Marino and I slipped in with the silence of a couple arriving late for a movie, then we lost each other in the dark. I suspected he found a wall, since he had trouble with his balance in situations like this. It was easy to get almost mesmerized and begin to sway. I moved close to the steel table, where dark shapes surrounded Davila’s body, a finger of light exploring his ruined head.
‘I would like one of the casts for comparison,’ someone was saying.
‘We’ve got photos of the shoe prints. I’ve got some here.’ I recognized Commander Penn’s voice.
‘That would be good.’
‘The labs have the casts.’
‘Yours?’
‘No, not ours,’ said Commander Penn. ‘NYPD’s.’
‘This area of abrasion and patterned contusion right here is from the heel.’ The light stopped below the left ear. ‘The wavy lines are fairly clear and I see no trace embedded in the abrasion. There’s also this pattern right here. I can’t make it out. This contusion, uh, sort of a blotch with a little tail. I don’t know what that is.’
‘We can try image enhancement.’
‘Right, right.’
‘What about his ear itself? Any pattern?’
‘It’s hard to tell, but it’s split versus cut. The jagged edges are nonabraded and connected by tissue bridges. And I would say based on this curved laceration right down here’ – the latex-sheathed finger pointed – ‘the heel smashed the ear.’
‘That’s why it’s split.’
‘A single blow delivered with great force.’
‘Enough to kill him?’
‘Maybe. We’ll see. My guess is he’s going to have fractures of the left temporal parietal skull and a big epidural hemorrhage.’
‘That’s what I bet.’
The gloved hands manipulated forceps and the light. A hair, black and about six inches long, clung to the bloody collar of Davila’s commando sweater. The hair was collected and placed in an envelope as I worked my way through thick darkness, finding the door. Returning my tinted glasses to a cart, I slipped out. Marino was right behind me.
‘If that hair’s his,’ he said in the corridor, ‘then he’s dyed it again.’
‘I would expect him to have done that,’ I said, envisioning the silhouette I had seen last night. Gault’s face was very white but, I could not tell about his hair.
‘So he’s not a redhead anymore.’
‘By now he may have purple hair, for all we know.’
‘He keeps changing his hair like that, maybe it will fall out.’
‘Not likely,’ I said. ‘But the hair may not be his. Dr. Jonas has dark hair about that long, and she was hovered over the body for a while last night.’
We were in gowns, gloves and masks and looked like a team of surgeons about to perform some remarkable procedure like a heart transplant. Men were carrying in a shipment of pitiful pine boxes destined for Potter’s Field, and behind glass, the morning’s autopsies had begun. There were only five cases so far, one of them a child who obviously had died violently. Marino averted his gaze.
‘Shit,’ he muttered, his face dark red. ‘What a way to start your day.’
I did not respond.
‘Davila’d only been married two months.’
There was nothing I could say.
‘I talked to a couple guys who knew him.’
The personal effects of the crack addict named Benny had been unceremoniously heaped on table four, and I decided to move them farther away from the dead child.
‘He always wanted to be a cop. I hear that all the damn time.’
The trash bags were heavy, a foul odor drifting from the top of them, where they were tied. I began carrying them over to table eight.
‘You tell me why anybody wants to do this?’ Marino was getting more furious as he grabbed a bag and followed me.
‘We want to make a difference,’ I said. ‘We want to somehow make things better.’
‘Right,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Davila sure as hell made a difference. He sure as hell made things better.’
‘Don’t take that away from him,’ I said. ‘The good he did and might have done is all he has left.’
A Stryker saw started, water drummed and X-rays bared bullets and bones in this theater with its silent audience and actors that were dead. Momentarily, Commander Penn walked in, eyes exhausted above her mask. She was accompanied by a dark young man she introduced as Detective Maier. He showed us the photographs of tread patterns left in the snows of Central Park.