'Move it down, right about here. Good, thanks.' Rader collected more fibers as disembodied voices continued to converse in a darkness as thick as velvet.
Finally, I confessed, 'I find this very unusual. Generally I associate so much trace with someone who has been wrapped in a dirty blanket or transported in the trunk of a car.'
'It's obvious she hasn't bathed lately, and it's winter,' Rader said as he moved the fiber-optic cable, illuminating a faint childhood scar from a smallpox inoculation. 'She may have been wearing the same clothing for days, and if she traveled on the subway or by bus, she could have collected a lot of debris.'
What this added up to was an indigent woman who had not been reported missing as far as we could tell because she had no home, no one who knew or cared she was gone. She was the tragically typical street person, we assumed, until we got her on table six in the autopsy room, where forensic dentist Dr. Graham waited to chart her teeth.
A broad-shouldered young man with an air of abstraction that I associated with medical school professors, he was an oral surgeon on Staten Island when he worked on the living. But today was his day to work on those who complained with silent tongues, which he did for a fee that probably would not cover his taxi fare and lunch. Rigor mortis was set, and like an obstinate child who hates the dentist, the dead woman would not cooperate. He finally pried her jaws open with a thin file.
'Well Merry Christmas,' he said, moving a bright light close. 'She's got a mouth full of gold.'
'Most curious,' Horowitz said, like a mathematician pondering a problem.
'These are gold foil restorations.' Graham began "pointing out kidney bean-shaped gold fillings near the gum line of each front tooth. 'She has them here and here and here.' He pointed again and again. 'Six in all. This is just very rare. In fact, I've never seen it. Not in a morgue.'
'What the hell is gold foil?' Marino asked.
'It's a pain in the ass, is what it is,' said Graham. 'A very difficult, unattractive restoration.'
'I believe in the old days, they were required to pass your dental license exam,' I said.
'That's right.' Graham continued to work. 'The students hated them.'
He went on to explain that gold foil restorations required the dentist to pound gold pellets into a tooth, and the slightest bit of moisture would cause the filling to fall out. Although the restorations were very good, they were labor intensive, painful and expensive.
'And not many patients,' he added, 'want gold showing, especially on the facial surface of their front teeth.'
He continued charting various repairs, extractions, shapes and misshapes that made this woman who she was. She had a slightly open bite and a semicircular wear pattern to her front teeth possibly consistent with her biting down on a pipe, since it was reported to him that she had been seen with a pipe.
'If she was a chronic pipe smoker, wouldn't you expect her teeth to be stained from tobacco?' I said, for I saw no evidence of it.
'Possibly. But look at how eroded her tooth surfaces are - these scooped-out areas at the gum line that required the gold foil.' He showed us. 'The major damage to her teeth is consistent with obsessive overbrushing.'
'So if she brushed the hell out of her teeth ten times a day, she's not going to have tobacco stains,' Marino said.
'Brushing the hell out of her teeth doesn't fit with her poor hygiene,' I commented. 'In fact, her mouth seems inconsistent with everything else about her.'
'Can you tell when she had this work done?' Rader asked.
'Not really,' Graham said as he continued probing. 'But it is consistently good. I'd say it was probably the same dentist who did all of it, and about the only area in the country where you find gold foil restorations still being done is the West Coast.'
'I'm wondering how you can know that,' Detective O'Donnell said to him.
'You can only get these restorations done where there are dentists who still do them. I don't do them. I personally don't know anybody who does them. But there is an organization called the American Academy of Gold Foil Operators that has several hundred members - dentists who pride themselves on still doing this particular restoration. And the largest concentration of them is in Washington State.'
'Why would someone want a restoration like this?' O'Donnell then asked.
'Gold lasts a long time.' Graham glanced up at him. 'There are people who are nervous about what is put into their mouths. The chemicals in composite white fillings supposedly can cause nerve damage. They stain and wear out more quickly. Some people believe silver causes everything from cystic fibrosis to hair loss.'
Then Marino spoke. 'Yo, well, some squirrels just like the way gold looks.'
'Some do,' Graham agreed. 'She might be one of those.'
But I did not think so. This woman did not strike me as one who cared about her appearance.
I suspected she had not shaved her head to make a statement or because she thought it looked trendy. As we began to explore her internally, I understood more, even as the mystery of her deepened.
She had undergone a hysterectomy that had removed her uterus vaginally and left her ovaries, and her feet were flat. She also had an old intracerebral hematoma in the frontal lobe of her brain from a coup injury that had fractured her skull beneath the scars we had found.
'She was the victim of an assault, possibly many years ago,' I said. 'And it's the sort of head injury you associate with personality change.' I thought of her wandering the world and of no one missing her. 'She probably was estranged from her family and had a seizure disorder.'
Horowitz turned to Rader. 'See if we can put a rush on tox. Let's check her for diphenylhydantoin.'
5
Little could be done the rest of the day. The city's mind was on Christmas, and laboratories and most offices were closed. Marino and I walked several blocks toward Central Park before stopping at a Greek coffee shop, where I drank coffee because I could not eat. Then we found a cab.
Wesley was not in his room. I returned to mine and for a long time stood before the window looking out at dark, tangled trees and black rocks amid snowy expanses of the park. The sky was gray and heavy. I could not see the ice-skating rink, nor the fountain where the murdered woman was found. Though I had not been on the scene when her body was, I had studied the photographs. What Gault had done was horrible, and I wondered where he was right now.
I could not count the violent deaths I had worked since my career began, yet I understood many of them better than I let on from the witness stand. It is not difficult to comprehend people being so enraged, drugged, frightened or crazy that they kill.
Even psychopaths have their own twisted logic. But Temple Brooks Gault seemed beyond description or deciphering.
His first encounter with the criminal justice system had been less than five years ago when he was drinking White Russians in a bar in Abingdon, Virginia. An intoxicated truck driver, who did not like effeminate males, began to harass Gault, who had a black belt in karate. Without a word, Gault smiled his strange smile. He got up, spun around and kicked the man in the head. Half a dozen off-duty state troopers happened to be at a nearby table, which was perhaps the only reason Gault was caught and charged with manslaughter.
His career in Virginia's state penitentiary was brief and bizarre. He became the pet of a corrupt warden, who falsified Gault's identity, facilitating his escape. Gault had been out but a very short time before he happened upon a boy named Eddie Heath and killed him in much the same style he had butchered the woman in Central Park. He went on to murder my morgue supervisor, the prison warden and the prison guard named Helen. At the time, Gault was thirty-one years old.
Flakes of -snow had begun to drift past my window and in the distance were caught like fog in trees. Hoofs rang against pavement as a horse-drawn carriage went by with two passengers bundled in plaid blankets. The white mare was old and not surefooted, and when she slipped the driver beat her savagely. Other horses looked on in sad relief against the weather, heads down, coats unkempt, and I felt rage rise in my throat like bile. My heart beat furiously. I suddenly swung around as someone knocked on my door.