The Disposable Man (2 page)

Tyler straightened, apparently unconcerned. “Doesn’t matter. That, though,” he added, pointing at the woods, “is something else. Did anyone think to restrict people to a single corridor in and out?”

Sheila smiled and pointed to a rock by the side of the road. “I put that there when I first got here. The rest of the way’s marked with surveyor tape.”

We lined up at the rock and gazed into the trees. Bright pink scraps of plastic ribbon, tied to branches twenty feet apart, stretched uphill into obscurity.

“I chose this spot because I saw fresh tracks over there,” Sheila added, pointing just beyond the parked cars. “Well,” she then corrected, “maybe not tracks exactly, but some crushed plants and scratch marks in the dirt.”

Tyler’s eyes gleamed. “Nice work.” He wandered over to appraise her discovery.

Ron Klesczewski turned toward our car. “I’ll call for one of the Fish Cops to see what they can pick up.”

The Fish Cops was the nickname for the wardens at Fish and Wildlife. The term was one of affection, since we all knew the best of them could track a squirrel over bedrock. At least that’s what they had us believing.

“Sheila,” J.P. called out. “Where did you say the body was?”

She pointed into the woods. “ ’Bout a quarter mile that way.”

He returned to us, his brow furrowed. “Whoever it was wasn’t taking any chances. Looks like he took a route where he could leave as few tracks as possible.”

Each of us hauling one of Tyler’s cases, we set out on Sheila’s blazed trail, leaving Ron behind to radio in. Five feet into the woods, it became obvious that protecting the integrity of a potential crime scene wasn’t the only reason to have marked a pathway. The surrounding trees became almost instantly indistinguishable from one another, looking as dense and untouched as remote Canadian hinterland. Without those plastic pink flashes of color, we would have been hard-pressed to know what direction to take, or how to find our way back to the road.

One hundred and fifty years earlier, Vermont had consisted almost entirely of farmland and pasture, wrested from a prehistoric virgin forest that had given the lumber industry a lucrative start. Now, some eighty percent of the state looked like our present dense surroundings and gave visiting tourists the erroneous impression that they were traveling the same paths used by the Abnaki Indians. Only the odd stone foundation or field wall gave a clue to the truth.

Several hundred yards up our gentle ascent, the trees thinned out, the earth beneath us yielding to moss and lichen-covered rock, and we found ourselves following the spine of a long, rocky crest, like ants traveling the length of a sleeping dinosaur. Here the surveyor’s tape was pinned in place by small stones.

“Clever,” Tyler said. “A spur of this same surface is what I noticed near the road, where those scratchings were. Guy obviously knew the terrain.”

“Unless,” Sheila cautioned, almost hopefully, “we’re talking about a hiker who just tripped and broke his neck.”

J.P. didn’t bother looking back. “Wearing a business suit?”

No one answered him.

There was no view from the ridge. The forest surrounding the outcropping we were traveling was too tall to allow for one. But it was brighter, and a small breeze brushed our faces, easing the claustrophobia of moments earlier.

The figure of a man suddenly rose as from the earth itself, standing up near the edge of the clearing. He waved at us. “Hey, Lieutenant. Over here.”

Patrolman Ward Washburn came our way, speaking as he approached. “The quarry’s right there. It was kind of hard to rope off.”

He led us to the edge of a sudden drop-off—a small quarry cut into the stone like a bite into a wheel of cheese. A yellow streamer of tape marked “Police—Do Not Cross” lay awkwardly on the stone, until it reached the woods at the foot of the quarry and began looping more authoritatively from tree to tree. Between the base of the small cliff we were standing on and those woods, nestled in the palm of the crescent-shaped quarry, was a pool of dark, shallow, stagnant water. Face down in its middle floated a small, thin man, spread-eagled, his arms extended as though desperately signaling a bus to stop.

The odd thing about him, though, wasn’t his attire, which looked like a throwback to the fifties. It was more the lack of it. His feet were bare.

J.P. Tyler smiled slightly, at last wholly in his element. “Well, it ain’t no deer.”

ALFRED GOULD, THE ASSISTANT MEDICAL
examiner for Brattleboro, sat back on his heels by the water’s edge. The corpse, stiff with rigor mortis, lay face up in the embrace of a wide open body bag, like a wet, unpliable parody of a Christ figure. His face was a blotchy purple, his hands and feet puckered and made slightly translucent by prolonged immersion. And yet his distinctly Slavic features—those of a man at least in his sixties—were recognizable, if no longer terribly appealing. He hadn’t been in the water long enough to suffer real damage, nor had any aquatic animals chosen to make a meal of his face.

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.

“I don’t know,” I answered him. “I was just telling Dr. Hillstrom that we can’t find anything on him. We’re thinking he may be a foreigner, but that’s all we’ve got so far. My inner bloodhound got the better of me, I’m afraid. Hope you don’t mind.”

Turner’s face broke into a smile. “Hell, no. Good to see you again.”

Dr. Short was looking at me quizzically, entrails still cupped in his hands. “Why a foreigner?”

“The missing shoes and the clothing labels. If they’d been American, they wouldn’t have been removed.”

Short nodded thoughtfully. “Could be. The dental work reminds me of some of the horrors I saw in South America, out in the boonies—very crude.”

I approached the table and gazed down at the familiar face, cleaner now, slightly cut and blanched where the purplish lividity had been prevented by stones pressing against the flesh from the bottom of the shallow pool. Contrary to popular belief, floating bodies do so head-down, that part of their anatomy having the most mass. Hillstrom joined me.

“Right now, it appears cause of death was a ligature around the neck, as Dr. Gould surmised in his report,” she said. “Something as thin as piano wire—it’s almost an incision wound.”

“Never seen one of these before,” Ed Turner added, “’cept in that
Godfather
movie. Think it was a hit?”