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.”
“Just a refreshing dip,” Jack quipped.
“What a shotgun wound!” Laurie marveled, gazing at the fearsome wound. Then looking at the multiple gashes, she added, “These look like they were done by a propeller.”
Jack straightened up. “Laurie, what’s on your mind? You didn’t come down here just to help us, did you?”
“No,” Laurie admitted. Her voice wavered behind her mask. “I guess I wanted a little moral support.”
“About what?” Jack questioned.
“Calvin just reamed me out,” Laurie said. “Apparently the night tech, Mike Passano, complained that I had been in last night accusing him of being involved in the theft of Franconi’s body. Can you imagine? Anyway, Calvin was really angry, and you know how I hate confrontation. I ended up crying, which made me furious at myself.”
Jack blew out through pursed lips. He tried to think of something to say other than “I told you so,” but nothing came to mind.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said limply.
“Thanks,” Laurie said.
“So you shed a few tears,” Jack said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“But I hate it,” Laurie complained. “It’s so unprofessional.”
“Ah, I wouldn’t worry about it,” Jack said. “Sometimes I wish I could shed tears. Maybe if we could do some kind of partial trade, we’d both be better off.”
“Anytime!” Laurie said with conviction. This was the closest Jack had come to an admission of what Laurie had long suspected: his bottled-up grief was the major stumbling block for his own happiness.
“So, at least now you’ll drop your minicrusade,” Jack said.
“Heavens, no!” Laurie said. “If anything, it makes me more committed because it suggests just what I feared. Calvin and Bingham are going to try to sweep the episode under the carpet. It’s not right.”
“Oh, Laurie!” Jack moaned. “Please! This little run-in with Calvin will only be the beginning. You’re going to bring yourself nothing but grief.”
“It’s the principle,” Laurie said. “So don’t lecture me. I came to you for support.”
Jack sighed, fogging up his plastic face mask for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing in particular,” Laurie said. “Just be there for me.”
Fifteen minutes later, Laurie left the autopsy room. Jack had showed her all the external findings on his case, including the two puncture wounds. She’d listened with half an ear, obviously preoccupied with the Franconi business. Jack had had to restrain himself to keep from telling her again how he felt.
“Enough of this external stuff,” Jack said to Vinnie. “Let’s move on to the internal part of the autopsy.”
“It’s about time,” Vinnie complained. It was now after eight and bodies were coming in along with their assigned techs and medical examiners. Despite the early start, he and Jack were not significantly ahead of the others.
Jack ignored the friendly banter evoked by his hapless corpse. With all the obvious trauma, Jack had to vary the traditional autopsy technique and that took concentration. In contrast to Vinnie, Jack was oblivious to the passage of time. But again his meticulousness paid off. Although the liver had essentially been obliterated by the shotgun blasts, Jack discovered something extraordinary that might have been missed by someone doing a more haphazard, cursory job. He found the tiny remains of surgical sutures in the vena cava and in the ragged end of the hepatic artery. Sutures in such an area were uncommon. The hepatic artery brought blood to the liver, whereas the vena cava was the largest vein in the abdomen. Jack didn’t find any sutures in the portal vein, because that vessel was almost entirely obliterated.