A Knife Edge

THREE

The Tokyo city coroner, Dr. Samura Hashimura, wore a plastic sheath and clear plastic industrial glasses, and he breathed through an industrial face mask of the kind spray-painters use, while he worked over the corpse on the stainless-steel autopsy table. She stared with open milky eyes at the ceiling and appeared completely unconcerned that the coroner was digging around in her small intestines as if he was looking through his sock drawer trying to match a pair. My nose told me the woman had been dead about ten days, and hadn't been refrigerated for most of it. Once you experience the smell of death, you never forget it.

I was chaperoned by a uniformed officer from the local Tokyo police force who didn't know any words of English except for “Make my day,” which he'd repeated enthusiastically several times already. An interpreter-slash-liaison officer provided by the U.S. embassy also accompanied me. Michelle Durban was around twenty-five, blond, petite, with pale blue eyes and a dimple in her chin. Think cheerleader. She'd look great in a schoolgirl-style tartan microminiskirt, the local male fantasy of choice if the advertising around town selling everything from motorcycles to seaweed snacks was anything to go by.

Needless to say, my interpreter-slash-liaison officer was not dressed in a microminiskirt. For one thing, it was too cold. The outside temperatures had taken a nosedive below freezing. Snow had begun to fall, sweeping off the mountains of Siberia and blanketing the island of Honshu. For another, Durban was CIA and microminis were not part of the dress code. Instead she wore slacks, boots, and a puffy parka that looked like a pink marshmallow with sleeves.

Dr. Hashimura set down a couple of instruments that looked disturbingly like chopsticks and mumbled a few words be hind his mask. Ms. Durban replied in Japanese. The coroner grunted. His rubber nonslip shoes squeaked on the polished concrete floor as he made his way out the door and across to a bank of stainless-steel drawers. He detoured to a computer screen and consulted it before returning to open one of the drawers. He pulled out the tray within, which rattled lightly on its bearings as if it wasn't carrying any weight. On the tray sat a rectangular stainless-steel box covered by an opaque plastic sheet. The coroner nodded at the box. I didn't need to speak Japanese to know that here were the remains of Dr. Hideo Tanaka, U.S. citizen and former employee of Moreton Genetics, the DoD contractor.

The coroner peeled back the plastic and said something to Ms. Durban as we looked down on what was left of the late doctor. “What'd he say?” I asked.

“He said that they thought at first it was a coconut.”

A coconut? The hairy ball in the tray could well have passed for one, especially if you weren't prepared to see it for what it was — a severed head. The coroner retrieved a large pair of forceps from a nearby tray and flipped the head over. The skin was greenish brown, the face swollen. The tongue was a livid purple. The eyes were missing, as were the eyelids. The stump of the neck was shredded. A single strip of muscle dangled from it, concealing a dirty white collarbone within.

Durban spoke to the coroner, who then scraped around in the ooze at the bottom of the tray with the forceps until he found what he was after. He pulled out something, then went over to a bench to wash it. He returned a moment later and gestured at me to hold out my hand. In my palm he deposited a white serrated triangle. Then he talked in an animated manner for several minutes. When he finished, Durban informed me, “There is no question that the doctor was attacked by a very large great white shark. The size of the tooth makes the animal over twenty feet in length. That's well over twenty-five hundred pounds of fish.”

“So his head was like the pit?” I asked, motioning at the thing on the tray.

“What?”

“Like the pit in a piece of fruit — the bit you don't eat.” Durban still didn't get it. “Did the shark spit the head out or something?” I asked.

Durban wasn't sure whether I was being serious. I was. Not knowing anything about shark attacks, I was interested to know why there was anything left of the man at all. She frowned, then put the question to the coroner. The man laughed like he'd just heard an extremely funny joke and then proceeded to play a little impromptu charade for my benefit. Durban interpreted as the coroner acted out. “He thinks the shark came up beneath the doctor and took his whole body in its mouth.” Just as well Durban was on my team. I was still stuck on the coroner miming what appeared to be “three words, first word rhymes with night.” To assist my understanding, the Japanese man traced his hand across his own shoulder and neck. And then what he was acting out clicked: bite. Just as I caught on, Durban said, “He believes the shark bit clean through Tanaka's neck and shoulder. The tooth was found embedded in the collarbone.”

I had an image of the shark using the doctor's collarbone as a toothpick and then licking its lips. “Have toxicology tests been done?” I asked.

Durban passed the question along and then handed back the translation. “Yeah. Seems he was smashed. Blood-alcohol content up over zero point one.”

“How does he know that?” I asked. As far as I was aware, alcohol didn't hang around in the blood indefinitely, and I knew the head had been found almost a week after it had been parted from its body.

Durban asked Hashimura, and then said, “The human body processes around an ounce of alcohol every hour. But once you're dead, those processes stop. Also, the head's been kept chilled in near-freezing water a couple of days. That preserves the blood and tissue.”

I nodded. The unusual circumstances surrounding the recovery of the doctor's head came to mind. They'd been elaborated upon in my briefing notes. One of the engines on the Natusima, Tanaka's expedition ship, overheated and had to be shut down. A storm and dangerously high seas meant the ship, reduced to one engine, had to be towed to Yokohama. It was dry-docked and the problem was traced to a blocked seawater intake essential to the engine's cooling system. Inside the pipe, wedged there like a cork in a bottle they found Tanaka's head, which I now knew everyone thought at first was a coconut.

“Have the local police followed up?”

Durban repeated the question for the coroner, who nodded and then spoke.

“They have and they're satisfied,” Durban translated. “Every one's calling it accidental death.”

“Yeah. I guess it'd be tricky murdering someone with a great white shark.”

“I don't know… Several years ago, a guy dressed in a panda costume murdered a woman in a Tokyo park. He caught the train home afterward. True story,” Durban added, just in case I was waiting for the punch line. I imagined a panda with bloodstained fur sitting cross-legged in the train, surrounded by Japanese workers heading home, everyone reading their newspapers. I said, “Do you think that's relevant to what we've got here?”

“No. What you said about someone using the shark as a murder weapon just reminded me.”

Whether the shark had anyone inside it before it struck its victim, who knew? But it certainly had someone inside it now — Dr. Tanaka, or at least most of him.