Other students crossing the bridge whipped out their phones, and multiple videos of the soaking cop crawling out of the river were uploaded to YouTube within minutes.
His fall cracked out the ice chunk containing the body, and backup patrolmen used long poles from a sculling shed down the river to pull in the corpsicle. They saw that his hands had been removed at the wrists, and left the deceased out to thaw in the sun while awaiting the arrival of homicide detectives.
The left flap of his sage green jacket defrosted quickly. Tucked inside the breast pocket was a wallet of expensive lambskin, the oversize passport-style favored by international business travelers. The issuing country was Venezuela. His name was listed as Señor Gilberto Vasco.
Running the name tripped a Homeland Security watch-list alert, which routed a bulletin to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New England Field Division, headquartered in the JFK Federal Building on Sudbury Street alongside Boston City Hall and the Government Center plaza. The DEA’s NEFD then notified the agent who had flagged Señor Vasco’s card via Immigration and Customs in the first place.
That agent, Marcus Lash, had been lunching on a tuna melt at the Busy Bee on Beacon Street near the St. Mary’s T stop, just minutes from the BU Bridge. That was how he came to be squatting down on the Cambridge side of the river, next to a young medical examiner from the coroner’s office, before homicide arrived and the meat wagon took Señor Vasco away.
“DEA?” said the ME, eyeing Lash’s credentials.
The ME was a young kid, brown-skinned like Lash, wearing a fur-hooded L.L. Bean parka over evidence-preserving Tyvek overalls and bootees.
“Possible drug-related homicide,” said Lash.
“Drugs? Because the decedent’s a well-dressed foreigner?”
Lash gave the kid another look. A fellow brother, but Lash didn’t get the confrere vibe. No shorthand, no soul-brother discount on a fast friendship. No love. Kid must have got all that affirmative-action shit drummed out of him in med school.
“Because he’s a KA. A known associate.”
“Is cutting off hands a drug thing?”
“It is when you steal.” Lash looked at the kid. He had kind of a natural antipathy toward lighter-skinned intellectuals that he was trying hard to overcome. Mostly because that was the same track his own college-age son was on. “How about we switch this around and you start telling me things now.”
The ME leaned forward to take a second look at the defrosting wrist stumps. “Nice clean cut. People think wrist joints, flexible, easy to cut. The reverse is true. This was done with a table saw, looks like. Postmortem for sure. No fish bites.” The ME looked closely at the fleshy sleeve. “Or very few, anyway. Body is well preserved on the whole. Essentially mummified. But as he continues to thaw, he’ll decompose faster than usual.” He looked up to the road where his white ME van was parked. “Guy’s going to drip all over my wagon.”
“You can’t keep him cold somehow?”
“Pack him in dry ice? Great if we had the budget. And the time. If he was chopped up into cooler-sized pieces, I could get him home that way.”
Lash thinking, Home?
The ME shuffled forward on his haunches, noticing something. The dead man’s face was half-emerged from the ice, glistening. “Chunk missing from his lower lip, see there? Could be a fish bite. Or...”
He worked his gloved fingers inside the dead Venezuelan’s parted teeth. With some effort, he slid out a wedge of melting river ice — meaning the body had gone into the water with its mouth open — then produced a small flashlight from his overalls pocket.
“Tongue’s cut off too.”
Lash looked in. The cut had been made at a slight angle, maybe an inch from the base at the back of the throat.
The ME mimed the procedure on the corpse. “They went in probably with garden shears or maybe butcher’s scissors, one snip. But as they did so, rubbing the lip over this lower canine here, it cut the lip. See? Can’t get a clean angle like that.” He pulled back, flicking his gloved fingers toward the river to get the wetness off. “So what does that mean?”
Lash sat back from the melting corpse. “Traditionally, you get your hands cut off for stealing, and your tongue cut out for squealing.”
“Uh-oh. Mixed messages.”
Lash stood, looking across the river at the Back Bay apartments and the Citgo sign. “He did something to piss off the wrong people. Not a lot of second chances in this game.”
A growing rumble became a train of six cars barreling across the Grand Junction Railroad bridge, shaking the crumbling stone struts of the overhead road as it passed into the rail yards on the Boston side.
“Did you know,” the ME said, once the train was clear, “that this is the only spot in the world where a boat can sail underneath a train running under a car driving underneath an airplane?”
“No, I didn’t,” said Lash, unable to figure out this kid. He reached into his coat pocket for a business card. “You won’t learn much, I don’t think. They dumped him here to be found. But here’s my card with my e-mail on the bottom there. If you could, cc me your autopsy report.”
“Sure, yeah.” The ME looked at the card, the embossed DEA seal in the corner. He was a little more interested now. “You got it.”
Lash turned to make his way back up the embankment.
“Hey,” said the ME. “So what does this mean anyway? Is this the start of a gang war or something?”
Lash stopped, turned back. “You know how they say, for every one dead rat you see, there are a hundred more living in the walls around you?”
The ME nodded. “Okay, I see what you’re saying.”
This kid had come in with hackles up, for whatever reason, but he was basically all right. Lash wanted to leave him with something, to appeal to their shared heritage, such as it was. “My grandpops used to have this thing. He was a big tea drinker. Smoked tea too, but that’s a different story. Back in the day, tea bags were for fancy folks. Tea came loose, and you made a pot and you strained out the leaves. He’d serve me some, wait until I drank it down to the bottom. ‘Gimme here,’ he’d say, motioning for the cup. ‘I’m ’on read your tea leaves for you.’ It was a way of fortune-telling, by the pattern they left. He’d take it and look at it this way and that, swirl it around a little and squint hard, then nod and make his pronouncement. ‘You’re going to take a piss soon.’”
The ME loosed a grudging smile.
Lash nodded. “That’s what I get off this. Somebody’s going to be taking a piss soon. All I really know is, it won’t be me.”
Lash hated narcotics the way social workers hate poverty, the way epidemiologists hate disease. Not an active, festering hatred, but as something to push against. A battle he didn’t expect to win, only to wage honorably.
He had thirty-three years in the DEA. A third of a century. Where did it all go? is what people always say, as though they hadn’t been paying attention, or else somehow imagined it was all going to come back around again.
But Lash knew where it went. It went into this job.
He had been with the DEA almost since its inception. People would ask him sometimes, Why drug enforcement? as though it had to be a calling, because who else but a fool would devote himself full-time to a losing cause? Or maybe some personal tragedy in his background had propelled him into this unforgiving line of work.
There was none. He came out of the service in 1975 with a helicopter license, a ’fro he was itching to grow, and a fuck-it-all attitude. The two-year-old DEA was a good fit. It was small and underfunded, and the agency needed a black guy with combat pilot experience more than he needed it. In the late seventies and eighties, narc work bloomed with the diversification of the drug trade. Undercover was where the action was, and for a time he lived the lifestyle, like the mirror image of a dealer. And he excelled. A black fed working UC in the early eighties was a lot less makeable than a gregarious white dude showing up in town with two days’ worth of beard growth and a spray-on tan, carrying a briefcase full of cash and looking to front some snow.