“ I started young, and believe me, all my life I've witnessed how narrow and stupid the bureaucrats can be.” She quickly recalled for Wardlaw's benefit a time when even her father was “let go” by a city as its M.E. In this respect, New Orleans was far behind the times; no municipal employee, including the mayor of the city, ought to have the right to summarily fire the city medical examiner. It smacked crisply of conflict of interest. An M.E. should answer to only one god-scientific truth. Knowing little of Wardlaw other than what she'd read in his reports, Jessica withheld any personal judgments about the doctor. However, it was true that his paperwork, at least on the Hearts case involving Victor Surette, was lacking. Her attitude seemed to have surprised Wardlaw, who was prepared with an angry, hell-raising speech but had not prepared a conciliatory word. He hemmed and hawed a moment before Jessica added, “Dr. Wardlaw, I'm glad to see that you've chosen to fight. There're too few of us M.E.'s in the country willing to fight for our basic rights as is.”
“ Your concern, Doctor, is deeply touching.” His bitterness had dissolved, any earlier sarcasm now dispelled by her charms. Now only his annoying smoker's cough and drinker's breath filled the room.
“ It was never my intent to have you removed, sir, I promise you that.”
“ Very well, then. Shall we go to work before that snake doctor they hired comes poking around?”
She smiled behind her own mask at his theatrical allusion to Kim Desinor. “My sentiments exactly.” In fact, she'd rushed here to get to the body before Kim had a chance to do her psychometric reading.
“ Science can't possibly outmaneuver the ramblings of a psychic, and certainly we can't hope to outpace the witch,” continued an irate Wardlaw. “Science and truth take too much time for the press, the public and the powerful concerned with holding office.”
“ I don't know her well enough to call her a witch, Dr. Wardlaw,” replied Jessica. “However, it was my intention to get as far and as fast as possible here before she arrived, yes.”
“ Then we agree on something.”
“ I hope that we can agree on many some things here today.”
“ Hmmmm…” He contemplated this, then reached out and snatched the dull white sheet from the cadaver with one even thrust, the sheet spiraling up and away like a ghost. “Then examine the neck wounds and tell me precisely how this fellow lost his head.”
She smiled at the challenge. Wardlaw was tall with hard-edged lines, an Abe Lincoln cast in granite, sorrow molded to him like some stone shroud. He was weary of seeing the kinds of atrocities that big city crime had routinely to show him, and she could well believe that the recent flurry of unholy terror which came to him in the form of cut-up young men whose hearts had been removed for God knows what unnatural cause or ritual might easily have thrown the man into a tailspin of self-destruction.
His surgeon's hands were as large as a pair of cast-iron skillets, thick blunted fingers, dark, gray, sensitive and cold as the casket itself, she thought. She guessed from his features, particularly the flat, flaring nose and natty hair, that he was certainly as much African-American as he was white, perhaps some Creole or Cajun blood there.
He pointed with his scalpel to a camera on the ceiling which had been activated with the push of a button. “We're on, Dr. Coran. Want to smile for Big Brother?”
She wondered if one of Stephens's lackeys was watching at the other end of the TV monitor somewhere; wondered if the commissioner had Dr. Wardlaw on video film in an inebriated state here in his own operating room-not that he could do much harm to the “patient patient,” though he could easily harm the evidentiary proceedings. If so, Wardlaw might well save his lawyers' fees.
Jessica rattled off the requisite information for the camera: time of day, cadaver tag, age, height, weight and sex of the victim, finishing with the victim's name, John Doe for the moment. After only a few minutes of close scrutiny over the neck wounds, she saw that the greatest gash was to the rear of the neck at the base of the skull rather than below the chin, so that if the killer had used a meat cleaver, he'd chopped at the head in execution style, from the rear. But it was by no means a clean cut; in fact it was a ghastly tear that'd made several strange rents, none of them looking like clean incisions. Either the killer had used a very dull blade and had had to repeatedly hack at the victim's neck, or something entirely different had occurred to John Doe.
“ This looks like the work of a… a machine of some sort,” she said.
“ Go on, Doctor,” he urged her.
“ A… like a propeller… a small but powerful, three-bladed propeller.”
“ And you may recall that the body was found by a group of fishermen, and fishermen do as much drinking as fishing, and they're not always careful about watching where they're headed, and none of them follow the speed rules, striking floating manatees and gators all the time.”
“ A boat propeller… the propeller severed the head,” she decided.
“ Not completely, but damned near, and the poor handling of the body from water to shore did the rest, but like the fishermen who left out the fact they'd hit the body where it bobbed in the water, no one wanted to own up to the fact that the head later tore loose. Honesty's hard to come by.”
“ Well, they might've saved your office a lot of time and effort, and nobody wanted that.” Her sarcasm, which he seemed very much to appreciate, was met with a hearty laugh on his part. Not likely that he'd had much to laugh about lately.
“ Nobody much thinks about the demands of my office, Doctor. You don't actually know anyone who really, truly gives a damn out there, do you, Dr. Coran?”
“ No, I'm no longer gullible about people, not any more than you are, Doctor.” She breathed in deeply the pungent odors of the room. “No… leastways, I shouldn't be.”
“ Still, truth dies hard…”
“ Okay, so the victim wasn't beheaded by the killer.” Score one up for science over seance, she thought. Although Dr. Desinor hadn't been up to bat on this one yet, both M.E. s were confident that the psychic couldn't possibly know how the head was severed from the body. Jessica silently and secretly felt good about this, that only science could clearly show the way to truth. She recalled an old and wise saying that went: In art, truth is a means to an end; in science, it is the only end.
“ Would you care to wager that this fellow is not one of the Queen of Hearts victims?” asked the grinning, eccentric Wardlaw, whose single gold tooth shone brightly beneath the tensor lamp where they worked.
“ That's quite a leap.”
“ Don't tell me you didn't have instant doubts yourself when you heard about the head being severed.”
“ Yes, but now we know the killer didn't sever the head, had nothing to do with the decapitation, so… so why're you still contending that this one died differently than the others? The heart was taken, after all.”
He only grinned at her like a nebbish.
“ What else do you have?”
“ I wouldn't want to prejudice you, Doctor, but give some consideration for this man's age and the semen found adhering in the throat. Just minute traces, but rather interesting since none of the other transvestite and gay victims were sexually molested.”
“ He's older, maybe early to mid-thirties?”
“ Precisely.”
“ Someone killed him and tried very hard to cover the murder by using the Queen of Hearts cases as a model? A copy cat killing? But this killer didn't count on the beheading, and only guessed at the semen since he knew all the victims were gay.”
“ In my estimation, all true, yes.”
“ Interesting premise.”
“ More than a premise.”
“ Really?”
“ The seminal fluid found in the mouth has been matched.”
“ Matched? Matched to whom?”
“ To the John Doe here.”
“ You're telling me that the semen in his mouth was his own?”