Robin Cook - Chromosome 6

“Hey, don’t encourage her,” Jack said. “That’s for Bingham and Washington to do.”

“He’s got a point, Laurie,” Lou said.

“Damn straight I got a point,” Jack said. “Last time Laurie got involved with the mob she got carried out of here nailed in a coffin. At least that’s what you told me.”

“That was then and this is now,” Laurie said. “I’m not involved in this case the way I was in that one. I think it is important to find out how the body disappeared for the sake of this office, and frankly I’m not convinced either Bingham or Washington will make the effort. From their point of view, it is better to let the episode just fade.”

“I can understand that,” Lou said. “In fact, if the goddamned media would only let up, the commissioner might even want us to ease up. Who knows?”

“I’m going to find out how it happened,” Laurie repeated with conviction.

“Well, knowing the who and the how could help my investigation,” Lou said. “It was most likely the same people from the Vaccarro organization. It just stands to reason.”

Jack threw up his hands. “I’m getting out of here,” he said. “I can tell neither of you will listen to reason.” He again tugged on Vinnie’s shirt on the way out the door.

Jack poked his head into Janice’s office. “Anything I should know about this floater that’s not in the folder?” he asked the investigator.

“The little there is, is all there,” Janice said. “Except for the coordinates where the Coast Guard picked up the body. They told me that someone would have to call today to make sure it wasn’t classified or something. But I can’t imagine that information will matter. It’s not like anyone could go out there and find the head and the hands.”

“I agree,” Jack said. “But have someone call anyway. Just for the record.”

“I’ll leave a note for Bart,” Janice said. Bart Arnold was the chief forensic investigator.

“Thanks, Janice,” Jack said. “Now get out of here and get some sleep.” Janice was so committed to her job that she always worked overtime.

“Wait a second,” Janice called out. “There was one other thing that I forgot to note in my report. When the body was picked up, it was naked. Not a stitch of clothing.”

Jack nodded. That was a curious piece of information. Undressing a corpse was added effort on the part of the murderer. Jack pondered for a moment, and when he did, he decided it was consistent with the murderer’s wish to hide the victim’s identity, a fact made obvious by the missing head and hands. Jack waved goodbye to Janice.

“Don’t tell me we’re doing a floater,” Vinnie whined as he and Jack headed for the elevator.

“You sure do tune out when you read the sports page,” Jack said. “Laurie and I discussed it for ten minutes.”

They boarded the elevator and started down to the autopsy room floor. Vinnie refused to make eye contact with Jack.

“You are in a weird mood,” Jack said. “Don’t tell me you’re taking this Franconi disappearance personally.”

“Lay off,” Vinnie said.

While Vinnie went off to don his moon suit, lay out all the paraphernalia necessary to do the autopsy, and then get the body into the morgue and onto the table, Jack went through the rest of the folder to make absolutely certain he’d not missed anything. Then he went and found the X rays that had been taken when the body had arrived.

Jack put on his own moon suit, unplugged the power source that had been charging over night, and hooked himself up. He hated the suit in general, but to work on a decomposing floater he hated it less. As he’d teased with Laurie earlier, the smell was the worst part.

At that time in the morning, Jack and Vinnie were the only ones in the autopsy room. To Vinnie’s chagrin, Jack invariably insisted on getting a jump on the day. Frequently, Jack was finishing his first case when his colleagues were just starting theirs.

The first order of business was to look at the X rays, and Jack snapped them up on the viewer. With his hands on his hips, Jack took a step back and gazed at the anterioposterior full-body shot. With no head and no hands, the image was decidedly abnormal, like the X ray of some primitive, nonhuman creature. The other abnormality was a bright, dense blob of shotgun pellets in the area of the right upper quadrant. Jack’s immediate impression was that there had been multiple shotgun blasts, not just one. There were too many beebee-like pellets.

The pellets were opaque to the X rays and obscured any detail they covered. On the light box they appeared white.

Jack was about to switch his attention to the lateral X ray when something about the opacity caught his attention. At two locations the periphery appeared strange, more lumpy than the usual beebee contour.

Jack looked at the lateral film and saw the same phenomena. His first impression was that the shotgun blasts might have carried some radio-opaque material into the wound. Perhaps it had been some part of the victim’s clothing.

“Whenever you’re ready, Maestro,” Vinnie called out. He had everything prepared.

Jack turned from the X-ray view box and approached the autopsy table. The floater was ghastly pale in the raw fluorescent light. Whoever the victim had been, he’d been relatively obese and had not made any recent trips to the Caribbean.

“To use one of your favorite quotes,” Vinnie said. “It doesn’t look like he’s going to make it to the prom.”

Jack smiled at Vinnie’s black humor. It was much more in keeping with his personality, suggesting that he had recovered from his early-morning pique.

The body was in sad shape although bobbing around in the water had washed it clean. The good news was that it had obviously been in the water for only a short time. The trauma went far beyond the multiple shotgun blasts to the upper abdomen. Not only were the head and the hands hacked off, but there was a series of wide, deep gashes in the torso and thighs that exposed swaths of greasy adipose tissue. The edges of all the wounds were ragged.

“Looks like the fish have been having a banquet,” Jack said.

“Oh, gross!” Vinnie commented.

The shotgun blasts had bared and damaged many of the internal abdominal organs. Some strands of intestines were visible as was one dangling kidney.

Jack picked up one of the arms and looked at the exposed bones. “A hacksaw would be my guess,” he said.

“What are all these huge cuts?” Vinnie asked. “Somebody try to slice him up like a holiday turkey?”

“Nah, I’d guess he’d been run over with a boat,” Jack said. “They look like propeller injuries.”

Jack then began a careful examination of the exterior of the corpse. With so much obvious trauma, he knew it was easy to miss more subtle findings. He worked slowly, frequently stopping to photograph lesions. His meticulousness paid off. At the ragged base of the neck just anterior to the collarbone he found a small circular lesion. He found another similar one on the left side below the rib cage.

“What are they?” Vinnie asked.

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “Puncture wounds of some sort.”

“How many times do you suppose they shot him in the abdomen?” Vinnie asked.

“Hard to say,” Jack said.

“Boy, they weren’t taking any chances,” Vinnie said. “They sure as hell wanted him dead.”

A half hour later, when Jack was about to commence the internal part of the autopsy, the door opened and Laurie walked in. She was gowned and held a mask to her face, but she didn’t have on her moon suit. Since she was a stickler for rules and since moon suits were now required in the “pit,” Jack was immediately suspicious.

“At least your case wasn’t in the water for long,” Laurie said, looking down at the corpse. “It’s not decomposed at all.”