When something is said to be adipose, it either contains animal fat or is like animal fat. If a body has lost its protective dermis and epidermis after submersion in water for a lengthy period of time, a waxy material develops in the outer layer of subcutaneous fat. Yellow-white in hue, dirty-looking, this formation is known as “adipocere,” and it is caused by the decomposition of animal fat into fatty acids. The corpse lying on Hanson’s table gave off the rancid odor typical of adipocere, but he tested several samples nonetheless — first in water, where a sample floated; next in alcohol and ether, where the second sample dissolved; and then with dilute copper sulfate, where his last sample gave off a pale greenish blue color. Hanson knew that adipocere developed first in the subcutaneous tissues and only later in the adipose tissues. The formation of adipocere in a submerged adult body would have been complete in anywhere from twelve to eighteen months. Examining Jane Doe’s corpse, Hanson estimated that it had been submerged for anywhere from six to nine months.
Although the corpse’s head hair was completely gone, there remained patches of hair in the pubic area, and samples of these were taken to support the finding that the victim had been blonde; she was, in fact, a “victim” in the police files, where suicide and homicide are investigated in exactly the same manner.
Hanson suspected she was a homicide victim.
That was because there was a bullet hole in her throat, clearly visible even though much of the skin there had been nibbled away by underwater creatures.
Suspicion, however, is not scientific evidence. Hanson was a detective only in a strictly circumscribed sense, and he was not paid to speculate, but only to deliver facts that might or might not help the police investigation. That he suspected this was a homicide had nothing at all to do with his objective approach to the examination. What he wanted to learn was whether or not this woman had died of a gunshot wound or of drowning, a determination that might mean nothing at all to the investigating detectives.
Hanson got down to serious work.
When a person is drowning, he or she inhales water into the air passages and the pulmonary alveoli. The cause of death in most drownings is asphyxia caused by this inhalation of water and the consequent exclusion of air from the lungs. Inhaled water circulates to the left side of the heart, altering the concentration of sodium chloride there. If someone dies by means other than drowning, he has not inhaled any water, and the sodium chloride content of the blood is equal on both sides of the heart.
The Gettler test is designed to reveal the relative concentrations of sodium chloride in the right and left sides of the heart, and is often conclusive — especially in cases of saltwater drowning — as to cause of death.
Jane Doe had been found floating in fresh water.
Normally, Hanson would have performed the Gettler test before disturbing or removing any of the organs. He would have wiped the surface of the heart dry. He would have punctured the heart with a dry knife. Using dry pipettes, he would have collected ten millimeters of blood from each side of the heart and placed the samples in clean, dry laboratory flasks. His chemicals would have been ready, as they were now: saturated picric acid, silver nitrate, starch nitrate, potassium iodide, sodium citrate, and sodium nitrite.
Normally the Gettler test would have told Hanson what he’d wanted to know.
But Jane Doe had been in the water for too long a time.
Postmortem putrefaction was too far advanced.
Gases had forced the blood out of the heart.
His pipettes came up dry.
Free now to examine the other viscera, Hanson went ahead with his exploration. Because the body had been submerged for such a long time, he did not expect to find any stiff foam or frothy liquid in the nasal or bronchial air passages, and he did not. Moreover, the alveolar structure of the lung had been severely damaged by decomposition so that the lung had shrunk and appeared waterlogged, dirty, and red — making it virtually impossible to detect inhaled water. He did find some bloodstained fluid in the pleural cavities, but he knew that this was not conclusive of drowning in that the same sort of fluid was often found in decomposed bodies that had not drowned. In short, he could not state conclusively that this was a drowning victim.
There remained the bullet hole in the dead girl’s throat.
According to the reports that had been delivered together with the unidentified body, the police had recovered no firearm at the scene. There was no question that this was a bullet hole, but because of the severe decomposition of the body, Hanson was unable to tell whether the wound was a contact wound, a near-contact wound, a close-up wound, or a distant wound. He knew for certain that a shotgun could not have produced this type of wound, but he was unable to determine — again because of the advanced state of decomposition — whether the weapon had been a pistol or a rifle. Nor did he, upon examination, find a bullet in the neck or the head. This did not surprise him; there was an exit wound at the back of the neck between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae.
Hanson still did not know the cause of death.
It seemed to him that there were four possibilities, none of them scientific:
1. The woman had waded into the river, gun in hand, had shot herself in the throat, and — wounded but still alive — had collapsed into the water and drowned. Cause of death: drowning.
2. The woman had similarly waded into the river, shot herself in the throat, and collapsed into the river — already dead. Cause of death: gunshot wound.
3. Someone else had wounded her and thrown her into the river to drown. Cause of death: drowning.
4. Someone else had shot her mortally and then thrown her into the river to dispose of her body. Cause of death: gunshot wound.
However you sliced it — and Hanson forgave himself the unintentional pun — the girl had been in that river for from six to nine months, and probably had been shot before her submersion in water. He could not tell the police anything more concrete about the cause of death.
Somehow, he felt like a failure.
Sighing, he picked up a scalpel and cut off the undamaged fingers on the girl’s right and left hands, and the undamaged thumb on her right hand. Then he began working to determine age, height, weight, and whatever other vital statistics the corpse on the table might reveal.
The first thing he discovered was that the corpse had no tongue.
Someone had cut out the girl’s tongue.
By one o’clock that afternoon, the thumb and four fingers dissected from the corpse of Jane Doe had been delivered to the police laboratory for fingerprinting by a technician named Larry Soames.
Soames had fingerprinted a lot of corpses in his lifetime. He had also fingerprinted a great many fingers dissected from corpses. With all the water here in Florida, he got a lot of floaters, too, and he had printed his fair share of those. The ease of fingerprinting a floater depended entirely on how long the body had been in the water. What he usually did — when he got a body that hadn’t been submerged too long and where the so-called washerwoman’s skin wasn’t too bad — was to dry the fingers with a towel, inject glycerin under the fingertips to smooth them out, and then ink and print each finger. Where the body had been in the water a longer period of time — say three or four months — he dried the dissected finger over an open flame. Actually, unless he wanted to cook the damn thing, he just kept passing it back and forth lightly over the flame, sort of a sweeping motion, until it shrank up and dried. Then he applied his ink and took his prints in the usual way. In a case like this one, though — the ME’s report estimated she’d been in the water some six to nine months, friction ridges all gone — what he had to do was to cut himself some skin shells and then ink and print those. He had to be careful detaching the skin, of course, but Soames was by nature a very careful man.