teased with Laurie earlier, the smell was the worst part.
At that time in the morning, Jack and Vinnie were the only ones in the
autopsy room. To Vinnie’s chagrin, Jack invariably insisted on getting a
jump on the day. Frequently, Jack was finishing his first case when his
colleagues were just starting theirs.
The first order of business was to look at the X rays, and Jack snapped
them up on the viewer. With his hands on his hips, Jack took a step back
and gazed at the anterioposterior full-body shot. With no head and no
hands, the image was decidedly abnormal, like the X ray of some
primitive, nonhuman creature. The other abnormality was a bright, dense
blob of shotgun pellets in the area of the right upper quadrant. Jack’s
immediate impression was that there had been multiple shotgun blasts,
not just one. There were too many beebee-like pellets.
The pellets were opaque to the X rays and obscured any detail they
covered. On the light box they appeared white.
Jack was about to switch his attention to the lateral X ray when
something about the opacity caught his attention. At two locations the
periphery appeared strange, more lumpy than the usual beebee contour.
Jack looked at the lateral film and saw the same phenomena. His first
impression was that the shotgun blasts might have carried some
radio-opaque material into the wound. Perhaps it had been some part of
the victim’s clothing.
‘Whenever you’re ready, Maestro,’ Vinnie called out. He had everything
prepared.
Jack turned from the X-ray view box and approached the autopsy table.
The floater was ghastly pale in the raw fluorescent light. Whoever the
victim had been, he’d been relatively obese and had not made any recent
trips to the Caribbean.
‘To use one of your favorite quotes,’ Vinnie said. ‘It doesn’t look like
he’s going to make it to the prom.’
Jack smiled at Vinnie’s black humor. It was much more in keeping with
his personality, suggesting that he had recovered from his early-morning
pique.
The body was in sad shape although bobbing around in the water had
washed it clean. The good news was that it had obviously been in the
water for only a short time. The trauma went far beyond the multiple
shotgun blasts to the upper abdomen. Not only were the head and the
hands hacked off, but there was a series of wide, deep gashes in the
torso and thighs that exposed swaths of greasy adipose tissue. The edges
of all the wounds were ragged.
‘Looks like the fish have been having a banquet,’ Jack said.
‘Oh, gross!’ Vinnie commented.
The shotgun blasts had bared and damaged many of the internal abdominal
organs. Some strands of intestines were visible as was one dangling
kidney.
Jack picked up one of the arms and looked at the exposed bones. ‘A
hacksaw would be my guess,’ he said.
‘What are all these huge cuts?’ Vinnie asked. ‘Somebody try to slice him
up like a holiday turkey?’
‘Nah, I’d guess he’d been run over with a boat,’ Jack said. ‘They look
like propeller injuries.’
Jack then began a careful examination of the exterior of the corpse.
With so much obvious trauma, he knew it was easy to miss more subtle
findings. He worked slowly, frequently stopping to photograph lesions.
His meticulousness paid off. At the ragged base of the neck just
anterior to the collarbone he found a small circular lesion. He found
another similar one on the left side below the rib cage.
‘What are they?’ Vinnie asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Jack said. ‘Puncture wounds of some sort.’
‘How many times do you suppose they shot him in the abdomen?’ Vinnie
asked.
‘Hard to say,’ Jack said.
‘Boy, they weren’t taking any chances,’ Vinnie said. ‘They sure as hell
wanted him dead.’
A half hour later, when Jack was about to commence the internal part of
the autopsy, the door opened and Laurie walked in. She was gowned and
held a mask to her face, but she didn’t have on her moon suit. Since she
was a stickler for rules and since moon suits were now required in the
‘pit,’ Jack was immediately suspicious.