“I don’t know. We found her with her head resting on the curb in front of the car.”
“Yes, I noticed that.” She moved to the body’s right side and slipped her finger deep into a hole hidden in the hair above the ear. “Your primary cause may be lurking under here.”
Evans sat down.
The autopsy continued for another hour and a half, during which Harry retrieved vitreous fluid from the body’s eyeballs with a syringe, and Hillstrom cut around the back of Mrs. Ricci’s head, peeled her forehead down over her nose like a rubber mask, and re c mand vealed the naked skull. She used a hand-held vibrator saw to remove the top half of the cranium and established that a broken brain stem had been the elusive primary cause of death. Both events sent Evans back to his chair.
Hillstrom’s prowess at this was impressive. She cut, sawed, and sliced with absolute grace, never nicking a wrong part, never hesitating once she’d started. It made me realize that, had Mrs. Ricci been alive, she could have done a lot worse than to pull this doctor for an operation.
We ended up, the two of us, off by a side counter where Hillstrom did her organ dissections. She was cutting thin slices of lung and studying them under the bright light. She held up a large piece of tissue. “See how the furrows are ingrained with black? That’s pollution. You don’t find it in country people; you get a ton of it in New Yorkers and the like. I’d guess she lived around Rutland, or a similar-sized city, all her life.” She looked up from her work at the others in the room, now out of earshot. “So, what about Kimberly Harris?”
“I just have some questions about your findings.”
“Think I messed up, huh?” The question was put with perfect neutrality, but I decided I wouldn’t run the risk. Things had started out badly enough.
“No, I think I came here at the wrong time, without an appointment, and said all the wrong things. Will you let me get my foot out of my mouth?”
She looked at me for a moment and smiled slightly, as if letting me halfway off the hook. “What would you like to know?”
“At the trial, you testified to the presence of sperm on the body…”
“Semen.”
“Right. Is there anything else you can tell from that?”
“Like blood type? I did.”
“No, I mean anything else-like race or if the man was taking medicine or had a cold.”
“Are you asking if I did or if I could?”
“Both, I guess.”
“I didn’t and I might. I couldn’t tell if he had a cold.” She stood up and took off her gloves. Harry began gathering up the organs and placing them into a large plastic bag, which he packed in the body’s empty cavity before sewing it up.
“But you didn’t do any of that?” I followed her across the room where she filled out some forms stuck to her clipboard.
“No. It’s usually not required in those cases, especially the quote-unquote open-and-shut ones like Harris, which I gather from your presence has undergone a change of status.”
“No, no. It’s still officially closed. I’m a bit of a Lone Ranger on this.” She stopped writing and genuinely smiled at me for the first time
“Really? You trying to reopen the case on your own?”
“Sort of. Things have happened that have made me curious.”
She nodded. “I’m glad.”
Tha t got me. “You are?”
“Yes. You want to follow me back to my office? My records are there, and I’m finished for the day. I also have some very good hot cocoa on hand.”
“That would be hard to turn down.”
“Then don’t.”
9
She drove a dark blue mercedes with license plates marked “ QNCY.” As we drove along a snow-blurred, Christmas-card-pretty Colchester Avenue in the darkening cold air, I had to admit that while I enjoyed the occasional autopsy, I wouldn’t make them a habit. For all their incredibly vicious, stupid, venal and self-centered moments, I still preferred my fellow humans alive.
Her office was small, warm, and friendly, decorated with childish drawings and family pictures taken at the beach and on a mountain top. It was also cluttered with hundreds of books, magazines, and mysterious black-bound volumes that were parked neatly on every available surface. In many ways, it reminded me of movies I’d seen featuring the favorite professor’s hideaway study. Classical music drifted from some hidden radio behind her desk.
She served the cocoa from a machine parked on the window ledge and handed me a cup. In the midst of her own cozy environment, immune from the swirling dark snow outside and all it hid, her earlier tenseness slid away. She raised her cup in a toast. “Truce?”
I toasted back. “Gratefully.”
“I’d like you to know that I am not an I-do-my-job-and-you-do-yours bureaucrat. When a case reaches me, most of the emotion has been drained from it; I see its background on a printed report, I usually never meet the principals involved, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, I’ve never even heard of the individual I’m working on. I have to fall back on procedure: I do what is required by law and what is additionally asked of me by the appropriate authorities. I am a middleman who does her utmost to steer clear of other people’s squabbles. I followed that precept in the Kimberly Harris case, but I will admit here and now that I wasn’t fond of the way things turned out.”
“Why not?”
“Human beings are sloppy creatures-nothing about them is perfect, either inside or out-and it is most often their imperfections that help us see what makes them tick. Kimberly Harris’s body fit that category just fine; the circumstances that put her body in my autopsy room did not-they were nice and clear and tidy.”
“So you think Bill Davis was framed.”
“If I did, I would have said so. What I think is that I’m happy someone is sniffing around this case again.”
I had to smile. I had never felt so suddenly in the presence of a kindred spirit. “What kind of information can you get from a semen sample, given the chance and a blank check?”
“A lot, with time, money, and the proper training and equipment, none of which I ha fghtve. Realistically, if you’re as alone as you say you are, you’re not going to get any more than what I already supplied.”
She got up and left the room, returning a couple of minutes later with an open file. “The semen was spermatic, although the sperm count was a little low-nothing exceptional there. We were lucky we even got a blood type. If the depositor had been a nonsecretor, we would have been up a tree.”
“A nonsecretor?”
“A secretor is somebody whose blood type appears in his or her body fluids as well as in the blood itself-handy if all you’ve got is a sweaty shirt or, as in this case, semen. A nonsecretor’s blood type can only be ascertained through the blood.”
I opened my mouth, but she cut me off. “Davis is also a secretor, if that’s what you were going to ask, and he is group O, which you probably knew. That part is especially unfortunate for him.”
“How so?”
“Let me give you a fast course in blood grouping. All secretors make a blood substance called ‘H’ in addition to whatever else they make. For example, type A secretors make A and H; type Bs make B and H; type ABs make AB and H. Type Os only make H. When we tested the semen, it came up H-period. What’s unfortunate for Davis is that forty-three percent or more of the entire population is of that type. It makes him an easy target-kind of like saying, ‘he’s guilty because he’s a man,’ if you get my drift. That, needless to say, was a subtlety lost on the jury.” She put the file on the desk and sat down.
“You said a lot more could be gotten out of this.”
“Yes, but not by me. Staying with blood grouping for a while longer, they’ve been able to break down those broad categories through something called PGM typing, or enzyme typing, and even PGM subtyping, as well as other methods I don’t even know about. Well, I’ve heard about them, but I don’t know the details. In any case, the result is that each stage of typing makes the tested sample more specific to one individual. So, if you compare Davis’s sample to the semen and go down the line, the first difference in typing lets your man off the hook. Of course, it’s not going to give you the real depositor of the semen, but it might help an innocent person.”