Salazar said, “Examination of the head and cranial contents reveals no trauma or underlying pathological disease conditions or congenital anomalies. Harry, I’m going to do the finger now.”
Bosch put the shoes back in their plastic bag and returned to the autopsy table as Salazar placed an X ray of Meadows’s left hand on a light window on the wall.
“See here, these fragments?” he said as he traced small, sharp white spots on the negative. There were three of them near the fractured joint. “If this was an old break, these would, over time, have moved into the joint. There is no scarring discernible on the X ray but I am going to take a look.”
He went to the body and used a scalpel to make a T-incision in the skin on the top of the finger joint. He then folded the skin back and dug around with the scalpel in the pink meat, saying, “No… no… nothing. This was post, Harry. You think it could have been one of my people?”
“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “Doesn’t look like it. Sakai said he and his sidekick were careful. I know I didn’t do it. How come there’s no damage to the skin?”
“That is an interesting point. I don’t know. Somehow the finger was broken without the exterior being damaged. I can’t answer that one. But it shouldn’t have been too hard to do. Just grab the finger and yank down. Provided you have the stomach for it. Like so.”
Salazar went around the table. He lifted Meadows’s right hand and yanked the finger backward. He couldn’t get the leverage needed and couldn’t break the joint.
“Harder than I thought,” he said. “Perhaps the digit was struck with a blunt object of some kind. One that did not blemish the skin.”
When Sakai came in with the slides fifteen minutes later, the autopsy was completed and Salazar was sewing Meadows’s chest closed with thick, waxed twine. He then used an overhead hose to spray debris off the body and wet down the hair. Sakai bound the legs together and the arms to the body with rope, to prevent them from moving during the different stages of rigor. Bosch noticed that the rope cut across the tattoo on Meadows’s arm, across the rat’s neck.
Using his thumb and forefinger, Salazar closed Meadows’s eyes.
“Take him to the box,” he said to Sakai. Then to Bosch, “Let’s take a look at these slides. This seemed odd to me because the hole was bigger than your normal scag spike and its location, in the chest, was unusual.
“The puncture is clearly antemortem, possibly perimortem-there was only slight hemorrhaging. But the wound is not scabbed over. So we’re talking shortly before, or even during death. Maybe the cause of death, Harry.”
Salazar took the slides to a microscope that was on the counter at the back of the room. He chose one of the slides and put it on the viewing plate. He bent over to look and after half a minute finally said, “Interesting.”
He then looked briefly at the other slides. When he was done, he put the first slide back on the viewing plate.
“Okay, basically, I removed a one-inch-square section of the chest where this puncture was located. I went into the chest about one and a half inches deep with the cut. The slide is a vertical dissection of the sample, showing the track of the perforation. Do you follow me?”
Bosch nodded.
“Good. It’s kind of like slicing an apple open to expose the track of a worm. The slide traces the path of the perforation and any immediate impact or damage. Take a look.”
Bosch bent to the eyepiece of the microscope. The slide showed a straight perforation about one inch deep, through the skin and into the muscle, tapering in width like a spike. The muscle’s pink color changed to a dark brownish color around the deepest point of the penetration.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“It means,” said Salazar, “that the puncture was through the skin, through the fascia-that’s the fibrous fat layer-and then directly into the pectoral muscle. You notice the deepening color of the muscle around the penetration?”
“Yes, I notice.”
“Harry, that’s because the muscle is burned there.”
Bosch looked away from the microscope to Salazar. He thought he could make out the line of a thin smile beneath the pathologist’s breathing mask.
“Burned?”
“A stun gun,” the pathologist said. “Look for one that fires its electrode dart deep into the skin tissue. About three to four centimeters deep. Though in this case, it is likely the electrode was manually pressed deeper into the chest.”
Bosch thought a moment. A stun gun would be virtually impossible to trace. Sakai came back into the room and leaned on the counter by the door, watching. Salazar collected three glass vials of blood and two containing yellowish liquid from the tool cart. There was also a small steel pan containing a brown lump of material that Bosch recognized from experience in this room as liver.
“Larry, here are the tox samples,” Salazar said. Sakai took them and disappeared from the room again.
“You’re talking about torture, electric shock,” Bosch said.
“I would say it looks so,” Salazar said. “Not enough to kill him, the trauma is too small. But possibly enough to get information from him. An electric charge can be very persuasive. I think there is ample history on that. With the electrode positioned in the subject’s chest, he could probably feel the juice going right into his heart. He would have been paralyzed. He’d tell them what they wanted and then could only watch while they put a fatal dosage of heroin into his arm.”
“Can we prove any of this?”
Salazar looked down at the tile floor and put his finger on his mask, and scratched his lip beneath it. Bosch was dying for a cigarette. He had been in the autopsy room nearly two hours.
“Prove any of it?” Salazar said. “Not medically. Tox tests will be done in a week. For the sake of argument, say they come back heroin overdose. How do we prove that someone else put it in his arm, not himself? Medically, we can’t. But we can show that at the time of death or shortly before, there was a traumatic assault on the body in the form of electric shock. He was being tortured. After death there is the unexplained damage to the first digit of the left hand.”
He rubbed the finger over his mask again and then concluded, “I could testify that this was a homicide. The totality of the medical evidence indicates death at the hands of others. But, for the moment, there is no cause. We wait for the tox studies to be completed and then we’ll put our heads together again.”
Bosch wrote a paraphrase of what Salazar had just said into his notebook. He would have to type it into his own reports.
“Of course,” Salazar said, “proving any of this beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury is another matter. I would guess that, Harry, you have to find that bracelet and find out why it was worth torturing and killing a man for.”
Bosch closed his notebook and started to pull off the paper gown.
The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers’ bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.