“So where are we?”
“You’re going to like this, Vince.”
Tony Bandolero handed him a magazine. Cardozo leafed through.
“What the hell’s this, gay porn?”
“It’s a leather goods catalogue, Vince, from a Greenwich Village sex shop called the Pleasure Trove. It is the place for leather and bondage goods.”
“This is part of the NYPD reference library?”
“Will you hear me out, Vince? The mask is handmade, and it’s in the catalogue, item number 706.”
6
THE M.E.’S OFFICE WAS located at Thirtieth Street and First Avenue in one of a complex of cinderblock buildings near Bellevue. A dark-haired girl was in charge of the lower-level reception desk, talking to a cop who wanted a receipt for a drop-off.
Cardozo gave her his name and asked to see the medical examiner.
The girl smiled at him prettily and consulted a clipboard hanging at the side of her desk. “He’s expecting you. Do you know the way?”
Cardozo nodded. He couldn’t help thinking she was awfully young to be working in a morgue.
He took the stairway to the subbasement with its depressingly familiar banks of overhead fluorescent lights and walls of latched stainless-steel body lockers. Drains dotted the cement floor at six-foot intervals.
This level was full of scurrying figures in white lab coats. Many of them, Cardozo knew, were medical students on the prowl for pregnant Jane Does. The city let them take the dead fetuses.
As he pushed through a door with heavy green rubber lips his nose was assaulted by a sudden stench of formaldehyde and human decay.
He saw at a glance that four of the tables in the cutting room were occupied. Three of the bodies, two white males and a black female, had had their rib cages split open, exposing the lungs and viscera. The fourth was covered. Beside each table stood a scale for weighing organs.
“Hey, Vince.” Dan Hippolito crossed the room. He was wearing a surgical smock and a rubber apron. He had pushed a curved Plexiglas face shield up over his receding hairline. “We just finished draining him and he’s ready. Right over here.”
Hippolito led Cardozo to the necropsy table where John Doe lay beneath a white sheet, his one leg jutting out with the foot at a slant. Hippolito gave the sheet a nudge and let it spill to the floor.
“The incisions on the chest are superficial, don’t mean anything. The skin coloring and neck contusions indicate asphyxia. Like I said before, looks like he was strangled. We’ll know for sure when we get to the lungs. The leg was cut off an hour, two hours after his heart stopped beating. The shear marks on the femoral bone were made by a rotary blade.”
“Dan, I don’t get it. Why take a dead leg?”
“That’s your field. I’ll tell you what happened, you figure out why. The left testicle, on the other hand, was cut off before death.”
Cardozo couldn’t believe he had missed it. “He lost a ball?”
Hippolito lifted the scrotum sac. Now Cardozo could see it. One testicle.
“How long before death?”
“Figure at least a year—it’s completely healed.”
“Did a doctor do it?”
“Either a doctor did it or a doctor stitched it.”
“Why would you take a ball off?”
“A lot of reasons. Like cancer maybe.”
“A guy this young?”
“The environment’s not healthy, Vince. You see pathologies developing early in a great many mammals. The reproductive organs are especially vulnerable.”
Hippolito pulled on a pair of heavy latex gloves. He removed the suction catheters from the dead man’s wrists. He angled the overhead light and began speaking into a microphone suspended over the table.
“The body is that of a young male Caucasian, twenty to twenty-two years of age, height approximately six feet, body weight prior to drainage one hundred forty-nine pounds, light weight due to absence of right leg, which has been severed at the midpoint of the femur. Left testicle missing. Superficial cutaneous cuts.”
He opened the dead man’s mouth and peered in.
“One filling, upper left second molar.”
Hippolito moved to the foot of the table, took hold of the ankle, and rotated it slowly.
“How is your little girl?” he said. “Still a real charmer?”
It made Cardozo uneasy to discuss his daughter in a room full of dead bodies. It seemed like inviting bad luck. “Fine, thanks. Terri’s just fine.”
Hippolito walked to the other end of the table and lifted the head, testing the resistance of the neck muscles. He reached up to the microphone. “Rigor mortis is pronounced, indicating death occurred at least thirty-two hours before examination.” He lifted each eyelid in turn and gazed down into the unseeing eyeballs. “She must be beginning school now, your little girl?”
“Sixth grade.”
“A prodigy.” Hippolito studied the throat closely, then spoke into the mike.
“Contusions on front of neck, probably thumb imprints. A rash is visible around the neck.” He angled the light further down the body. “And around the waist and the ankle.”
“What kind of rash?” Cardozo interrupted.
Hippolito raised a hand to turn the mike aside. “Maybe an allergy, but the localization is unusual for that. Most likely some kind of abrasion.”
“Think he was tied?”
“I’ll have to peel the skin and see it under a microscope. Looks like a reaction to some kind of particles or granules. I don’t think rope would do it, but we’ll see.”
Hippolito unhurriedly studied the dead arms and wrists.
“What’s that?” Cardozo said suddenly.
The left hand was balled into a fist.
Hippolito frowned, pulled at each finger in turn. “I’ll be damned, Vince. He’s holding on to something.”
The M.E. took a pair of surgical pliers, adjusted the grip around the dead man’s index finger, and gave a quick twist. The finger flapped loose with the crack of a breadstick. With three more cracks Dan was able to bend the hand open.
Cardozo could see something small and white, the size of a fat caterpillar, wedged into the pulpy gray valley of the heel of the palm.
Hippolito probed the object free with a pair of tweezers.
“A cigarette butt.” Hippolito frowned. “Filter tip. Check the brand.” He handed it to Cardozo.
There was a ring of red around the filter.
“Lipstick,” Cardozo observed.
The M.E. pointed to a plastic evidence bag. Cardozo dropped the butt into it.
Hippolito was examining the hand, shaking his head.
“The cigarette was extinguished on his palm. I’ll tell you something, Vince. This happened while he was still alive. And here’s what’s weird.”
Hippolito pointed his scalpel to a quarter-inch circle of ash and caked blood.
“He closed his hand around the burning cigarette. Normally that wouldn’t happen, the reflex would be to eject it or somehow evade it.”
“Could the killer have forced his hand closed?”
“See how the tendons are tensed? That shows he clenched his own hand. It’s not a normal reflex to pain.”
Hippolito gazed at the body.
“What strikes me is, there’s a remarkable absence of defensive wounds. Not that the peace sign on the chest is life-threatening, but still you’d think that the victim would have tried to defend himself in some way.”
Cardozo remembered the scratches on the doorman’s face. “No skin under the fingernails?”
“A little, but it looks like his own.”
“What’s his own skin doing under his fingernails?”
“He itched, he scratched himself.” Hippolito reangled the light. “Now we dig in. Better stand back.”
He lowered his face shield. Using a high-speed circular saw, he began an incision into the chest. Blood and tissue spattered up.
Cardozo backed off. “Dan, I’m going to say good-night.”
Driving home down Second Avenue, Cardozo didn’t see any patrol cars. He busted three red lights.
When he let himself into the apartment, Mrs. Epstein, the neighbor, was in the livingroom watching TV. She bustled up from her chair. “Terri’s asleep. Your lamb chop’s in the oven, I left it on low. By now it’s dry. We thought you’d be home earlier.”