Linda Fairstein - Hell Gate

“Good evening, Alex. Hey, Mike,” the doctor said as he came out of the locker room, wiping his hands on a towel before extending one of them to us.

“How’d you do today?” Mike asked.

“We’ve actually finished three autopsies. Not too much competition on the homicide front.”

“What’s the news?”

“We started with the two young women. Jerry also had time to help me with one of the men, so I could make the necessary comparisons,” Pomeroy said, leading us into the second theater, where a sheet appeared to be covering one of the bodies. “Two of them are most certainly accidental drownings.”

“Most certainly?” I asked.

“I’ve told you before, Alex, that drowning deaths can be difficult to call.”

“What’s the mechanism?”

“Well, submersion in water is usually followed by a struggle to reach the surface. Most often, it’s a panicky process.”

Panic kills. Exactly what the guys had told me on the beach.

“The energy reserves get exhausted,” Pomeroy continued. “People try to hold their breath, till the carbon dioxide accumulation builds up. Then they open their mouths and end up inhaling large amounts of water. Once they swallow the water-it’s pretty gruesome, Alex. You really want to understand this?”

“I need to, of course.”

“Then the gagging starts. Coughing, sometimes throwing up. The air escapes from the lungs and it’s replaced by water.”

“So, it’s an asphyxial death?” I asked.

“Rarely. Less than twelve percent of the time. Though more so in salt water, like these cases, than in fresh. The salt moves into the bloodstream to establish an osmotic balance, which makes it appear more like an asphyxial death.”

I listened to Pomeroy but looked at the still form covered by sheeting.

“Me and science weren’t a natural match, Doc,” Mike said. “What does that mean for these guys?”

“The victims become unconscious. Often suffer convulsions. It’s anoxia that causes death-low oxygen as a result of the inhalation of large amounts of water.”

“So the tests you do to say they drowned, those are all done?”

“There are no reliable tests.”

“Water in the lungs?” Mike asked. “Water in the stomach?”

“No real significance to those facts. The water can easily reach those organs after death. In a situation like this with rough ocean movement,” Pomeroy said, “water, sand, seaweed, all get forced into the body.”

“So what do you need?”

“The key question is whether or not we have facts that establish whether the person was alive when he-or she-entered the water. All the background observers give to you, what the scene was actually like, what the condition of the deceased’s clothing is when we recover the body.”

“I got a shipwreck in the middle of the night with a boatload of hysterical Ukrainians. So far nobody can tell us anything I understand. What next, Doc?”

“For the moment, Mike, while you put the pieces together, I’m quite confident that the first two bodies autopsied-one male, one female-are accidental drowning,” Pomeroy said, stepping to the table and lifting the sheet to fold it down to the waist of the young woman we had seen earlier, at the temporary morgue. “This is Jane Doe Number One.”

Her eyes were closed now. The auburn hair had been brushed neatly off her face in the postautopsy washing, revealing an uneven line of scrapes and cuts across her forehead.

Pomeroy pointed his finger to the small bruise on her left chest. “That’s it.”

“That’s what?” Mike asked.

“This girl was stabbed to death.”

“The mark is so small it looks like a bullet wound.”

“That’s what I thought, too, at first. But it’s a single thrust, right into the heart. Someone knew what he was doing, or got very lucky.”

“A knife did that?” I asked.

“Not likely. Something pointed and very sharp. Something with a fine, thin tip.”

Homicidal stab wounds usually involved some cutting as well as thrusting, the knife pulled down or up, twisted during its insertion or removal. The injury was usually longer than the widest part of the blade.

“What then?”

“A sharp pair of scissors, maybe. A pick of some sort.”

“Crime Scene take any weapons off the ship?” I asked Mike.

“Control your control freak instincts, Coop. That sloop crossed the ocean. There’s a galley with kitchen equipment to prepare food for hundreds of people and a boiler room with enough tools to keep the damn thing afloat. That’s not to mention that half the men on board had homemade shivs and all kinds of metal to protect themselves. And don’t ask me to start dragging the ocean bottom tonight, okay?”

“We will need to see every sharp object you find,” Pomeroy said.

“Yeah, Doc,” Mike said. “What kind of public statement will you make about her death?”

“That’s up to the chief. To my view, Jane here was stabbed to death and disposed of to simulate drowning. Something we don’t see very often.”

“Why not?”

“Because, Alex, it would be fairly easy to discover the bullet hole or track the internal hemorrhaging of a stab wound at autopsy. Your killer must have counted on this body not being found for days, if at all.”

“The vicious riptide,” Mike said. “We’re not done waiting for bodies to wash up.”

“Far likelier for this girl to have been dragged out in the ocean. If and when she came ashore, the odds are pretty good that she would have been skeletonized. All those marine creatures would have gotten to work on her. You’ll see, if there are more deaths in the next few days.”

“So almost the perfect crime, Doc, right? One well-placed thrust between the ribs and overboard with the mutineers. Jane just surfed the wrong way.”

“Possibly.”

“So I’m looking for someone who heard her squealing like a stuck pig just before the other desperate souls decided to jump.”

“Those bruises,” I said, pointing to the marks on the young woman’s forehead, “are those-and her hands-signs of a struggle?”

Pomeroy lifted the girl’s left hand to point out the abrasions on the wrinkled skin of her knuckles. “They’re not defensive wounds, Alex. Nothing to suggest that she struggled. She was dragged by the tide along the shallow bottom of the ocean, drifting below the water’s surface. Those scrapes here, on her forehead, and her knees are all postmortem, all superficial.”

“I’m just thinking about Mike’s comment about her squealing. Someone certainly took advantage of all the commotion if she was killed after the ship beached itself on the reef. That should help us once we get to talk to these people.”

“I’ll bet half the boatload was wailing and screaming,” Mike said. “You know how long she was dead before she was tossed in?”

“The waterlogging makes it hard to determine lividity,” Pomeroy said. “There’s a loss of translucency of the upper layers of the skin, can you see? The internal organs display lividity normally, though. I’d say she wasn’t dead many hours before she was found.”

“We’re not talking about Jane being on ice since she left home?”

“No, we’re not.”

“How about her clothing?” I asked. “There must have been blood all over it.”

On a workbench in a far corner of the room, Jane Doe’s clothes had been laid out to dry. “I’m afraid they won’t be all that much help. Yes, exsanguination was the cause of death, Alex, but most of the bleeding went into the body cavities.”

I knew that was common in stabbings that didn’t involve the head or neck. Often, the track of the wound closed up after the weapon that pierced the flesh was withdrawn.