An Indian who spoke with an English accent, Dr. Patel was a middle-aged man with a permanent half smile and steel-framed glasses over brown eyes. He was dressed in blue scrubs and a blue puffy hat with a drawstring, and he wore two pairs of latex gloves. A little gold bump on one finger betrayed a wedding band. His hand rested protectively atop the body bag, which couldn’t be denied any longer. The black nylon bag was surprisingly short, with a puff at the end where the head would be and a mound where the feet would be. It smelled of new, cheap synthetics and carried with it the faint chill of refrigeration. Judy’s head felt light.
“Are you okay?” Dr. Patel asked her, and though it was kind, she was getting tired of being asked that question. Judy was supposed to be tough. She took boxing lessons. She climbed rocks for sport. She was a lieutenant colonel’s daughter.
“I’m fine,” she answered, hoping it sounded professional, but knowing it sounded like WATCH OUT, I’M GONNA RALPH! The district attorney and Detective Wilkins looked over. She wanted to run away. “I love it here,” she said, and the coroner smiled.
“This is your first time.”
No shit. “Yes.”
“I understand.” Dr. Patel’s eyes softened. “Perhaps if I explain as I go along, you can understand what you are seeing and it will diminish your fear.”
No, please, God, Judy thought. But what she said was, “Thank you.”
“Fine. We will begin the external examination.” With the help of an assistant, Dr. Patel unzipped the body bag, making a metallic chattering sound. The zipper opened from the top to the bottom and the widening opening at the top showed a V-slit of a gray human mask. The coroner and his assistant made quick work of slipping the body out of the bag and repositioning it on the table, then quickly covering its privates with a white sheet. Judy’s nausea surged at the sight. It was the dead body of Angelo Coluzzi.
“This is the case of Angelo Coluzzi,” Dr. Patel said, pronouncing the Italian name perfectly as he read it and a case number from a large yellow tag that hung from the body’s big toe. The coroner projected his voice in the direction of a black microphone that hung from the ceiling over the body. “Subject was brought into the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office on April seventeenth. Subject is an eighty-year-old male Caucasian.”
Judy was about to look away again but stopped. She may have been an artist at heart, but she was a lawyer by profession. She had to understand everything about the facts to build her defense. There was a dead body at the crux of every murder case; it couldn’t, and shouldn’t, be avoided. Especially when this dead body was her client’s handiwork. The thought struck her that maybe that was part of the problem, which was also as it should be. It was easier to confront her art than her profession, but she was responsible for both. She told herself, So take responsibility. Look at the act you’re about to defend. Decide if he’s innocent or guilty. Judy’s eyes narrowed and her stomach tensed. She took a good look, and it repulsed her.
His face was bone-white in places and gray in the hollow of his cheeks and around his eyes, which were closed so tightly they seemed glued shut. Sparse gray hair sprung haphazardly from his scalp, which was as bald as Pigeon Tony’s. His nose protruded from gaunt cheeks, a bulbous shape with a breach at the bridge; it looked as if it had been broken long ago. His lips, flat in death, looked thin. Although Angelo Coluzzi’s head rested roughly in line with his backbone, even Judy’s untrained eye could see that its location was tenuous. His head wasn’t firmly attached to anything; only skin and muscle held it to the body. Judy realized that a broken neck was essentially a beheading. She closed her eyes briefly. How could one human being do this to another? How could Pigeon Tony do this to anyone?
“The first step in the external examination is easy,” Dr. Patel was saying. “The body must be measured and those measurements recorded for the case file.” He selected a common yardstick from the table of medical instruments and began measuring various parts of Angelo Coluzzi’s body, dictating the findings into the microphone. Judy barely listened, except to hear that the body weighed only 155 pounds and measured a mere 67 inches.
As the coroner read his other measurements, Judy’s horrified gaze traveled down Angelo Coluzzi’s body, which was skinny, his chest almost wasted and his upper arms withered with age. His hands had been bagged in clear plastic with a loose rubber band, but Judy could see they were arthritic. His hips jutted from above the discreet white sheet, and his legs rested slightly open, their calf muscles slack. Blood had collected along the backside of Angelo Coluzzi’s body, drawn by gravity once his heart had stopped, making a grim outline around his frail form.
Judy hadn’t expected that, hadn’t expected any of it. She had imagined that Angelo Coluzzi would be a tall, strong man. A big bully, a brute. But in death he took up only a little over half of the tray table. His were the remains of a bony old man. The body of a frail victim. Her client’s victim. A wave of emotion swept over her, stronger than the earlier nausea but kin to it, a sensation of ugliness that left her feeling sorrowful and sad. A vendetta was a living thing, and it could kill. It could do this, to an old man.
“Now we will note for the record the external abnormalities in the body,” Dr. Patel was saying, for Judy’s benefit. She watched as he gestured to Coluzzi’s broken neck. “There is slight bruising in the neck region, and the neck is at a distinctly abnormal angle in relation to the spine.”
Judy blinked, sickened, but the district attorney opened a fresh legal pad. “Wasn’t he strangled?” he asked, his pen poised for a note. “Looks like he could’ve been strangled, with the bruising on the neck and all.”
“I think not. Let me explain. Here, see.” Dr. Patel turned to an oversize manila folder on the side table, slid a large, dark X ray from it, and with a loud rustling noise tucked the X ray under the clamp on a light box on the near wall. Judy shakily retrieved a pen and a legal pad from her backpack as Dr. Patel switched on the light box. The box illuminated the X ray, a close-up of the miraculous tongue-in-groove vertebrae of the human backbone. But you didn’t have to be a doctor to know that something was terribly wrong with this backbone. It was disconnected at the base of a shadowy skull. Dr. Patel pointed calmly to the film. “We took these X rays when he first came in, the same time as the photos. You can see the fracture to the spinal column, at C3. A fracture that high up, death would have been instantaneous.”
“But he could have been strangled, couldn’t he? I mean, the bruises to the neck look like it was squeezed,” the district attorney asked again, but Dr. Patel shook his head, apparently willing only to state facts the science would support.
“No, the neck wasn’t squeezed. The bleeding you see is internal. The victim was not strangled to death. In the cases of strangulation, or asphyxia, one always sees petechial hemorrhages on the conjunctiva.” Dr. Patel turned back to the body and with a gloved thumb suddenly opened wide the eye of Angelo Coluzzi. Judy startled at the odd sight of the one-eyed corpse, his brown cornea clouded. Dr. Patel was pointing to the flap of the eyelid. “See? There is no blood clotting on the membrane lining the eye, not at all. So there was no loss of oxygen that resulted in death. We are getting ahead of ourselves here”—at this he gave an uncomfortable laugh—“but my initial conclusion is that the cause of death was the fracture to the neck. Death would have been instantaneous. This man did not suffer.”
Judy realized where the D.A. was going, and it wasn’t concern over the man’s suffering. He wanted to prove that the murder was premeditated. The law in Pennsylvania was that premeditation wasn’t a question of time, as in weeks or days in advance, but could occur in an instant, as long as death was the intended result. Strangulation was a slam-dunk for premeditation. Judy didn’t know if she was allowed to ask questions at an autopsy, but figured if the D.A. could, she could, too. And she had more than a legal reason for asking this one. “Dr. Patel, you said the victim’s neck was broken. Is that difficult to do?”