Black Notice

13

I lost myself in what I was doing, my mind pulled into a body that was completely autolyzed and putrefied and hardly recognizable as human.

Death had rendered this man defenseless, and bacteria had escaped from the gastrointestinal tract, invading as it pleased, fomenting, fermenting, and filling every space with gas. Bacteria broke down cell walls and turned the blood in veins and arteries a greenish-black, making the entire circulatory system visible through the discolored skin like rivers and tributaries on a map.

Areas of the body that had been covered by clothing were in much better shape than the head and hands.

"God, how would you like to run into him when you're skinny-dipping at night?" Ruffin said, looking at the dead man.

"He can't help it," I said.

"And guess what, Chuckie-boy?" Marino said. "After you die someday, you're gonna look ugly as hell, too."

"Dу we know exactly where the container was in the ship's-hold?" I asked Marino.

"A couple rows down."

"What about weather conditions during the two weeks it was out at sea?"

"Mostly mild, averaging around sixty with a high of seventy. Merry El Niсo. People are doing Christmas shopping in their friggin' shorts."

"So you're thinking maybe this guy died on board and someone stuck him inside the container?" Ruffin asked.

"No, that ain't what I'm thinking, Chuckie-boy."

"The name's Chuck.".

"Depends on who's talking to you. So here's the daily double, Chuckie-boy. If you got tons of containers stacked like sardines in a hold, tell me how you sneak a dead body into one," Marino said. "No way you could even open the door. Plus the seal was intact."

I pulled a surgical lamp close and collected fibers and debris, using forceps and a lens, or, in some instances, swabs.

"Chuck, we need to check on how much formalin we've got," I said. "It was low the other day. Or have you already taken care of that?"

"Not yet."

"Don't inhale too many fumes," Marino said. "You can see what it does to all those brains you haul over to MCV"

Formalin was a diluted formaldehyde, a highly reactive chemical used to preserve or "fix" surgical sections or organs, or in anatomical donations, entire bodies. It killed tissue. It was extremely corrosive to respiratory passages, skin and eyes.

"I'll go check out the formalin;" Ruffin said.

"Not now you won't;" I said. "Not until we're done here.

He pulled off the cap of a permanent marker.

"How about buzzing Cleta to see if Anderson left," I said. "I don't want her wandering around somewhere."

"I'll do it;" Marino said.

"I gotta admit, it still blows my mind a little to see chicks chasing after killers." Ruffin directed this at Marino. "Back when you got started, they probably did nothing but check parking meters."

Marino went to the phone.

"Take off your gloves;" I called after him, because be always forgot, no matter how many Clean Hands signs I posted.

I moved the lens slowly and stopped. The knees looked abraded and dirty, as if he had been kneeling on a rough, dirty surface without his pants on. I checked his elbows. They looked dirty and abraded, too, but it was hard to tell with certainty because his skin was in such bad shape. I dipped a cotton swab in sterile water as Marino hung up the phone. I heard him tear open another pair of gloves.

"Anderson ain't here," he said. "Cleta said she left about a half hour ago."

"So what do you think about women lifting weights?" Ruffin asked Marino. "You see the muscles in Anderson's arms?"

I used a six-inch ruler as a scale. and started taking photographs with a thirty-five-millimeter camera and a macro lens. I found more dirty areas on the underside of the arms, and I swabbed them.

"I'm wondering if it was a full moon when the ship left Antwerp," Marino said to me.

"I guess if you want to live in a man's world you gotta be as strong as one;" Ruffin went on.

Running water was relentless and steel clanged against steel and overhead lights allowed no shadows.

"Well, it will be a new moon tonight;" I said. "Belgium's in the eastern hemisphere, but the lunar cycle would be the same there."

"So it could have been a full moon," Marino said.

I knew where he was going with this and my silence told him to stay away from the subject of werewolves.

"So what happened, Marino? The two of you arm-wrestle over your job?" Ruffin asked, cutting the twine around a bale of towels.

Marino's eyes were double barrels pointed at him.

"And I guess we know who won since she's the detective now and you're back in uniform," Ruffin said, smirking:

"You talking to me?"

"You heard me." Ruffin slid open a glass cabinet door.

"You know; it must be I'm getting old:" Marino snatched off his surgical cap and slammed it into the trash. "My hearing ain't what it used to be. But if I'm not mistaken, I believe you just pissed me off."

"What do you think of those iron women on TV? What about women wrestlers?" Ruffin kept going.

"Shut the fuck up," Marino told him.

"You're single, Marino. Would you go out with a woman like that?"

Ruffin had always resented. Marino, and now he had a chance to do something about it, or so he thought, because Ruffin's egocentric world turned on a very weak axis. In his dim way of seeing things, Marino was down and wounded. It was a good time to kick him around.

"Question is, would a woman like that go out with you?" Ruffin didn't have sense enough to run out of the room. "Or would any woman go out with you?"

Marino walked up to him. He got so close to Ruffin, they were face shield to face shield.

"I got a few little words of advice for you, asshole," Marino said, fogging up the plastic protecting his dangerous face. "Zip those sissy lips of yours before they kiss my fist. And put that tiny dick back in its holster before you hurt yourself with it."

Chuck's face turned scarlet, all this going on while the doors slid open and Neils Vander walked in carrying ink, a roller and ten print cards.

"Straighten up, and I mean now," I ordered Marino and Ruffin. "Or I'm throwing both of you out of here."

"Good morning," Vander said, as if it were.

"His skin's slipping badly," I told him.

"Just makes it easier."

Vander was the section chief of the fingerprints and impression lab, and wasn't bothered by much. It wasn't uncommon for him to shoo maggots away while he fingerprinted decomposed bodies, and he didn't flinch in burn cases when it was necessary to cut off the victim's fingers and carry them upstairs in ajar.

I had known him since the beginning of my time here, and he never seemed to get any older or change at all. He was still bald, tall and gangly and always lost in oversized lab coats that swirled and flapped around him as he hurried up and down halls.

Vander put on a pair of latex gloves and lightly held the dead man's hands, studying them, turning them this way and that.

"Easiest thing's gonna be to slide off the skin," he decided.

When a body was as decomposed as this one, the hand's top layer of skin slips off like a glove and, in fact, is called a glove. Vander worked fast, sliding off the gloves intact from each hand and working his own latex-sheathed hands inside them: Wearing the dead man's hands, in a sense, he inked each finger and rolled it onto a ten-print card. He removed the skin gloves and left them neatly on a surgical tray, then popped off his latex ones, before heading back upstairs.

"Chuck, put those in formalin," I said. "We'll want to save them."

He was sullen, screwing the lid off a plastic quart jar.

"Let's turn him," I said.

Marino helped us flip the body facedown. I found more dirt, mostly on the buttocks, and got swabs of that, too. I saw no injuries, only an area over the right upper back that seemed darker than the skin around it. I looked at it through a lens, staring, blanking out my thought process as I always did when looking for pattern injuries, bite marks or other elusive evidence. It was like scuba diving in water with almost no visibility. All I could make out were shades and shapes and wait until I bumped into something.

"Do you see this, Marino? Or is it just my imagination?" I asked.

He sniffed more Vicks vapors up his nose and leaned against the table. He looked and looked.

"Maybe," he said. "I don't know."

I wiped off the skin with a wet towel, and the outer layer, or epidermis, slipped right off. The flesh beneath, or dermis, looked like soggy brown corrugated paper stained with dark ink.

"A tattoo." I was pretty sure. "The ink penetrated to the dermis, but I can't make out anything. Just a big splotch."

"Like one of those purple birthmarks some people have," Marino offered.

I leaned closer with the lens and adjusted a surgical lamp to its best advantage. Ruffin was obsessively polishing a stainless steel countertop and pouting.

"Let's try UV," I decided.

The multiband ultraviolet lamp was very simple to use and looked rather much like the handheld scanners in airports. We dimmed the lights and I tried longwave UV first, holding the lamp close to the area I was interested in. Nothing fluoresced, but a hint of purple seemed to feather out in a pattern, and I wondered if this might mean we were picking up white ink. Under UV light, anything white, such as the sheet on the nearby gurney, will radiate like snow in moonlight and possibly pick up a blush of violet from the lamp. I slid the selector down and tried shortwave next. I could see no difference between the two.

"Lights;" I said.

Ruffin turned them up.

"I would think tattoo ink would light up like neon," Marino said.

"Fluorescent inks do," I replied. "But since high concentrations of iodine and mercury aren't so great for your health, they're not used anymore."

It was past noon when I finally began the autopsy, making the Y incision and removing the breastplate of ribs. I found pretty much what I expected. The organs were soft and friable. They virtually fell apart at the touch and I had to be very careful when weighing and sectioning them. I couldn't tell much about the coronary arteries except that they were not occluded. There was no blood left, only the putrefied fluid called oily effusate that I collected from the pleural cavity. The brain was liquefied.

"Samples of the brain and the effusate go to tox for a STAT alcohol," I said to Ruffin as I worked.

Urine and bile had seeped through the cells of their hollow organs and were gone, and there.was nothing left of the stomach. But when I reflected back flesh from the skull, I thought I had my answer. He had staining of the petrous ridge of the temporal bones and mastoid air cells, bilaterally.

Although I couldn't diagnose anything with certainty until all toxicology results were back, I was fairly certain this man had drowned.

"What?" Marino was staring at me.

"See the staining here?" I pointed it out. "Tremendous hemorrhaging, probably while he struggled as he was drowning:"

The phone rang and Ruffin trotted over to answer it.

"When's the last time you dealt with Interpol?" I asked Marino.

"Five, maybe six years ago, when that fugitive from Greece ended up over here and got in a fight in a bar off Hull Street."

"There certainly are international connections in this one. And if he's missing in France, England, Belgium or God knows where, if he's some sort of international fugitive, we're never going to know it here in Richmond unless Interpol can link him with someone in their computer system."

"You ever talked to them?" he asked me.

"No. That's for you guys to do."

"You ought to hear all these cops hoping they get a case that involves Interpol, but if you ask 'em what Interpol is, they ain't got a clue,' Marino said. "You want to know the truth, I got no interest in dealing with Interpol. They scare me like the CIA. I don't even want people like that knowing I exist."

"That's ridiculous. You know what Interpol means, Marino?"

"Yeah. Secret Squirrels."

"It's a contraction of international police. The point is to get police in member countries to work together, talk to each other. Sort of what you wish people in your department would do."

"Then they must not have a Bray working for them."

I was watching Ruffin on the phone. Whomever he was talking to, he was trying to keep it private.

"Telecommunication, a restricted worldwide law enforcement web… You know, I don't know how much more I can stand this. He not only counters me, he flaunts it," I muttered, staring at. Ruffin as he hung up.

Marino glared at him.

"Interpol circulates color-coded notices for wanted and missing people, warnings, inquiries," I went on in a distracted way as Ruffin stuffed a towel in the back pocket of his scrubs and got a pill counter out of a cabinet.

He sat on a stool in front of a steel sink, his back to me. He opened a brown paper bag marked with a case number and pulled out three bottles of Advil and two bottles of prescription drugs.

"An unidentified body is a black notice," I said. "Usually suspected fugitives with international ties. Chuck, why are you doing that in here?"

"Like I told you, I'm behind on it. Never seen so many damn pills come in with bodies, Dr. Scaipetta. I can't keep up anymore. And I get up tу sixty or seventy or something, and the phone rings and I lose count and have to start all over again."

"Yeah, Chuckie-boy," Marino said. "I can see why you'd lose count real easy."

Ruffin started whistling.

"What are you so happy about all of a sudden?" Marino irritably asked, as Ruffin used tweezers to fill rows with pills on the little blue plastic tray.

"We're going to need to get fingerprints, dental charts, anything we can," I said to Marino as I removed a section of deep muscle from the thigh for DNA. "Anything we can get needs to be sent to them," I added.

"Them?" Marino asked.

I was getting exasperated.

"Interpol," I said tersely.

The phone rang again.

"Hey, Marino, can you get that? I'm counting."

"Tough shit," he said to Ruffin.

"Are you listening to me?" I looked up at Marino.

"Yeah," he said. "The state liaison's at State Police Criminal Investigation, used to be some guy who was a first sergeant and I remember asking him if he wanted to have a beer sometime at the F.O.P, or go grab a bite at Chetti's with some of the guys. You know, just being friendly, and he never even changed his tуne of voice. I'm pretty sure I was being taped."

I worked on a section of vertebral bone that I would clean with sulfuric acid and have trace check it for microscopic organisms called diatoms that were found in water all over the world.

"Wish I could remember his name," Marino was saying. "So he took all the info, contacted D.C., and D.C. contacted Lyon, where all the secret squirrels are. I hear they got this real spooky-looking building on a hidden road, sort of like Batman and his cave. Electrified fences, razor wire and gates and guards carrying machine guns, the whole nine yards:' "You've watched too much James Bond," I said.

"Not since Sean Connery quit. Movies suck these days, and nothing's good on TV anymore. I don't even know why I bother."

"Maybe you ought to consider reading a book now and then.,.

"Dr. Scarpetta?" Chuck said, hanging up. "That was Dr. Cooper. The STAT alcohol's oh-point-oh-eight in the effusate, and zip-o in the brain."

The 0.08 didn't mean much, since the brain didn't show an alcohol level, too. Perhaps the man was drinking before he died, or maybe what we had was postmortemgenerated.alcohol caused by bacteria. There were no other fluids for comparison, no urine or blood or fluid of the eye known as vitreous, which was too bad. If 0.08 was a true level, it might, at the very least, show that this man would have been somewhat impaired and therefore more vulnerable.

"How are you going to sign him out?" Marino asked.

"Acute seasickness." Ruffin popped a towel at a fly.

"You know, you're really beginning to get on my nerves;" Marino warned him.

"Cause of death undetermined," I said. "Manner, homicide. This isn't some poor dockworker who accidentally got locked inside a container. Chuck, I need a surgical pan. Leave it right here on the counter, and before the day is out, you and I need to talk:'

His eyes darted away from me like minnows. I pulled off my gloves and called Rose.

"Would you mind going into archives and finding one of my old cork cutting boards?" I asked her.

OSHA had decided that all cutting boards had to be Teflon-coated because porous ones were susceptible to contamination. That was appropriate if one worked around live patients or was making bread. I complied, but it didn't mean I threw anything away.

"I also need wig pins," I went on. "There should be a little plastic box of them in the right top drawer of my desk. Unless someone stole those, too."

"Not a problem," Rose said.

"I think the boards are on a bottom shelf in the back of storage, next to the boxes of old medical examiner handbooks:' "Anything else?"

"I don't guess Lucy's called," I said.

"Not yet. If she does, I'll find you."

I thought for a minute. It was past one o'clock. She was off the plane by now and could have called. Depression and fear rolled over me again.

"Send flowers to her office," I said. "With a note that says, `Thanks for the visit, love, Aunt Kay.' "

Silence.

"Are you still there?" I asked my secretary.

"You sure that's what you want to say?" she asked.

I hesitated.

"Tell her I love her and I'm sorry," I said.