I asked the obvious first question: “Any idea what killed him?”
Gould glanced up at me. “The ME’ll have to confirm it, but I think this had something to do with it.”
He reached under the body’s chin and spread the flesh at the throat with his latex-gloved fingertips. A deep but grotesquely bloodless wound yawned open like a slice into a large piece of fish, extending across the neck to below each ear.
“I’d say he was garroted, probably with a thin wire. Not what I’d call a weapon of opportunity.”
“And he’s not the typical age for a crime of violence, either,” I muttered, as Gould grabbed each of the body’s arms and folded them in with a loud cracking sound so he could close the bag.
Ron Klesczewski, by far the most sensitive of my crew, let out a small groan. “So he was dumped. Why the bare feet?”
Tyler, his preliminary photographs, site maps, and measurements completed, was wasting no time getting back to work after waiting for Gould to finish. Straddling the body bag like a strawberry picker astride a row of plants, he rummaged through the soggy clothing, looking for anything interesting.
“That’s easy,” he said without looking up. “We might’ve been able to trace his shoes, at least to country of origin-same reason all the labels have been cut out of his clothes.”
Gould looked back at the body, his brow furrowed. “You think he’s a foreigner?”
Tyler straightened. “It’s just a guess. Why else would you remove those kinds of identifiers but leave the fingertips and face intact? We could run print checks till next Tuesday and get nowhere if we don’t even know what country he’s from.”
“There’s Interpol,” Ron suggested.
“They need a country reference, too. There’s no such thing as a central international print file. Anyhow,” he added, stooping over again, “there’re a ton of places that don’t share with Interpol or anyone else-either that or they’re so disorganized it amounts to the same thing.”
We silently watched him as he continued his search. The sticky mud and strands of vegetation clinging to the corpse sent up a cloying odor of rot.
“Maybe the Fish Cops’ll come up with something,” Ron persisted, the perpetual optimist.
Tyler, his voice showing frustration, spoke directly to the body again. “They better, ’cause I’m getting squat here-not a fiber, not a ticket stub, not a candy wrapper. Nothing. But I won’t be surprised if they don’t.” He swung his head around and glanced at me suddenly, repeating a theme he’d introduced earlier. “Whoever did this knew what he was doing.”
His hands at the victim’s belt buckle, he abruptly froze. “Uh, oh.”
There was a small clicking sound as he manipulated the buckle and smoothly extracted a nasty-looking knife blade. He held it up in his gloved hand so the sun reflected off its short, lethal double edges. “Cute,” he said.
I leaned forward and looked at it carefully. “I guess we can rule him out as a lost tourist.”
The facilities of the state’s medical examiner were brand new. After years of borrowing clinical space in Burlington’s Fletcher Allen Health Center, and doing her paperwork in a rented office above a dentist on Colchester Avenue, the ME had finally come into her own.
She greeted me at the door of the waiting room with an unusually gregarious smile, simultaneously shaking my hand and lightly patting me on the back. A tall, blonde, formal woman of indeterminate age and occasionally formidable frostiness, Beverly Hillstrom was also a doggedly curious perfectionist, traits I’d never shied from aiding and abetting. Frequently in the past, she had waived fees, brought in outside consultants, and spent extra time on cases when she’d thought I might benefit. I had no idea if she did this for other departments or investigators. I’d heard some cops refer to her as a coldhearted, bureaucratic bitch. I expected, however, that she repaid in the currency she was dealt-coin for coin. Over the years, we’d become close and trusted colleagues, despite the fact that we still only referred to one another by our official titles.
“This is an unexpected pleasure, Lieutenant,” she said, guiding me through a general office area to a coffee machine, where she offered me a cup. “Were you just in town, or did word of our Taj Mahal finally prove irresistible?”
I smiled and shook my head to the coffee. “I was curious, I will admit.”
“We are the unlikely beneficiaries of a market-driven, politically sensitive war between the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire and this place.” She waved her hand overhead. “The entire hospital has been overhauled to compete. We just caught hold of the coattails. Actually, half our facility is shared with either the hospital or the university, but considering what we got, I’m not begrudging them a single square foot.”
She suddenly looked at me over her reading glasses, belatedly struck by the unlikeliness of my merely dropping by. “We haven’t completed your John Doe, by the way.”
I smiled at the veiled warning. “I’m not here to speed things up.”
The warmth returned to her eyes. “Interesting answer-meaning it warranted a three-hour drive over a five-minute phone call. Must be big.”
This time, I laughed outright. “Don’t I wish. I’m afraid ‘weird’ is a better word. We found this guy over eight hours ago, and we still have no idea who he is, where he’s from, how he ended up where we found him, or even how he came into our jurisdiction. It’s almost like he fell from a balloon.”
Hillstrom opened a rear door onto a broad, brightly lit hallway and turned left, leading us past an enormous scale, mounted flush with the floor. She didn’t comment on it, but I recognized the significance of that item alone. In the past, cadaver weights had been estimated-everyone in the autopsy room had been allowed a guess, and the median had appeared in the formal report. That scale was a sign that Vermont’s medical examiner had finally been paid some respect.
“Well,” she said, rounding a corner and heading for a broad door at the end of the hall, “if it’s any help, the balloon couldn’t’ve been too far off the ground, because there’s no evidence of any fall beyond the height of the quarry wall. And that was postmortem, by the way. He was killed earlier, and probably elsewhere.”
She fitted a key to the door and swung it back, ushering me across the threshold. We entered a large, high-ceilinged, well-lit room equipped with a skylight and two complete workstations-twin autopsy tables attached to a long, single counter like boats nosed up to a dock. There were four people in the room: Harry, the pathology assistant; Dr. Bernard Short, Hillstrom’s young and brand-new second in command, whom I’d met only once before; Ed Turner, the ME’s investigator on loan from the Vermont State Police; and my blotchy-faced acquaintance from the quarry, who was lying naked on the far table with his torso split open. Dr. Short was holding his small intestine in both hands.
“Gentlemen,” Hillstrom announced as the door swung shut behind us. “You all know Lieutenant Gunther, I believe?”
A chorus of mumbled greetings rose from the group, accompanied by Turner’s “Long trip, Joe. This guy special?”
The question was as much from simple curiosity as from the ME’s official law enforcement liaison, onto whose turf I’d just stepped. In times past, homicide victims especially were routinely accompanied by a department baby-sitter, equipped with pictures of the murder site for reference. As a goodwill gesture to everyone, however, the VSP had eventually assigned one of their own to gather whatever evidence the ME found, forward it to the crime lab in Waterbury, take photographs, lift prints, keep up the paperwork, and generally stand in for the often uneducated neophytes we’d all depended upon before. It had been such a success that the appearance of a cop like me, instead of a FedEx package bearing photos, was now as unusual as it had once been commonplace. And it obviously made Ed Turner wonder why.