“It’s about the list of drugs the toxicologist found in the American’s body,” I say.
“Hm, quite a list. Traces of cocaine, cannabis, opium, and a few uppers of the prescribed kind.” Supatra is a little breathless from the exertion with the secateurs. “It wasn’t drugs that killed him though, nor was it the removal of the top half of his head. It was loss of blood from the way the perpetrator gutted him. Of course, to survive long term he would have needed a skull even if they’d left his guts intact.”
I watch in revolted fascination while she digs her hands into the corpse and brings out a heart. “Check it for abnormalities,” she tells her students as she passes it to them, “use your hands, change to thinner gloves if you have to at this stage, you need to develop your sense of touch, especially with hearts, livers, and kidneys: any hardening, lumps, gritty spots, undue fattiness-the eye can’t tell you half as much as a good grope.”
“What about the chunk the killer took out of the victim’s brains for lunch?”
She cocks her head. “How do you know it wasn’t breakfast or supper? I couldn’t give a precise time of death. And to answer your question, no, the chunk taken out of the left lobe may have impaired quite a few functions, but it wasn’t lethal.”
“Okay, if it wasn’t drugs that killed him, or the hole in his brain, surely something must have been used to knock him out while he was being scalped? You said in your report there was no sign of struggle.”
“That’s correct. I had the toxicologist check for all the usual anesthetics, sedatives, et cetera, and he didn’t find any. There is no general check for drugs-you use a specific test for each chemical, and you need to have a good idea what you’re looking for, because many drugs will be untraceable after a few days, either because they have decomposed or because they have combined with body chemicals to form some other substance.” To her students: “Here’s the liver. There’s nothing wrong with it. Just handle it for a few minutes, start to get a sense of what a healthy one feels like, squeeze, that’s right.” She watches the student for a moment, then says, “Certainly, I was aware that something must have kept him quiet while the brain surgery was in progress. My guess was that given his size and probable life habits, a little opium and cocaine were not enough to sedate him. So I asked for special tests for various unusual drugs that have come onstream recently, and guess what? The toxi found tubocurarine chloride in his blood.”
“That’s what I wanted to ask about.”
“It’s quite exotic, used mostly in the U.S. and Japan as a neuromuscular blocker.” She looks at me. “It’s made from curare, obtained from a South American plant which jungle tribes use for arrow poison.”
“What does it do?”
“Causes paralysis without loss of consciousness.”
“But how would someone obtain it?”
“A well-connected pharmacist would be a minimum requirement. Even then, the pharmacist would normally have to explain to someone why they wanted it.” We exchange glances.
She stops in her labors for a moment as if she has just remembered an interesting but minor detail. “One thing did strike me as unusuaclass="underline" the neatness of the work. As a pathologist I don’t have to be particularly careful with the rotary saw, but whoever removed the skull of Frank Charles was in a class of their own. Even brain surgeons don’t work to such fine tolerances.”
Now she turns back to what is left of the young woman. The whole of the chest cavity is open, and most of the organs have been removed. A tube is draining the fluids that have washed down the stainless-steel table into the trough below. “So, everything is healthy. Just as I suspected. Now, this is how to hold the buzz saw. Always use both hands or it will run away from you.”
It is similar in size and shape to any small circular DIY saw, though a little more gentrified. It makes a screaming noise that deadens just a tad when it bites into skull bone.
“Ha!” the doctor says when she has removed the scalp. “Just as I thought. A massive subarachnoid hemorrhage caused by a burst brain aneurysm, caused, in all probability, by a serious overdose of methamphetamine. There would have been a predisposing weakness in the cerebral artery, probably congenital. The yaa baa would have sent the heart racing like crazy, putting pressure on the aneurysm, causing it to rupture. What a waste! Still, she most probably would have died young anyway-any serious exertion, especially from sport, would likely have caused the aneurysm to burst.” She smiles. “Did you know autopsy means ‘see for yourself’?”
“Thanks, Doctor,” I say, and catch the look of happiness on her face: another successful hunt. It’s a beautiful profession if you don’t mind blood. When she has washed she takes me into her office, where we examine her report on Frank Charles on her computer. We’ve just about finished, when I say, “What’s that, on page twenty-one, at the bottom?”
“Diamond fragment,” she reads, and rubs her eyes. “That’s right, I forgot. Apparently a fragment of industrial diamond was found, but we couldn’t be sure where it came from, and anyway it had nothing at all to do with the cause of death.”
“And this, on page three of the toxicologist’s report. Beryllium. What’s that?”
“Don’t know, except that it’s a kind of oil we found under his fingernails. Once again, it had nothing to do with the cause of death, so we didn’t waste time on it.”
It wasn’t heroin, I’m telling myself in the cab on the way back to the station. I’ve quite forgotten about Frank Charles; I’m thinking about the anonymous dead girl on Supatra’s autopsy table, her internal organs ripped out, her personality defined, so to speak, by her death, whence she derives a certain power over me, even though I had nothing to do with her demise. No doubt she was just a dumb kid who got handed some yaa baa and had no reason for not using it. But she was going to die young anyway, so was it really anyone’s fault? Metaphysics aside, I feel awful. And I know exactly what kind of nightmare I’m going to suffer through tonight.
34
Ever tried calling your Zurich-based Lichtenstein bankers outside office hours? I mean, even half a minute after five p.m. on a Thursday? You can see why they’re strong on clocks. I’m calling the main banking man dealing with the Lichtenstein trust in a small matter of forty million dollars, to tell him to go ahead and courier the documents we talked about when I first spoke to him about my special shipment of Lapsang souchong tea for wholesale to Europe and the need to set up a Lichtenstein trust for that very purpose-a transparent excuse he didn’t blink at-and he’s gone home. Nor will he answer his cell phone, and his assistant’s cosmology is equally clockwork: she’s gone home too. Finally, by going through the switchboard I get a secretary on overtime who knows what documents I’m talking about; she agrees to send them, emphasizing that she is using her own initiative and risking a reprimand and that she is an Ethiopian refugee whose English is not great. That done, there is nothing to do but wait for a couple of days. Without having to rush around town, my mind starts to dig one of those big dangerous black holes.