Jeff Carson - Foreign Deceit

They drove in silence for a few minutes. Wolf could see Lia glancing at him from his peripheral, unsure of what to say.

“I was really sweating being paired up with Tito there for a minute,” he said with a shake of the head, breaking the silence. “So, thanks again.”

“Yeah, Tito’s a dumbass, you would be pretty screwed with him,” she said laughing out loud with a wide smile. She was beautiful .

Lia pushed a button on a state of the art looking electronic keypad next to a heavy steel door.

“Si?” said a tinny male voice.

“Noi siamo.”

Buzz, click.

“Ciao,” a voice said from a doorway down the hall. A bald man was peaking his head out, looking over his pushed down glasses. They followed his beckon.

The room was cold, and smelled of formaldehyde, just like any other morgue five thousand miles to the west in the US. Two rows of four refrigeration units lined the far wall. The lower right-most one was pulled out displaying a sheeted lump of a figure. His brother.

His heart skipped and his breath caught as he looked down, then he turned to shake the hand of the pathologist.

“Ciao. I am Vittorio.” He blinked rapidly behind thick glasses while stretching his neck muscles as if his collar was itchy. He stood just under the height of Lia, who Wolf judged earlier to stand at about five foot eight inches.

Vittorio and Lia had a brief exchange in Italian, Vittorio looking intelligently at Lia in between blinks. Vittorio left the room quickly, and Wolf turned to the pulled out refrigeration unit.

He didn’t want to waste any more time, but he knew he should probably wait for the pathologist to return before looking at his brother. He wasn’t in that much of a hurry to look at his face, a face he hadn’t seen alive in over five months, other than in tiny pictures on a blog.

Lia came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder as he stared at the sheet below.

“Sorry.” Vittorio moved swiftly into the room. “I have the records all-a here now. Are you ready, officer Wolf?”

“Yeah, go ahead.” He wasn’t.

The sheet was pulled back in a well executed, not too slow-not too fast technique, revealing his brother beneath.

John’s skin was a bluish white, a peaceful sleeping expression on his face. Wolf noticed his hair had been closely cropped, and a large straight-line bruise was on the right side of his head, angling from the top of the forehead to ear. There was a deep black bruise lining the circumference of his neck, indicating where the belt had been wrapped around his throat.

“Why was no autopsy ordered?”

“We-a determined the external evidence on the body to be consistent with suicide,” Vittorio said quietly. “And we normally do not perform an autopsy for a suicide, unless ordered by the Coroner in collaboration with officers on the scene.”

“How do you explain the bruise on his head?” Wolf asked.

“We determined the bruise-a was antemortem, how you say?”

“Sure, antemortem.”

“Bruising from the chandelier falling on his head.”

“Okay.” Wolf shook his head. “so how did he die? Are you saying he died from the hanging, then the chandelier fell on his head, causing a bruise?” Wolf looked skeptical. “Once the heart has stopped beating, isn’t it impossible to bruise?”

“It is actually entirely possible to bruise shortly after death. If he died while hanging, then shortly thereafter the chandelier gave way, falling on him, it could bruise his head. There was also pooling of blood on the left side of his body, as you can see by the bruising all down the left side, consistent with the position he was found underneath the chandelier.”

“What was the evidence of drug use?”

Vittorio produced some photos from the file he had. “Since we didn’t do an autopsy-a, we did not do a complete toxicology report. But I did an exterior exam-a, and found residue on his nose that was confirmed to be cocaine. I have some photos of your brother’s body at the scene.”

Wolf took the photos and looked. There were close-ups of John from every angle. He was covered in small glittering slivers of glass, apparently from the chandelier.

“You can see there, a bar on the chandelier lines up very closely to the bruise on his head.” Vittorio dug for another photo and pointed at the wooden chair that was tipped over, five feet from John’s dead form. “I am not completely sure, but I feel the chair was kicked out from under him with a spasm, which could have began the process-a of the chandelier falling.” He flipped to another photo. “And here is a close-up of his right nostril, with cocaine residue.”

Wolf smiled humorlessly. “You don’t think this is grounds for ordering an autopsy? That seems like a very manufactured explanation of his death. What if the bruise was caused by someone else?”

The pathologist looked at Wolf with a look that said it all. “It is not my decision, but in my opinion, I think it could go either way. But we have other pressures here-a, Officer Wolf. Your brother was not a resident here, and the Comune pays for the autopsy — ”

“The Comune?” Wolf asked.

“Yes, the municipality, I think you say?”

“Okay, I get it. You guys looked at the whole scene with worry about money? Jesus Christ, that’s some bullshit.” Wolf shook his head in disbelief, but also knew full well the same thing could happen if a foreigner showed up dead from apparent suicide in his home town.

He looked in silence at the pictures. John was wearing jeans and a long sleeved button up shirt. The jeans had small stains on each leg. Like oval mud stains.

“Do you have the clothing he was wearing here?” Wolf asked.

“Yes, I do, I will go get his belongings.”

Vittorio gently placed the sheet back over John’s face, again with a well executed touch, and left the room. Wolf stood up and paced in thought.

Vittorio returned with a sealed large plastic bag and put it on a steel table against the wall, motioning to Wolf to go ahead and look. He took the bag and began laying the contents out on the table. Vittorio and Lia had a quiet conversation in Italian, walking to the other side of the room.

He dug for John’s jeans first. Pulling them out, he looked at the knees. There were two large, faint circles, as if he’d been kneeling in wet, muddy grass. Next he pulled out his sneakers. They were black Puma low top canvass shoes. The bottom sole pattern held a bit of mud, and the canvass was streaked light gray with the same.

Two belts were in the bag. One for the hanging, one for the jeans he was wearing he guessed. He took another look at a picture to see that the black belt was the one John was wearing, and the other light brown leather belt was the one around his neck. He took the light brown belt over to John’s body, and motioned for Vittorio to pull back the sheet again. Wolf ignored Vittorio’s show of being insulted. The belt looked to be the exact same width as the marks on the neck. It was definitely the instrument that strangled his brother.

He returned to the table and rifled his brother’s pants pockets. Nothing, but he took his brother’s wallet out and looked through it, pulling out the driver’s license and finding a dated receipt from a pub tucked in the main pocket, which puzzled him for a second, until he realized the different way Europeans wrote dates — day, month, year . It was from Friday night. The last night his brother was alive.

His iPhone was in the bag as well, but the battery was dead.

Wolf stood straight and felt light headed and stumbled into the table, bending over, breathing deeply a few times to stop from passing out.

Lia and Vittorio rushed over and patted his back. “Should we go? You need to rest after such a long day,” Lia had on a look of concern.