“Assume at one's own risk,” Jessica cautioned.
“-to be the result of hard and fast living, a lifestyle which may well have contributed to his untimely death.”
“The body's age, according to bone structure and what few teeth he has in his head, puts him at between fifty-five and sixty years of age,” Jessica estimated. “I'd take the conservative path, guess the lower end of the scale more accurate.”
“Whatever his age, he's lived the life of a hard-bitten, crusty old salt,” J. T. put in.
Jessica immediately replied, “And the man appears to have had a 'hard-bitten' death as well.”
Only young Chen remained silent as the other three laughed aloud. “Hard-bitten?” she asked.
“Later,” Holbrook assured her. “I'll explain it to you later.”
Still, Jessica hated the typical cop mentality that the deceased had probably brought on himself. In some ways, maybe so, but Jessica knew only a handful of men-serial killers she had hunted down-whom she honestly felt deserved a death as heinous as that which Horace had met, to be mauled to death by animals starved and made rabid by someone Horace knew.
“Horace's murder, and indeed it is murder,” Jessica said for the record and the interns, “represents a particularly brutal one.
Jessica's sense of awe at the flamboyant needle etchings and delightful, multicolored designs covering Horace's form only grew as she worked. She had to keep reminding herself to focus on the autopsy and to stop “reading” the illustrated man lying like an open book before her, but this proved impossible.
One set of images spiraled into a depiction of hell, while another displayed a rose garden that looked as peaceful and virginal as any heaven. Overall, Horace the Tattoo Man preferred dark and sinister themes in his body art, even incestuous scenes of twisted family life and child abuse. She wondered if such scenes meant a graduation from skeletons swallowing snakes and women whole, and eyeballs with all manner of terrible instruments plunged through them. Chains and peculiarly designed machines held people in limbo all about Horace's body. Torture all mixed up with sex appeared his main theme.
She wondered if his choice of artwork reflected anything of the man himself, or if the raw artwork with its undisguised themes of hatred toward women and lust for sexual power over them and children amounted to simple affectations taken on to make the man appear more sinister than he actually was. Either way, the artwork itself proved, by anyone's standard, superb. The artist was a master at his craft, likely at the apex of his career when he did John Doe's body. What year would that have been?
“We need to get an ink expert down here to make some estimation of how old the tattoos are,” she said to J. T., who nodded appreciatively.
“Sure, it would tell us a lot to know when the most recent tattoo was applied.”
“Exactly. Maybe after the when, we can begin to hone in on the where and the who.”
“The artist, sure.”
“Maybe he'll have a record or at least a recollection of the client. Either that or perhaps someone in the know about tattoos might recognize the artist's work. Lead us to the artist, and perhaps we're in Horace's neighborhood.”
The body, gone rotting and decomposing over a weekend and discovered under a harsh sun, had been discovered in a New Jersey junkyard by a couple who had come in search of some used auto part.
Having learned of the dead man's much mutilated and torn body, Chesterfield police proceeded to the scene, only to find six hungry and nasty pit bulls in various, eerily posed stances on and around the body-white, foaming slaver dripping from each muzzle. The animals, standing guard about the body, protective of their kill, had prompted the elderly couple to call 911 immediately. Each of the starved and rabid dogs continued to take additional strips of meat from the carcass from time to time until the arrival of the infamous Pet Patrol police. They came armed with their dart guns. Six of the dogs by this time, lying over the body, were in the throes of paralysis, the rabies overtaking them completely. They were easily put down, one shot after the next, but the seventh-only recently infected and in the first stages of the disease-proved more difficult to target, hiding in the recesses of the yard. The seventh dog belonged to the junkyard owner, who professed no knowledge of the other dogs or Horace.
The junk dealer, it was reported, had been more upset about the loss of his dog than the fact a man had died on his premises.
The police could not identify the dead man. He remained a person the junkyard dealer claimed not to know, or to ever have done business with in the past.
Business had been bad, the junk man told police, so he had shut down for a couple of weeks and had taken a long-needed vacation. He claimed not to know how six additional pit bulls and a dead guy wound up inside his fence without any apparent break-in. Somebody lied somewhere, somehow, to someone. Either that or the killer knew not only how to make rabid dogs but how to pick expensive locks and subdue a junkyard dog on hand.
Regardless, Jessica Coran, having dissected hundreds of corpses, hadn't been so amazed by a body in years. J. T., her male counterpart in the lab and her most trusted friend, pointed out that she really ought to at least attempt to contain her amazement over Horace. J. T. had jokingly told her, “I fear that the young and impressionable interns might get the wrong idea-that maybe you like seeing unknown victims of brutal attacks by vicious pit bulls come rolling through the door.”
“Short of a bear attack or an attack by a wolf pack,” Jessica retorted, “I imagine Horace's end to be the worst way to go out of this world, the pain absolutely excruciating.”
J. T. nodded, bit on his lower lip, and replied, “I can't imagine a worse way to die.”
“Maybe one,” she countered. “Did you read that horrible story in the Post about the woman's body discovered in a park someplace in London in which the victim had been staked to some sort of cross and actually crucified?”
“Oh, yeah… how awful. Suffocation, slow and painful. Still, I think the rabid dog attack even worse.”
“You really think so?” Jessica had her doubts.
“Oh, absolutely. I mean these dogs were hungry, mad, and vicious.”
The dogs, all but the junkyard dog, had been rabid. They'd not only killed John Doe, aka Horace, their mindless attack had filled his body with the rabies virus. The neurological toxin commonly referred to as rabies did not kill Horace, as it had not the time to incubate in his wounds as yet. Given the number of bites and tears to his flesh, and the fact he'd been attacked by not one but six rabid animals who had ripped at one another as well, meant that the level of neurotoxin in his system would begin to work in half the normal three days to three months.
In time, the poison would have reached its full deadly power. His killers, banking on getting away, meant to leave him with a little something extra.
“Someone desperately wanted Horace dead.”
Their eyes had met over the autopsy a hundred times, matching the number of punctures to the body. Each realizing that Horace could not have lived long even had he somehow miraculously been able to find an escape route from the gang of starved and rabid animals that'd repeatedly bitten and torn away at him. In fact, Horace's corpse remained riddled with the rabies virus, frozen in place. Perhaps his killers believed it a fitting gift to leave him with in the hereafter, a kind of forged chain for his ghost to rattle for eternity.
J. T. said, “Police in Chesterfield, New Jersey, tell us by all indications that Horace had put up a hell of a fight. He broke some doggy legs and bit off a couple of ears during the struggle.”