An hour later, back at UT, I eased the truck into the garage bay of the Regional Forensic Center. Miranda fetched a gurney and we carefully slid the icebound corpse onto the gurney, faceup, and wheeled it toward the autopsy suite. Detective Emert, who was also authorized to serve as a coroner, had gravely pronounced the iceman to be dead, once he’d stopped laughing about my chainsaw.
Miranda and I stopped in the hallway outside the autopsy suite long enough to weigh the corpse on the scales that were built into the floor. The scales, which automatically subtracted the weight of the gurney, gave the weight as 162 pounds. I knew that fifteen or twenty pounds of that total was ice, though, and I made a mental note to weigh the body again once the ice had thawed and dripped off.
As we wheeled the gurney into the suite, the medical examiner, Dr. Edelberto Garcia — an elegant Hispanic man in his late thirties — looked up from the corpse he was autopsying, a young black male. One of Garcia’s purple-gloved hands cradled the top of the man’s skull; the other hand held a Stryker autopsy saw, with which he had just opened the cranium. Sixty seconds from now, he’d be removing and weighing the brain. Garcia nodded at us, glanced at the body we’d just wheeled in, and looked a question at me. I nodded back at him and said, “Okay if we park this guy by the sink for a couple days, Eddie?”
Garcia’s eyes looked mildly surprised through the blood-spattered shield he wore. “Don’t leave him in here,” he said. “He’ll smell to high heaven. Put him in the cooler. I’ll try to get to him tomorrow.”
“He’s frozen solid,” I said. “If I put him in the cooler, it’ll take him a week to thaw out. Even in here, at room temperature, it’ll take a day or two.”
“Ah,” he said. “Sure, right there is fine.” He looked more closely at the body, noticing the ice that formed a rectangular frame around it. “You fish this guy out of a frozen pond?”
“Frozen swimming pool,” Miranda said. “Dirtier than any pond I ever saw. Ask Dr. B. how he got the guy out of the ice.” She snorted, just as she had in the momentary silence that had followed the splash at the pool. “Ask him about being prepared.”
“Watch it, smarty-pants,” I warned. “You are skating—” I stopped, one word too late.
“On thin ice?” She finished my sentence gleefully, then proceeded to recount my chainsaw misadventure to Garcia. As she pantomimed my whirling arms, the chainsaw’s slow-motion arc through the air, its slithering to-and-fro across the bobbing ice, and its plunge into the murky depths, they laughed until tears streamed from their eyes.
“Very funny,” I said. “Except to the guy whose chainsaw is rusting at the bottom of the pool.”
“Fear not, master,” she said. “All will be well. Because you are the Man of Stihl.”
CHAPTER 3
Twenty-four hours after I parked the gurney in the autopsy suite, the body was still half frozen, but the clothing had thawed. Water dripped slowly through the drain at the foot of the gurney and into the sink, to which I had latched the lower end of the gurney. I had taken the precaution of fitting a fine wire screen over the gurney’s drain to catch any hairs or fibers or other debris that came off the clothing as it thawed. Glancing at the screen, I saw only a few small, rotting bits of leaves, which I assumed had been floating in the pool before it froze.
Detective Emert had asked if Miranda and I would be willing to take the clothing off the corpse and hang it up in the morgue. “I need it to be dry so I can go over it with evidence tape,” he said, though I already knew that was the reason.
“Sure,” I said. “No point your making a trip just for that.” It wasn’t easy to undress the frozen body, but we managed it. As we removed the pants, I noticed that the underpants were soiled. The man appeared to have had diarrhea, and it looked reddish brown, possibly bloody. I made a note to point it out to Garcia the next day, when he did the autopsy.
As Miranda and I were driving back to the Anthropology Department, I called Emert. “Hello, Detective, it’s Dr. Brockton.”
“Hi, Doc,” he said. “Call me Jim, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind. The clothing’s off and should be dry by tomorrow. Your man’s still half frozen, though. Reminds me of Thanksgiving dinner.”
Emert laughed. “How so?”
“Well, my wife — my late wife; she died several years ago — she always bought frozen turkeys, and she never seemed to remember that it takes a couple of days in the fridge to thaw one of those. So every Thanksgiving morning, she’d panic when she realized the turkey was still frozen solid. Every year I’d end up putting the damn thing in the bathtub in warm water to thaw it.”
“Hmm,” said Emert. “And you never remembered to put it in the fridge ahead of time, either?”
“Truth is,” I laughed, “I kinda got a kick out of it. After the first couple of times, it seemed like part of the tradition. For all I know, Kathleen might have been pretending to forget, just to amuse me. Or just to make me feel useful.”
“Some women are smart that way,” he said. “My wife has me cooking the turkeys at Thanksgiving and Christmas now. I deep-fry ’em. You ever done that?”
“No, but I’ve heard it’s good. True?”
“Once you’ve done it, you’ll never go back to baked turkey.”
“But it’s not like fried chicken, is it? You’re not dipping it in batter?”
“No, no,” he said. “You inject it with a marinade — my favorite’s a Cajun marinade, which has some kick to it — and when you put it down in the oil, the oil browns the skin really fast, seals in all the juices. Makes an oven-roasted turkey seem dry as shoe leather.”
“Sounds tasty,” I said. “Wish it weren’t ten months till Thanksgiving.”
“Tell you what,” he offered. “When we close this case, I’ll do a turkey-fry to celebrate.”
“Deal,” I said. “Dr. Garcia scheduled the autopsy for one o’clock tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”
“This is the only homicide I’m working,” he said. “Of course it’s okay. How about if I show up at twelve-thirty, so I can go over the clothing?”
“I’ll meet you at the loading dock behind the hospital,” I said.
Hey,” I called as he opened the trunk of the white Crown Victoria the next day. “You got my chainsaw in there?”
“Sorry,” he said, removing an evidence kit and closing the lid. “We haven’t been able to empty the pool yet. Drainpipe’s frozen solid; so is the valve mechanism. We’ll need a few days above freezing to thaw it out enough to drain.”
“Can’t you just put in a sump pump and pump it out from the top?”