had brown eyes,” said Bob.

“Well, one, anyway,” I said. It was an attempt at a bit of humor, to ease the stress.

We stepped back again and regarded the entirety of the scene.

“Mostly bits and pieces,” I said. “That’s only good if you like puzzles.”

“It’s not a lot,” said Hester, “but we at least have someplace to start.”

She was right about it not being a lot. Just some hair, partial dentition, and hopefully an eye color. The only concrete ID materials we had were his fingerprints, and we could only hope they turned up something concrete. In the meantime, we’d have to circulate a pretty basic description and see if anybody resembling it turned up missing. I was sort of praying that he was local. If not, we could be looking at the remains of somebody from just about anywhere.

Lamar and I pulled on some latex gloves and helped Henry turn the body over, so he could feel the abdomen and get a guess as to the core temperature of the deceased.

The absence of a face was a lot more pronounced when he was rolled over. What bothers me the most in the recently dead is usually the face. No problem here.

“Ugh,” said Henry. “What a mess.”

I noticed that there was a gold chain around the dead man’s neck. Anything in the way of an identifier was good, although it looked like a perfectly ordinary chain from where I stood.

“Still some warmth in there,” said Henry, mostly to himself. “Let me check his pockets to see if he has any ID.”

“Watch for needles,” warned Hester.

“Sure,” said Henry. He went through the jeans pockets, and came up with a quarter and two dimes.

“That’s it,” he said. “No billfold, nothing else.” He smiled at Hester. “And no needles.”

Henry, as county medical examiner, authorized the remains to be taken to Maitland Hospital, where they’d be examined by one of the state forensic pathologists as soon as one was available.

“Are one of you,” he asked Hester and me, “going to want to attend the autopsy?”

“Yes,” said Hester. “If you could let us know when it’s scheduled…”

“Sure,” said Henry. “Shouldn’t think it’d be too very hard to determine the mechanism of death in this one.”

“God,” said Hester, “I should hope.” She motioned to Lamar. “Could you have an officer meet the body at the hospital and stay with it until the pathologist gets there?”

He could and would.

“Great. Either I’ll be at the autopsy or Carl will,” said Hester. “Bob, be sure to get case prints as soon as you can. That means you have to be at the hospital, because we leave the wrists bound until the pathologist cuts the cuffs. Okay?”

The senior lab technician agreed, a bit reluctantly. Case prints are “fingerprints” that encompass the entire hand, past the crease of the wrist. That way, even if the person being identified has just left a partial palm print on some surface, you can at least get a fair comparison. It was also for normal ID purposes, since our victim was without his face.

“And AFIS as soon as possible,” she said. AFIS stands for Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Its computerized database is composed of links to FBI, state, local, and independent databases. If a set of prints has been recorded, AFIS can retrieve it, identify the owner, automatically link with the Computerized Criminal History system, and get any criminal record from CCH within seconds. It was a great system. They also make a portable print scanner, but Iowa hadn’t chosen to provide one of those to its lab crews. Therefore, they had to do an old-fashioned ink and roll job, and then take the prints to a regional console. It was still a tremendous improvement over the old method where you had to have a suspect, and then the records were searched on that name. Those old manual searches made it impossible to obtain an ID from prints alone, simply because of the manpower required to search the millions of records.