Davis thought, I really don’t need this. He said, “Let’s hear what the medical examiner has to say.”
Echevarria led inside the morgue, no doubt familiar turf for an officer of the Bogotá Special Investigations Unit. The place looked and smelled like every other morgue Davis had visited. Clammy and cool, the schizophrenic lighting was eerily subdued in some quarters, and blazed like a supernova in others. The decorator had settled on gray as the dominant color, walls the hue of a battleship, a spalled concrete floor, and dull steel furnishings. At the far end of the room were two sheet-shrouded metal tables under harsh examination lights. A woman in scrubs was waiting. More greetings were exchanged with the medical examiner, a genial woman named Rosa Guzman, and she launched right into her briefing. Thankfully, her English was superb.
“All remains from the crash site have been brought here to our facility. Last night I performed postmortems on the two pilots. As requested by Colonel Marquez, this was our first priority due to the evidence of gunshot wounds.”
Arriving at the first examining table, Davis recognized the copilot, Moreno. The autopsy had run its course, and he’d been stitched back together with all possible dignity and left in a restful supine pose. The body was very different from how Davis had last seen it, sprawled on top of the captain and wedged against a circuit breaker panel. Guzman launched into a detailed summary of her findings, much of which went over Davis’ head. Professionals everywhere liked to impress laymen. The salient points for Davis: Moreno had been shot once at close range in the back of the head, and he displayed a host of other injuries that had likely occurred after death, all of these consistent with the trauma of an air crash.
When she finished, Marquez and Echevarria seemed satisfied.
Davis asked, “Can you tell what time he died?”
Guzman referenced a clipboard hanging from a hook on the examining table. “I set the time at nine o’clock on the night of the crash.”
“One hour after takeoff,” Marquez said helpfully.
Davis looked at Marquez, then the ME. “Exactly nine o’clock? That’s pretty precise. Isn’t there usually a window?” Davis saw an exchange of confused glances, and he realized his linguistic error. “I mean, isn’t there a range?”
Guzman said, “There are always assumptions in such estimates. The postmortem interval, the time between death and when I examined the victim, was nearly two days, so, yes, there is definitely room for error. I would say plus or minus three hours is a certainty.”
Davis nodded, and he asked no more questions. Neither did anyone else, and they moved on to Captain Reyna.
The captain’s body was in worse shape. Same sutures, same restful pose, but bearing the severe cranial damage Davis had noted in the field. Guzman’s second briefing was much like the first, and she looked directly at him when she said, “The time of death is roughly consistent.”
“Roughly,” Davis said.
“If anything, it might be a bit earlier.” Guzman pointed to an advancing green hue on Reyna’s stomach. “That is putrefaction, bacteria beginning the process of decay. It is more advanced in this body, but not significantly so.”
Echevarria launched into an extensive line of questions regarding the bullet entry and exit wounds, which Guzman tackled capably. He then asked Marquez, “Have you found the slugs yet?”
Marquez replied defensively, “We are in the process of recovering an entire airliner from a jungle basin. It will take time to find and identify every small piece of debris.”
“This shooting should be your most important task,” the policeman countered with newfound gravity. “I am going to send my own team to the crash site. Clearly we are facing a criminal investigation.”
“Do as you like,” said Marquez, “but they will not be riding on my helicopter.”
With that the floodgates opened. Marquez and Echevarria began a hushed argument that reverted to Spanish. Fingers jabbed the air, and soon they withdrew to an office to take turns using the phone — apparently cell reception in the basement was nil. When Guzman left to play referee, Davis saw his chance.
Still standing beside Reyna’s body, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the ink pens he’d pilfered the previous night. Having already unscrewed the tops, he extracted one plastic ink sleeve and cracked it between his fingers. He rubbed the resulting seepage of ink over Reyna’s right thumb, and then pulled out the Post-it notepad. He rolled Reyna’s finger over the pad, but there was too much ink and his first result was nothing but a blotchy mess. With a glance at the glass barrier between the examination room and the office, he discarded the top note and tried again. This time he got a crude but usable print.
Guzman reappeared and Davis pocketed everything, his fingers working blindly to fold an unused note from the pad over the good impression.
Guzman gave him a suffering look as the donnybrook continued in her office. “Is there anything else I can tell you?” she asked.
“Actually, there is,” he replied. “I’d like to take a quick look at another body — one of the passengers.”
“You have the name or identity tag number?”
“Thomas Mulligan.”
Guzman checked a board on the wall, found the name, and led Davis toward a row of holding drawers.
“Have you inspected this body yet?” he asked as she was reaching for a handle.
“No, a technician does our receiving, and I’ve been busy examining the pilots.” She pulled out the drawer and looked at Thomas Mulligan for the first time.
Davis watched Guzman. He saw the recognition in her eyes.
Then the surprise on her face.
How the world around him worked had long been a mystery to Martin Stuyvesant. It was the simple things that most bedeviled him. His father, rarely present in his youth, had never taught him how to use a screwdriver or shut off the water to a toilet. His mother, rarely sober, had never taught him how to cook, although one of her less surly lovers, a tattoo-sleeved short order cook, had once given a rambling dissertation regarding the various grades of deep-fryer oil. Some years ago Stuyvesant had misplaced his wallet and left it at that — an imperceptible loss really, since he rarely had cash to carry in it, and because he didn’t keep a driver’s license since he didn’t own a car. The everyday machinations of life did not exist for Stuyvesant, which at times simplified things. The downside was that it made him highly dependent on others.
Presently he was standing behind a cauldron of stew in a south Tampa soup kitchen, ladling a large helping of chipped beef onto a mound of mashed potatoes. The glutinous concoction spread a bit too far, slopping over the side of the plate, and from there onto the shoe of his customer.
“Goddammit!” croaked the man, a ruffian of no less than sixty who sported a week’s gray stubble on his deeply lined face.
“I’m so sorry,” said Stuyvesant, not that he really was. Ungrateful bastard.
The old man wiped his shoe on the opposite trouser cuff and moved on.
“Not such a large portion,” whispered the kindly woman to his left who was dishing out the potatoes.
The line shifted, and Stuyvesant dropped another, smaller dollop onto the next mound of instant spuds.
“It’s really quite tasty,” Stuyvesant said to the woman. She was the lead volunteer, and the two of them had already shared an early lunch before she’d put him to work as a server. She was the usual sort one came across in these places, a well-meaning woman, perhaps slightly younger than Stuyvesant. He thought her attractive, in an oddly philanthropic way. During lunch she’d thanked him for volunteering, and told him she wished there were more people like him who were willing to pitch in and help, her entire sermon interspersed with lamentations about the shelter’s lack of funds. Stuyvesant feigned interest while casting fleeting glances at the deep cleavage behind her earth-tone smock — made from recycled plastic bags — and by the end of the apple cobbler she had twice decisively brushed his hand from her knee. It was a silly fantasy, but one of the few pleasures Stuyvesant managed anymore. He had a wife, somewhere, but the relationship had long existed only on paper.