Bad blood

34

I smelled the musty odor as I entered the autopsy room at the morgue. I had been to crime scenes where bodies had been discovered in closets or locked rooms after several days, and the stench was unbearable. This was just stale and unpleasant.

Jerry Genco was standing beside the photographer, who was bending over the coffin with his camera, talking to Mike.

“Stop wriggling your nose, Alex. There’s nothing much to smell,” Jerry said.

As with most forensic pathologists, years on the job had burned out his olfactory nerves.

“You ready for this?” Mike asked.

I didn’t like anything about being present during an autopsy-not the sights nor the sounds nor my inevitable musings about how the deceased would, when alive, have felt about this kind of investigation. I had enormous respect for the work of the doctors who performed the critical task and never ceased to be amazed at how they interpreted the stories that dead bodies revealed to them. I was comfortable knowing Mike would remain in the room for the entire procedure, but it was actually better if I did not make myself a witness to the reexamination.

“I’m not staying,” I said, holding up my hand like a stop sign.

At times it was critical to understand the process that would occur. I had never participated in an exhumation, and I knew that Battaglia would have questions that I would have to answer. Perhaps one day, if we were lucky enough to name Bex’s killer, a jury would need to know exactly what had transpired, too. So I would stay close by in the event there were developments that would direct the course of our work.

The photographer took a few more shots and walked out of the room. Genco made space for me beside him.

“Aspergillus fungus. That’s all it is, Alex,” Genco said, offering me a Tic Tac. “The body is pretty well preserved-a combination of the embalming process and luck. What you see is a bit of mold on the surface of the skin. I’d expect it to be there. That’s what the odor is.”

I looked down at the lifeless remains of Rebecca Hassett. Her skin looked rubbery and discolored against the white satin lining of the coffin, which had been stained by fluids that had seeped into it over the years. The black hair, so lustrous and thick in photographs, was clumped around both sides of her face, which itself had taken on a greenish hue. The once vibrant eyes were closed, probably sewn in place in the funeral home that had prepared her young body for the wake.

I was both horrified and transfixed. I wanted to look away but was drawn to stare at the petite body while images of a life that should have been flashed through my mind.

Her clothing had fared no better. The black cotton sweater and the pleated skirt that draped the thin figure had holes.

Around her neck was a silver crucifix on a chain, and cradled beside the teenager-a reminder of how childlike she still was at the time of her death, despite her defiant independence-was a worn stuffed animal, a brown-and-white bulldog that a family member, I presumed, had placed beside her.

“What happens next?” I asked, reluctantly turning my back to Rebecca.

“We’ll lift her out onto the table. Undress her, clean her up. I’ll examine the body first, of course. Then the vital organs.”

“Were they inventoried?”

“That’s the first sign that this case wasn’t taken too seriously,” Genco said. “I’ve checked everywhere for a record that the doc kept the neck organs. No luck.”

“They’d be useful because the cause of death was asphyxial?” I asked.

“Yes. A careful physician would have put the hyoid bone, the windpipes, the major pieces of the neck, in a formalin jar. They’re just not anywhere here in our archives.”

Had there been a timely arrest and a trial, the defense attorney would have been allowed to have his own expert reexamine the body parts at issue.

“And the other organs?”

Genco guided me to the door while he called for his photographer to return and his assistants to move the body. “Just wait out here while we set up. There’ll be a bag-a green plastic trash bag, probably-inside the girl’s body cavity. That should have all her other organs inside it.”

The brain and liver and uterus-everything else that had been removed for analysis during the autopsy at the time of Bex’s death-would have been stored within her since then.

Mike and I paced the basement corridor for fifteen minutes until Jerry Genco was ready to proceed. Mike would take his position at the foot of the table while Genco got to work, speaking into the recorder that dangled overhead. I waited in an office down the hall, using the time to catch up with Laura and return calls.

When Genco finished his reexamination of the body, he sent an assistant for me and I rejoined him and Mike as the aides removed the gurney with the girl from the room.

“Pretty straightforward,” Genco said. “I’d agree, from what I can see now on the front of the neck and what’s left of the strap muscles beneath, that this was a manual strangulation. There’s certainly no ligature involved.”

“Nothing like a ribbon around her neck?” Mike asked. He was still troubled by the “confession” extracted from the kid named Reuben.

“No. There isn’t any injury to the back of her neck. None at all,” Genco said. “The pathologist overlooked some other minor trauma, though.”

“How significant?” I asked.

“You tell me what isn’t significant at an autopsy.”

“Inconsistencies?”

“No. More like sloppiness. Laziness, I’d say.” Genco sketched a diagram for us. “Some minor bruising on her back-her shoulder blades. The rear of her thighs, too. I’d expect to see those things, since it figures she was lying down when she was killed. Even if she didn’t have the ability to resist, she was being pressed against the surface of the ground, and there were bound to be some rocks, stones, or twigs around.”

“The doc knew what he had,” Mike said. “Guess he thought there was no need to work overtime.”

“That’s what it looks like. I’ll go the whole nine yards,” Genco said, pointing to the trash bag. “Check the organs, too, in case he missed anything.”

It was early afternoon and Mike’s stomach was growling. “You want a sandwich, Jerry? I need some fresh air.”

“Ham and cheese.”

“Coop?”

“I’ll walk with you.”

As we started to the door, Mattie Prinzer, the newly appointed chief of forensic biology, walked in. “I heard you two were down here.”

“Hey, good to see you. I was going to stop by later on.”

“I’ll save you the trip. Thought there was something you ought to know.”

“You don’t have that ‘good news’ look all over your chops, Mattie. You making life difficult for me?”

“I know you’re a guy who likes a challenge, Mike. Is this the child? The girl from Pelham Bay Park?”

“C’mon, Mattie. You get anything off the zipper? You get a profile?”

“I hope inside that thick skull you’ve kept an open mind, Mike. You have a suspect, don’t you?”

Mike feigned indifference and tossed back the hair on his forehead. “Any one of a number of guys, Mattie. I’m in no rush.”

“You might need to think outside the box, if you’re looking for a guy.” Mattie was holding a printout of the DNA results in her hand. She placed it on the countertop near the door. “One of my techs ran this overnight, just as soon as Mercer Wallace brought it in.”

“What’s the problem?” Mike asked, bending over to study the bands that made up the unique genetic profile of a human being.

I could see where Mattie was going the minute I looked at the page.

The sex of the individual whose blood had been examined was encoded in the DNA results. A male donor’s profile was always marked by two peaks that appeared on the line-one representing the X chromosome and the other representing the Y.

“There’s only one peak,” I said to Mattie.

“Let me see,” Mike said, trying to find the telltale image on the page that looked like a hieroglyphic jumble.

“That’s it, Alex,” Mattie said. “No sign of a Y chromosome anywhere in that little speck of blood, my friend. No question whoever cut herself on that zipper is a woman.”