"Have you seen Detective Soldano?" Jack asked.
"He was here earlier but left to go down to the morgue," Sergeant Murphy said.
"Did he ask you about the unidentified floater that came in last night?"
"He did, and I told him the only missing-person report filed overnight was for a woman."
Jack thanked the sergeant and managed to catch up to Vinnie, who'd summoned the back elevator. Downstairs, Jack found Lou in the locker room, already suited up in a Tyvek coverall, which had replaced the far more bulky protective moon suits except for known exceptionally infectious cases.
As Jack quickly changed into scrubs, Lou couldn't help but notice the swelling and discoloration of Jack's injured knee.
"That doesn't look so good," Lou commented. "Are you sure you should be doing these posts?"
"Actually it's gotten better," Jack said. "I just have to baby it until Thursday, when it's scheduled to be repaired. That's what the crutches are for. I could do without them, but using them is a constant reminder."
"You're having it operated on so soon?" Lou questioned. "My ex-brother-in-law had an ACL tear, and he had to wait six months before having it fixed."
"The sooner I have it, the better, as far as I am concerned," Jack said as he climbed into a Tyvek coverall. "The quicker I get back to my bike and, hopefully, my b-ball, the saner I'll be. The competition and the physical exercise keep my demons at bay."
"Now that you remarried, are you still tormented by what happened to your family?"
Jack stopped and stared at Lou as if he couldn't believe Lou had asked such a question. "I'm always going to be tormented. It's just a matter of degree." Jack had lost his wife of ten years and two daughters, aged ten and eleven, to a commuter plane crash fifteen years earlier.
"What does Laurie think of you having surgery so soon?"
Jack's lower jaw slowly dropped open. "What is this?" he questioned with obvious irritation. "Is this some kind of conspiracy? Has Laurie been talking to you about this behind my back?"
"Hey!" Lou voiced, raising his hands as if to fend off an attack. "Calm down! Don't be so paranoid! I'm just asking, trying to be a friend."
Jack went back to finishing his suiting up. "I'm sorry to jump on you. It's just that Laurie has been on my case to postpone my surgery since it was scheduled. I'm a little touchy about it because I want the damn thing fixed."
"Understood," Lou said.
With hoods in place and tiny, battery-powered fans recirculating the air through high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters, the two men entered the windowless autopsy room, which had not been upgraded for almost fifty years. The eight stainless-steel autopsy tables bore witness to the approximately five hundred thousand bodies that had been painstakingly disassembled to reveal their forensic secrets. Over each table hung an old-fashioned spring-loaded scale and a microphone for dictation. Along one wall were Formica countertops and soapstone sinks for washing out intestines, and along another wall were floor-to-ceiling glass-enclosed instrument cabinets, the contents of which looked like something that should have been in a house of horrors. Next to them were backlit x-ray view boxes. The whole scene was awash in a stark blue-white light coming from banks of ceiling-mounted fluorescent fixtures. The illumination appeared to suck the color out of everything in the room, especially the ghostly pale corpse on the nearest table.
While Vinnie continued the preparations by getting out instruments, specimen bottles, preservatives, labels, syringes, and evidence custody tags, Jack and Lou went to the view box to look at the whole-body X-rays that Vinnie had put up. One was anterior-posterior; the other was lateral.
After checking the accession number, Jack gazed at the films. Then he said, "I think you are right."
"Right about what?" Lou asked.
"It being small-caliber," Jack said. He pointed to a cylindrical, half-centimeter-long translucent defect within the lower part of the skull's image. Composed of metal, bullets totally absorb X-rays, and since X-rays are viewed as negatives, the image appears in the color of the background illumination.
"Twenty-two-caliber would be my guess," Lou said, moving his face close to the film.
"I think you're also right about it being execution-style," Jack said. "From its position in the films, it's undoubtedly lodged in the brain stem, where a professional killer would aim. Let's take a look at the entrance wound."
With Vinnie's help, Jack rolled the corpse on its side. First, Jack took a digital photo. Then, with his gloved hand, he separated the hair covering the point where the bullet entered the victim's head. Since the victim had bobbed around in the Hudson River, most of the blood had been washed away.
"It's a near-contact wound," Jack said. "But certainly not contact, since it's a circular, not a stellate defect." He took another photo.
"How far away?" Lou questioned.
Jack shrugged. "By the looks of the stippling, I'd say somewhere around twelve inches. Noticing the position of the entrance wound in relation to the bullet's position on the X-ray, I'd guess the perpetrator was behind and above the victim, maybe with the victim seated. That's seemingly confirmed by slightly more stippling below the entrance wound than above."
"More weight to it being execution-style."
"I'd have to agree."
Jack took some measurements of the position of the wound, and another photo with a ruler in close proximity. Then, with a scalpel, he dislodged some of the embedded soot from within points of stippling. He put the material in a specimen tube. Finally, he took additional photos before motioning for Vinnie to allow the body to roll back into a supine position.
"What do you make of these deep slices across the thigh?" Lou asked, pointing to two parallel sharp cuts in the anterior aspect of the right thigh.
Jack took a photo before inspecting the wounds and palpating them. "They were certainly made by a sharp object," he said, looking at the clean edges. "There's no skin bridges. I'd guess they are propeller injuries, and I'd be willing to bet they were postmortem. I don't see any extravasated blood within the tissues."
"Do you think the victim could have been run over after being thrown from a boat?"
Jack nodded, but something more subtle caught his attention. Moving down to the ankles, he pointed out some oddly shaped abrasions.
"What is it?" Lou asked.
"I'm not sure," Jack said. He went over to the counter and hefted a dissecting microscope detached from its base. Bracing his elbows on the edge of the table, he studied the subtle abrasions.
"Well?" Lou questioned.
"I'm going out on a limb," Jack admitted, "but it looks as if his legs might have been tied with chains. There's not only abrasions but also suspiciously shaped indentations."