“I’ll sign it,” she said. “You and Marvin decide how many zeroes you want.”
Chapter Seventeen
The sign was still there above the door. DE MORTUIS NIL NISI BONUM. Of the dead, say nothing but good.
Louis and Swann stood in the hall outside the autopsy rooms at the Lee County medical examiner’s office. Mel had stayed back at the hotel, again saying he had a headache.
The medical examiner, Vince Carissimi, was down the hall finishing up an examination of the newly exhumed John Doe. Louis hoped that they would be able to discover some bit of evidence that might tell them more about how John Doe died. But at the very least, he hoped they would be able to identify this fellow as Emilio Labastide.
How exactly that might happen, Louis wasn’t sure. It would require that there be enough usable skin left on the hands to obtain clear fingerprints. Or, as a last resort and probably an option they would never take, there would have to be enough of a body left to be viewed and recognized by Rosa.
“What are we going to do if we can’t ID him?” Swann asked.
Louis looked at Swann. His usual peachy tan glow was gone, replaced by the gray pallor of dread that accompanied someone’s first visit to a morgue.
“I don’t know,” Louis said. “You got any other ideas?”
“You ever heard of DNA testing?” Swann asked.
Louis nodded. He’d read about it in forensics magazines and heard talk around O’Sullivan’s. It was a new technology that gave cops a surefire ID off small amounts of human tissue. More important, it offered an indisputable genetic blueprint of whoever left tissue or blood at a crime scene.
“I know a little about it,” Louis said. “But wouldn’t we have to have some tissue from Labastide that we know is his, something we can compare this tissue to?”
“Sure,” Swann said. “But in the absence of that, there’s also a way to match him up with relatives at a lesser percent.”
“Like Rosa?”
Swann nodded. “But we’d need a really large sample to do that. Plus, it would take months to get the results back, and it’s very expensive.”
“How expensive?”
“A hundred thousand dollars.”
“Wow.”
“A lot of money for something when the courts don’t even allow it to be admitted.” Swann shook his head. “Can you imagine how easy our jobs would be if we could swab up a drop of blood at a crime scene and match it up to some criminal whose genetic profile is already in the system?”
Louis could see a hard glint of interest in Swann’s eye that he had never seen before. The guy had the heart of a true crime dog. That was the nickname Louis had given those studious guys on the force who loved poring over science files and psych profiles rather than being out on the street.
“I don’t know many defendants who can afford that kind of testing,” Louis said.
“Yeah, but it will get cheaper,” Swann said eagerly. “Like video cameras. Remember when those came out, they were around a thousand dollars? I bought one last week for the department for under three hundred.”
Louis was quiet. He’d been a PI for more than three years now and didn’t want to admit to Swann that he’d only recently bought a Nikon with a telephoto lens. He hadn’t even mastered all of the settings yet.
“Hello, gentlemen.”
Vinny made his entrance. Tall and lanky, with a healthy head of gray hair, he wore a loose-fitting cotton shirt printed with the red tongue logo of the Rolling Stones. As always, a pair of headphones hung around his collar.
“Hey, Vinny,” Louis said, extending a hand. “Good to see you. This is Lieutenant Swann of Palm Beach PD.”
Swann stepped forward and, with an obvious hesitation, extended a hand to Vinny. Louis wondered if he was afraid Vinny had dead people’s cooties.
“So, you’re the big bucks behind this?” Vinny asked Swann.
“Me? No, I’m not paying for this.”
Vinny looked to Louis. “Then who is?”
“I’ll write you a check.”
“Semper letteris mandate,” Vinny said, shaking his head.
“What?”
“He said, ‘Get it in writing,’” Swann said.
They both looked at him.
“You speak Latin, too?” Louis asked.
Swann shrugged.
“My man!” Vinny said, holding up his palm. They high-fived. “Latine loqui coactus sum!”
They launched into a rapid-fire dialogue in Latin, laughing like two old golf buddies.
“Can we get on with business?” Louis said finally.
“Fine with me,” Vinny said. “Let’s go take a look at our friend.”
He led them into the autopsy room. A familiar smell pricked Louis’s nostrils: human rot, industrial-strength disinfectant, and that odd metallic scent of blood. There were three tables, two empty and the third covered with a limp blue sheet. It was only when Louis stepped forward that he could see the skeletal contour of what lay beneath the cloth.
Louis looked back. Swann hadn’t moved from the door.
“First time?” Vinny asked.
“I saw an autopsy once in the academy,” Swann said. “On film.”
Vinny handed him a jar of Vicks VapoRub and motioned for Swann to rub some under his nose. Swann did as instructed, handed the jar back to Vinny, and followed him to the table. Vinny carefully pulled back the sheet.
Louis had to stifle a gag. He’d seen quite a few dead bodies, some as healthy-looking as they had been in life and others so decomposed that little remained but black sludge. This body was a weird combination of both. The legs tapered off into ragged black flesh; the bones of the ankles and feet were gone. There was a hollowed-out gut but an almost intact rib cage. There was no head.
Louis looked at Swann, wondering if he was going to have to pick him up off the floor, but Swann was staring at the remains with the awe of a kid seeing his first fireworks display.
“Come around here and look at the hand,” Vinny said.
Louis and Swann stepped around the table. The dead man’s hand was moldered and missing all of the fingers, but what remained was the ballooned stub of a thumb. And Louis knew why it was distended: Vinny had injected it with fluid to stretch the skin and get a clear print.
“Did it work?” Louis asked.
Vinny held up two fingerprint cards. One was the worker ID card from the old Palm Beach jail that they knew to be Labastide’s. Louis had given it to Vinny the day they dug up the body. He recognized the other as one from the Lee County lab.
“Gentlemen, say hello to Emilio Labastide,” Vinny said.
Louis walked to the end of the table and motioned to the decayed stump of the neck. “Can you tell us anything about the weapon used to decapitate him?” he asked.
“I can tell you it’s not the same one that was used to stab him in the chest,” Vinny said. “That was a small and narrow-bladed knife of some kind.”
“Could he have been beheaded with a sword?” Louis asked.
“Sword? Why do you ask?”
“They took one from the suspect’s house.”
Vinny picked up several X-rays. As he slapped them onto the backlit panels, he started talking.
“Well, there were no X-rays taken originally,” Vinny said. “I took these this morning of Labastide’s cervical vertebrae. The only thing I can tell is that it was a large blade of some kind. There isn’t enough tissue left for me to say exactly.”
“So, it could be a sword?” Louis pressed.
Vinny nodded. “I can tell you that whatever was used, it was done with extreme violence. It’s not easy to behead someone. Inexperienced killers would most likely try to saw a head off, especially if they were doing it to avoid identification.”
“This happened in the middle of nowhere and likely in the dead of night,” Louis said. “The killer probably had all the time he needed to do whatever he wanted with this body.”