CHAPTER 33
Emert, the firefighter, and I stared down at the body in the pool, the knife jutting from the chest. The first thing Emert did — after letting a few more cusswords fly — was call Hank Strickland at REAC/TS and say, “You got that Geiger counter handy?” Evidently Hank did. “Could you come check out another body for us? I don’t want to turn another medical examiner into a human gamma detector.” Emert had his phone in one hand and his personal radiation monitor in the other. The chirper remained reassuringly quiet, even when Emert stretched it out over the pool.
Hank arrived fifteen minutes later. By then the parking lot was filling with police cars and fire trucks. “Have gadget, will travel,” Hank said.
“Your office is only two blocks away,” I said, pointing down the hill to the hospital. “You call that traveling?” Hank shrugged. “How come it took you fifteen minutes to travel two blocks?”
“I was in the middle of a very important email,” he said. “A chain letter, only it’s email. Break the chain, you’re in for seven years of bad luck.” He looked at the body in the pool. “Maybe this guy broke the chain.”
“I’d say a knife in the chest is more like seven seconds of bad luck,” I said.
“I’d say it’s more like bad karma,” Emert said. “Somebody catches a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting, that’s bad luck. Somebody catches a dagger in the left ventricle, that’s probably not so random.”
“So answer me this,” said Hank. “How come Novak’s body was frozen in the ice, but this guy sank to the bottom? And don’t tell me it’s because he had a chainsaw for an anchor. The chainsaw was a postmortem decorative accent, if the story I heard is true.” He grinned at me.
“True,” said Emert, “every word. Doc, you got a scientific explanation?”
“Maybe he’s got rocks in his pockets,” I said. “Or just denser bones. Novak was ninety-three, after all. His bones were probably pretty porous. But some people are floaters, and some are sinkers. I’ve got a friend who bobs like a cork, but I’m like a shark — if I don’t keep swimming, I sink to the bottom.”
Hank stretched the Geiger counter’s wand out over the edge of the pool; he set the detector for gamma radiation first, then beta, then alpha. The instrument emitted only the slow, comforting ticking I’d come to recognize as the sign of background radiation. Armed with that reassurance, he ventured down into the pool, with the help of a ladder off one of the fire trucks, and surveyed the body at close range. Satisfied that it posed no hazard, he climbed out.
Next to descend the ladder was Emert, who donned his coroner’s hat long enough to confirm that the man who’d been submerged for days or weeks with a knife in his heart was indeed dead. I couldn’t help thinking of the scene in The Wizard of Oz where the coroner in Munchkinland pronounces the witch crushed by Dorothy’s house to be “not only merely dead,” but “really most sincerely dead.”
Emert had called Art Bohanan and asked if Art would mind looking for prints on one more piece of evidence, and Art had agreed. Using a set of tongs he’d taken from an evidence kit, Emert worked the knife from the man’s chest, taking care not to touch the handle. He sealed the knife in an evidence bag, labeled it, and handed it up to me. Even through the bag’s plastic, even through the smear of body fluids and water on the blade, I thought I discerned the distinctive swirls of Damascus steel. “Looks like the missing knife from Novak’s display case,” I said.
“It is,” he said. “I’d bet a month’s salary on it.”
A cloud of mist shrouded the knife handle. Art squeezed the spray bottle twice more. Mopping a few stray droplets from my face, I said, “And why is it you’re wetting it?”
“The moisture helps the superglue latch onto the oils from the print,” he said.
“I knew that,” I said.
He laid the knife in the transparent chamber of a boxy glass and metal apparatus—“the Bohanan Apparatus” was its official name, and it was patented — and switched on the device’s heating element. As the element vaporized the glue, white fumes swirled into the chamber hiding the knife from view. After several minutes Art switched on a fan, which sucked the fumes out of the glass chamber, up through an exhaust hood, and away from the KPD crime lab.
Holding the knife by the blade, Art lifted it from the fuming chamber and held it under a magnifying desk lamp. After studying it for a moment, he leaned back. “Take a look at the tang,” he said.
“Okay. Where do I look to see the tang?”
He laughed. “The tang is the part of the blade the handle is riveted to,” he said. “This knife has a thick blade, so the tang’s thick, too — an eighth of an inch, maybe three-sixteenths. That handle is horn, which is hard to print, but the metal tang can actually be etched by the oil in a fingerprint. Look right there,” he said, pointing to a spot near the guard that separated the tang from the sharpened edge of the blade. Dozens of closely spaced lines crossed the tang, with one tiny swirl at the center. “That’s a pretty good print,” he said.
“But it’s less than a quarter-inch wide,” I said. “Is that enough to match to anything?”
Art picked up a printout that showed a complete set of prints. “Look at the right thumb,” he said. I took the page and held it under the magnifying glass. “What do you think?”
“That loop in the center has the same little break as the one on the knife,” I said. “I think it’s the same print.”
“I think so, too,” he said, “and I’m pretty good at this stuff.”
I glanced at the words on the paper. The prints had been reproduced from a U.S. government security clearance file. “Damn,” I said. “He didn’t go gentle into that good night, did he?”
In his final moments, Leonard Novak — a ninety-three-year-old walking ghost — had stabbed to death a man roughly half his age.
CHAPTER 34
The autopsy of the third Oak Ridge victim — case 09–03 — was almost redundant, since the cause of death had been sticking out of the man’s chest. According to the Nashville medical examiner, the lungs contained a small amount of water, which suggested (but did not prove) that the victim had drawn a partial breath as his heart shuddered and stopped. Beyond that, the autopsy report contained nothing extraordinary, though it did shed some light on the guy’s life: a middle-aged white male, he stood five feet eleven inches tall, with blue eyes, thinning blond hair, and a gray beard. Thin, whitish scars indicated prior surgeries on the right ankle and left shoulder. A series of whole-body X-rays revealed numerous healed fractures — four ribs on the right side of the chest had been broken, as well as six ribs on the left — two of them in more than one place. The right femur bore evidence of a childhood fracture, the report noted, and was a quarter-inch shorter than the left. The spine, particularly the cervical spine, showed osteoarthritic lipping — ragged fringes of bone rimming the vertebrae in the neck — that was surprisingly severe for a man his age. My first thought, from the variety of skeletal trauma, was too many bar fights. But the victim had well-developed leg muscles and — until the knife blade made its entrance — a robust circulatory system. Maybe not bar fights after all, I thought. Maybe bicycle wrecks. Regardless, the guy seemed to have been rode hard and put away wet.
Miranda, Emert, Thornton, and I were huddled around a table of stale cookies and stale coffee at the ORPD. I had come straight from the KPD lab, so Miranda had caught a ride with Thornton. Strictly speaking, there was no compelling reason for her to be here, but it had become important to find things to occupy Miranda’s time and energy. Her three burned fingertips were getting worse — they’d progressed from blisters to open, oozing wounds, wrapped in gauze, and she couldn’t do the delicate reconstruction the North Knoxville skeleton required.