The Disposable Man (3 page)

I merely shrugged.

He pointed at a damp pile on a distant counter. “We ran an ultraviolet lamp over him before and after we undressed him, to check for trace evidence. We didn’t find anything, so I removed all the pockets for the lab. Thought there might be drug residue or something.” He paused and then added, “You been having any action like that back home?”

I shook my head. “Not really. Were you pointing a finger specifically at South America, Bernie? Or just saying the guy’s dental work was from out of the country?”

Bernie Short was now weighing his burden in a large, shiny bowl attached to a scale. “No, no. I’m not
that
much of a world traveler. You’d have to have a forensic dentist or someone analyze the alloys in the fillings—different countries have different amalgam mixes.” He paused and then hedged his bet. “For all I know, he might’ve grown up in West Virginia and had some horse doctor work on his teeth.”

“I don’t think so,” Beverly Hillstrom said softly. She was standing at the body’s feet, examining his toes. “Did anyone take note of this?”

We all gathered around her. Harry spoke first, “They look like tattoos—one on each toe. Pretty faded, though. I can’t make it out.”

“I shouldn’t think you would,” Hillstrom said. “Unless I’m mistaken, these are Cyrillic letters.”

A long silence greeted her remark. She left us and crossed over to a phone mounted on the wall. She quickly punched in a few numbers and waited a moment. “Betty? Find Timothy Cox in my Rolodex, and if you can reach him, tell him I’ve got a tattoo I need interpreted—soon as he can. Thanks.”

She hung up and faced us. “A neurologist friend. Works upstairs. Spent five years in Moscow teaching. It’s worth a try. If he doesn’t know, we can go through more formal channels.”

“Absolutely,” I agreed. “Can you tell me any more about the garroting?”

“Not much,” Bernie Short said. “It was done from behind. Death was almost instantaneous, although not quite. We found scratches around the neck wound and some tissue under the nails, indicating the victim tried to claw the garrote away. It’s probably his own skin, although we’ll test its DNA to make sure it doesn’t belong to someone else. But that’s basically it, excepting a small laceration to the top of the head. He was definitely dead by the time he went underwater. Judging from my findings and the documentation Al sent with the body, I’d say someone pitched him into the quarry from the top of the small cliff. As you know, time of death is always tricky. Al’s notes say the body temperature was the same as the environment, so cooling was complete. Yet rigor was still in full force.”

He’d removed the bowel from the scale and was opening it lengthwise on the counter with a scalpel, checking its contents. “Notice the slight discoloration around the abdomen—a shade of light green in the right lower quadrant?” he asked.

I did see something that looked like bruising.

“First signs of putrefaction. On the other hand, while the corneas are cloudy, they haven’t begun to bulge, which they would’ve later on. Also, there’s no insect infestation. ’Course, the only skin exposed to the air were the heels—the rest being either clothed or underwater—and blowflies don’t like that part of the body much.”

“So maybe more than a day, probably less than two or three?” I interpreted.

Hillstrom patted my arm. “Very good, Lieutenant. We’ll have you in a lab coat yet. Unfortunately,” she added, glancing at Bernie Short and obviously using me to caution him, “he may also have been placed in a freezer for three years and then thawed. For all the tricks of our trade, I can still only guarantee that someone’s time of death occurred sometime between when he was last seen alive and when his body was discovered.”

Visibly abashed, Short resumed in a slightly quieter voice, “Two other details you might like: it looks like he had a moderate meal just a few hours before he died, although what it was I don’t know; and according to the lividity pattern, he was dumped not long after death, so he didn’t spend the night in a car trunk or something, although lividity overall was lessened by some pretty serious blood loss—the garrote cut into the carotid.”

I tried to ease him out of his embarrassment. “Tell me more about the scalp laceration.”

Short made a discouraging face. “Can’t say if it happened before or after death. There was some vegetable matter caught in his hair near the site, but I don’t know if it was related to the wound. He was pretty grubbed up.”

Ed Turner cleared his throat and motioned to an evidence envelope nearby. “What we collected’s in there, if you want to take a look. It’s mostly tiny bits and pieces, though—probably crap already in the water.”

“Incidentally,” Hillstrom said, “don’t take the suggestion that this man ate shortly before death as gospel. They’ve done endless studies, trying to pin a predictable rate to the digestive process and have gotten nowhere. Depending on a person’s metabolism and state of mind shortly before death, food’s been found in the stomach, far downstream, and everywhere in between, even hours following ingestion.”

She smiled and let her protégé off the hook with one additional comment: “Which doesn’t mean he didn’t eat shortly before he died.”

“There’s nothing else?” I asked in the brief silence following.

Short readied himself to cut through the scalp from ear to ear, just above the occipital portion of the dead man’s head, in order to expose the cranium and subsequently the brain.

“There might be,” Hillstrom admitted, nodding in his direction. “We’re not quite finished, and there are some tests to be done. We’ve taken blood, bile, vitreous humor, and urine samples for tox scans, along with a blood standard for DNA typing. It’s possible we’ll pick up something later as a result, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

Short, having finished his incision, peeled the face down under the victim’s chin like a rubber mask. He pointed to a small bloody stain on the glistening skull while Harry took a picture. “Definitely looks like that head laceration was perimortem.” He hesitated slightly under Hillstrom’s gaze and added, “I would guess it happened as he fell, since it’s not compatible with an attack wound—too minor. ’Course, that’s just a guess. He could’ve bumped his head before he even set eyes on the person who killed him.”

Hillstrom smiled. “No, I would agree with the first suggestion. It’s reasonable and logical.”

Short let out a small sigh and reached for the bone saw. As its high-pitched whine filled the room, Hillstrom resumed her conversation with me. “We took a complete set of X-rays and made a listing of all moles, scars, and signs of prior surgery for future reference, but I imagine his teeth and fingerprints alone will suffice if you ever come up with a possible identification.”

“Are you going to include a hair sample with the tox scans?” I asked.

She gave me a surprised look. Her answer, I guessed, was as much an olive branch to Short as a response to me. “That’s a good idea. I wouldn’t have thought of it, since drugs weren’t a known factor. But where identification is the goal, everything should be considered.”

I noticed Short smiling as he put aside the saw and began working the top of the cranium loose, and I realized that despite their curious way of communicating, they probably made a good team.

Bernie freed the skullcap and held its bowl-like interior up to the light. “Yeah—there’re no signs that blow to the head caused any cerebral damage.”

Hillstrom moved to look more closely, suddenly interested. “Yes, but see that yellow-green color on the inner table of the calvaria?”

“Tetracycline?” Short asked.

“Right,” she agreed, and explained to me, “tetracycline leaves a permanent stain here on everyone who’s ever used it. It’s a common enough finding in the U.S., where it’s routinely prescribed for infections, but it’s rarer in less developed countries. If the assumption is correct that this man is a foreigner, and of Slavic origins as his features suggest, this could be an interesting finding.”

“Can you determine what caused the infection?” I asked.

Short began to shake his head, but Hillstrom, for once not watching him, merely shrugged her shoulders, making him instantly freeze.

She was smiling as if to herself and said, “Well, there is one small test we could try—more for fun, really.”

She picked up a long, thin probe from the counter by her side, and stepped up to the corpse’s midriff. She took his uncircumcised penis in one hand and gently inserted the probe up his urethra. After a minute, she withdrew the probe and laid it back on the counter.

“Strictures?” Short asked.

She looked pleased. “Yes.” She turned to me. “I found an obstruction—probably scarring caused by a bout of gonorrhea, which could have been treated with tetracycline. It’s entirely conjectural, of course, so don’t take it too seriously. We have no way to really prove it. I just thought of it because of the tattoos and the man’s age. In a rough-and-tumble life, a man is likely to contract an STD at least once before he goes.”

The wall phone buzzed, and she crossed over to pick it up. “Hillstrom.”

She listened for several seconds, said, “Thank you, Betty,” and hung up, explaining, “I thought the wording might catch his attention. Tim’s on his way.”

I hadn’t bothered forming a mental image of Hillstrom’s Russian-speaking friend, but when he was shown through the door by one of her staff, I was somewhat taken aback. Instead of a skinny, stooped academic, with maybe a goatee and thick glasses, a man in the casual dress of a businessman—sport jacket and slacks—balding, sharp-eyed, broad-chested, and thin-lipped, entered the room as if he were about to address a board meeting.

“Beverly, what are you up to?” he demanded, taking the rest of us in with a glance and a curt nod.

Hillstrom knew better than to bother with introductions. She took Cox’s arm and led him to the autopsy table. “We have a John Doe with a curious set of toes. What do you make of them?”

Perching a pair of half-glasses on his nose, Timothy Cox bent at the waist and peered at the row of letters, keeping his hands by his sides. After no more than half a minute, he straightened back up, removed the glasses, jammed them into his breast pocket, and announced, “We’re tired.”

“That’s what they say?” I asked, after a moment’s stunned silence.

Cox allowed a small, pleased smile. “Right. In the old Soviet Army days, you’d mix an excess of vodka with boredom and a barracks artist, and this,” he pointed at the toes, “was often the result. It was considered a classic infantry badge, way back when.” He glanced up the table at the discolored face. “And judging from his looks, this guy’d be about the right age. My bet is you’ve got yourself an old-time Russkie here.”

I REACHED BRATTLEBORO LATE
that night. The trip home had been by the sepulchral gleam of a full moon, washing the tree-covered mountains and the undulating road with the colorless light of a hundred-year-old photograph. Vermont at night has always made me think of the eighteenth century, when its few inhabitants surrendered the darkened fields and forests to the mysterious elements that helped fuel Indian folklore on one side and settlers’ fears on the other. To this day, even in a car flying down the interstate, I see the vast spaces between the occasional lights as teeming with nocturnal life, most of which is watching me as I pass, a meaningless blur, no more than a shiver of wind.

I took Exit Two, considered checking in at the office, but turned right instead, toward West Brattleboro, making another right up Orchard Street, where I shared a house with Gail Zigman. It was time to be home—to be one of those glimmering lights.

Still, I paused on the street opposite our address, killing the engine to better savor the moment. The house was large—even enormous—with a garage, an attached barn, a back deck so big a huge maple looked comfortable sticking up through its middle. It was two and a half stories tall, Greek Revival in style, with white-painted wooden clapboards and a slate roof. It was surrounded by a lush, sloping lawn and sat in the moonlight like a display in some celestial shop window. Not long ago, it would have been as foreign to me as a mansion in Rhode Island. And now it was home.

It was Gail’s doing, of course. An erstwhile hippie of the sixties, come to Vermont to exchange a wealthy urban lifestyle for a nearby commune, she’d eventually migrated to town, become a successful Realtor, earned a place on half the boards available, been elected a selectman, and fallen in love with me. Now she had a dependable bank account, worked endless hours as a brand-new assistant state’s attorney, and was as happy as I’d ever seen her. It had been a long road, almost destroyed by a violent rape a few short years ago, and this house was the visible reward.

Which sometimes left me feeling a little odd. Briefly married, a widower for decades thereafter, I’d been a cop my whole adult life. I’d lived in this town since my mid-twenties, most of that time on the third floor of an ancient Victorian pile, in a cheap apartment remarkable only for the shabbiness of its furniture and its excessive assortment of books—my only recreation. The son of a farmer who’d fathered me late in life, I knew nothing of the financial achievements that had marked Gail’s past. The house opposite me was ours in name, and represented a move I’d made without regret, but I had yet to form an attachment to it. It remained the home a rich person would own, and within its embrace I always felt slightly like an intruder.

I restarted the engine and pulled into the driveway, the night abruptly torn away by the blinding glare of two motion-detector spotlights. Walking from the car to the kitchen door, fumbling with the several keys I needed to gain entry, I squinted up in vain at the stars for a final farewell, defeated by the artificial brightness. Perhaps that was another cause for my uneasiness with this house: it had been purchased after the rape, which had occurred in Gail’s own home, where she’d been happily living alone. This substitute, while fancier by far, was like the memorial of an event that would never fade from memory.

I found Gail in bed upstairs, surrounded by folders, legal briefs, and sheets of yellow notepaper. She didn’t usually work in bed, having an office down the hall, which prompted me to ask, “You okay?”