“Chuck, put those in formalin,” I said. “We’ll want to save them.”
He was sullen, screwing the lid off a plastic quart jar.
“Let’s turn him,” I said.
Marino helped us flip the body facedown. I found more dirt, mostly on the buttocks, and got swabs of that, too. I saw no injuries, only an area over the right upper back that seemed darker than the skin around it. I looked at it
through a lens, staring, blanking out my thought process as I always did when looking for pattern injuries, bite marks or other elusive evidence. It was like scuba diving in water with almost no visibility. All I could make out were shades and shapes and wait until I bumped into something.
“Do you see this, Marino? Or is it just my imagination?” I asked.
He sniffed more Vicks vapors up his nose and leaned against the table. He looked and looked.
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know.”
I wiped off the skin with a wet towel, and the outer layer, or epidermis, slipped right off. The flesh beneath, or dermis, looked like soggy brown corrugated paper stained with dark ink.
“A tattoo.” I was pretty sure. “The ink penetrated to the dermis, but I can’t make out anything. Just a big splotch.”
“Like one of those purple birthmarks some people have,” Marino offered.
I leaned closer with the lens and adjusted a surgical lamp to its best advantage. Ruffin was obsessively polishing a stainless steel countertop and pouting.
“Let’s try UV,” I decided.
The multiband ultraviolet lamp was very simple to use and looked rather much like the handheld scanners in airports. We dimmed the lights and I tried longwave UV first, holding the lamp close to the area I was interested in. Nothing fluoresced, but a hint of purple seemed to feather out in a pattern, and I wondered if this might mean we were picking up white ink. Under UV light, anything white, such as the sheet on the nearby gurney, will radiate like snow in moonlight and possibly pick up a blush of violet from the lamp. I slid the selector down and tried shortwave next. I could see no difference between the two.
“Lights;” I said.
Ruffin turned them up.
“I would think tattoo ink would light up like neon,” Marino said.
“Fluorescent inks do,” I replied. “But since high concentrations of iodine and mercury aren’t so great for your health, they’re not used anymore.”
It was past noon when I finally began the autopsy, making the Y incision and removing the breastplate of ribs. I found pretty much what I expected. The organs were soft and friable. They virtually fell apart at the touch and I had to be very careful when weighing and sectioning them. I couldn’t tell much about the coronary arteries except that they were not occluded. There was no blood left, only the putrefied fluid called oily effusate that I collected from the pleural cavity. The brain was liquefied.
“Samples of the brain and the effusate go to tox for a STAT alcohol,” I said to Ruffin as I worked.
Urine and bile had seeped through the cells of their hollow organs and were gone, and there .was nothing left of the stomach. But when I reflected back flesh from the skull, I thought I had my answer. He had staining of the petrous ridge of the temporal bones and mastoid air cells, bilaterally.
Although I couldn’t diagnose anything with certainty until all toxicology results were back, I was fairly certain this man had drowned.
“What?” Marino was staring at me.
“See the staining here?” I pointed it out. “Tremendous hemorrhaging, probably while he struggled as he was drowning:”
The phone rang and Ruffin trotted over to answer it.
“When’s the last time you dealt with Interpol?” I asked Marino.
“Five, maybe six years ago, when that fugitive from Greece ended up over here and got in a fight in a bar off Hull Street.”
“There certainly are international connections in this one. And if he’s missing in France, England, Belgium or God knows where, if he’s some sort of international fugitive, we’re never going to know it here in Richmond unless Interpol can link him with someone in their computer system.”