Gallery of the Dead

Sixty

Dr. Morgan’s comment made everyone inside Autopsy Theater One look back at him with concern in their eyes.

‘And what does that mean exactly, Doc?’ Agent Fisher asked.

‘Let me show you.’

The doctor nodded at Hunter and Garcia, requesting their help to once again flip the body over.

‘When I first saw the body, just a few hours ago,’ Dr. Morgan began, ‘something struck me as odd straight away — the severe discoloration of the skin.’ He indicated as he spoke. ‘I know you have all seen more than your share of dead bodies and probably witnessed just as many autopsy examinations, so I’m sure I don’t need to explain to anyone what post-mortem lividity is.’

The short silence that followed confirmed Dr. Morgan’s assumption.

‘Well,’ he continued, ‘Mr. Davis here showed none. No lividity whatsoever.’

‘How is that possible?’ Agent Williams asked.

Hunter’s heart skipped a beat.

‘Because there was no blood,’ he said.

Garcia and both FBI agents looked at him.

‘No blood where?’ Agent Williams asked.

‘In his body,’ Hunter replied.

Dr. Morgan nodded. ‘That’s correct. The victim’s body was practically drained of all its blood. His veins were dry. His brain resembled a lump of stale bread. I managed to obtain a small amount of blood from his heart, liver and kidneys, but I had to practically squeeze it out of them.’

The doctor used both hands to mimic a squeezing motion.

It made Agent Fisher cringe.

‘The victim had no blood in his veins when he got here?’ Agent Williams asked. He was starting to wonder if he was dreaming or not.

‘That’s correct,’ Dr. Morgan reconfirmed.

‘Wait a second,’ Agent Fisher said, taking a step back from the examination table. ‘Have I just been thrown into the Twilight Zone here? This isn’t a vampire story, right?’ She addressed the doctor. ‘You’re not going to tell me that he’s got fang marks on his neck now, are you?’ Reflexively her gaze traveled to Timothy Davis’s neck.

‘No,’ Dr. Morgan replied. ‘There are no fang marks on his neck. All we have is this small puncture and bruise to his left thigh and an even smaller one on the inside of his left arm.’ He called everyone’s attention to it.

Directly over the median-cubital vein on Timothy Davis’s left arm, a small bruise could be seen.

‘Was he a junkie?’ Agent Fisher asked.

‘I found no indications of it,’ the doctor replied with a shake of the head. ‘This bruise,’ he said, referring to the one on the victim’s left arm, ‘is consistent with blood donation.’

‘Wow, hold up,’ Agent Fisher said, both hands up in the air. ‘Are you trying to tell me that the killer managed to extract all of the victim’s blood through a minuscule pinprick on his arm?’

‘No, that’s not what I’m telling you,’ Dr. Morgan came back. ‘What I said is that this tiny injury and bruising directly over the victim’s median-cubital vein here is consistent with the kind of bruising one gets after donating blood, but I don’t think this was the killer’s extraction point.’

‘Hold on a second,’ Agent Williams said. ‘When you say “all of the victim’s blood”, how much blood are we talking about here?’

‘Judging by the victim’s size,’ Hunter commented, ‘somewhere between five and six liters.’

‘I’d say that that’s a pretty good assessment,’ Dr. Morgan agreed before addressing Agent Williams. ‘You see, the estimated volume of blood in a human body is approximately seven to nine percent of its weight. In life, our victim would’ve weighed around one hundred and sixty pounds, give or take.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Agent Fisher interrupted the discussion. ‘But I don’t think that the volume of blood extracted, or how much the victim weighed when alive, is of any real relevance to us. What I want to understand is — how is this possible? You said so yourself, Doc — the blood could not have been extracted through his veins.’ She faced the body on the table one more time. ‘There are no cuts to his body. His throat hasn’t been slit open. His wrists haven’t been touched. How did the killer drain him of all his blood?’

‘Well, there are two problems with your statement, Special Agent Fisher,’ Dr. Morgan countered, his tone of voice tenacious.

She half-glared at him.

‘One,’ the doctor began. ‘The volume of blood extracted is of extreme relevance to us because that was the cause of death, not asphyxiation. Once a body loses over forty percent of its blood volume,’ he explained, ‘which in medical terms is known as a class four hemorrhage, it’s pretty much game over. The strain on the body’s circulatory system becomes too great to survive. The heart will no longer be able to maintain blood pressure and circulation. Major organs will fail and the victim will slip into a comatose state, preceding death. That condition is known as hypovolemic shock.’

‘No suffering,’ Hunter said.

‘Indeed,’ Dr. Morgan agreed. ‘The worst the victim would’ve felt would’ve been a discomfort in his chest as the loss of blood triggered his heart to work overtime to try to get oxygen to tissues. With that, his blood pressure would’ve dropped very quickly, taking him into the comatose state I mentioned.’

Dr. Morgan filled his lungs with air before re-addressing Agent Fisher.

‘And the second problem with your statement is — I didn’t say that the blood could not have been extracted through his veins. What I said was that I don’t believe that this pinprick wound to the victim’s left arm was the killer’s extraction point, which leads us to the only other injury the body has sustained.’ He indicated the puncture-like wound on Timothy Davis’s left thigh.

‘What?’ Agent Fisher looked even more puzzled, but this time she wasn’t alone. Garcia also looked a little lost.

‘Your confusion is completely understandable,’ Dr. Morgan said in a tone that carried no arrogance, no deprecation. ‘I was quite lost myself, but I had to deal with the facts — the victim’s body showed only two injuries — the pinprick to his arm and the puncture to his leg, nothing else. I just couldn’t see a way where whoever did this, whoever drained the victim of his entire volume of blood, could’ve done it by inserting a sixteen-gauge needle into his arm. That left me with one option — the wound to his leg.’

‘OK, but how?’ Agent Williams this time. His attention had gone back to the injury on Timothy Davis’s leg. ‘How could the killer have sucked all the blood out of the victim’s body through a small incision in his leg?’

‘That’s what got me as well,’ the doctor admitted. ‘In all my years as a pathologist, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. If the victim had been decapitated and left upside down, his body still wouldn’t be this drained of blood.’

‘So what’s the answer?’ Agent Fisher queried. ‘How did the killer manage to do this through a hole in his leg?’

‘Very cleverly, and that’s the reason I’ve taken so long with this autopsy. I’ve been racking my brain to understand how this could be possible. I had to dig through his leg wound and inside his body for some sort of clue... something to point me in the right direction.’

‘And did you find anything?’

‘I did.’ Dr. Morgan readjusted his glasses on his nose and gestured for everyone to follow him to the other side of the autopsy theater, where a human-body diagram hung from the wall. ‘But I need you to understand that this isn’t a certainty, by any means. What this is, is an educated guess taking into account the wound we have here and what I found during the post-mortem examination. So please stay with me here a moment, OK?’

Everyone’s eyes settled on the diagram. It depicted the main veins and arteries in the human body.

‘We’ll have to wait for toxicology to identify the agent,’ Dr. Morgan began. ‘But for the killer to be able to work without the victim putting up a fight, he would’ve had to have sedated him. Toxicology will tell us what was used.’

Everyone nodded.

‘Now for what I’ve found,’ the doctor continued. ‘The puncture in his leg was very carefully and expertly made to tap directly into the victim’s left external iliac vein.’ He indicated the vein on the diagram. ‘Now here comes the very clever and equally difficult part, but if I’ve got this right the killer inserted something like a four-and-a-half catheter through the leg puncture and into the victim’s external iliac vein. That is essentially a large connecting vein that connects the femoral veins to the common iliac veins. At the level of the fifth lumbar vertebra the left and right common iliac veins come together and become the abdominal vena cava. As the vein approaches the heart it becomes the inferior vena cava.’

On the diagram that hung from the wall, it all looked like one long vein, traveling from halfway down the leg all the way up to the heart.

‘To put it simply,’ Dr. Morgan clarified, ‘this is basically a massive vein that travels to and from the heart. It’s similar to a major city road that crosses several neighborhoods. Though the road remains the same, as it crosses from neighborhood to neighborhood, it acquires different names, that’s all.’ Dr. Morgan’s hands moved away from the diagram. ‘Are you all familiar with the system of inferior vena cava?’

Hunter nodded once; everyone else shook their heads.

Dr. Morgan looked back at him curiously.

‘I read a lot, Doc.’

‘OK,’ the doctor replied, before addressing the rest of the group. ‘The inferior vena cava brings de-oxygenated blood from the lower body regions — legs, back, abdomen and pelvis — to the right atrium of the heart, and that’s why the killer would’ve had to use a long catheter. He very slowly and carefully guided the catheter through the victim’s vein — or veins, as it changes name like I explained — and into the victim’s heart.’

As the doctor explained his theory, Garcia and Agent Fisher began to slowly cringe.

‘At first,’ Dr. Morgan carried on, ‘I thought that the killer would’ve needed some sort of pump to pump the blood out of the victim’s body.’

‘Didn’t he?’ Agent Fisher asked.

‘Well yes, and that’s the real clever thing about all this.’

‘He used the most natural pump of them all,’ Hunter said. ‘He used the victim’s own heart.’

‘What?’

Dr. Morgan nodded, looking impressed.

‘Without a doubt a very clever, think-out-of-the-box idea,’ he said. ‘As I’ve explained, as the victim’s volume of blood decreased, the heart would’ve begun pumping faster, sending more and more blood into the catheter.’

‘But as soon as the blood volume dropped to under sixty per cent,’ Garcia said, ‘as you’ve also explained, game over. The heart would stop pumping. So how did he get the rest of the blood out of the body?’

‘Great question, and the only way I can think of is by doing it manually.’ He directed the group back to the autopsy table and used gestures to explain. ‘First aid. As if he was trying to resuscitate the body. Both hands on the chest, over the heart, and then you pump. One, two, three, four... To get the blood from the victim’s arms, I guess that the killer would’ve had to lift them up one by one and just squeeze the blood out of them and back into the heart. A few more pumps and voilà — one completely dried-of-blood victim.’

‘That’s absolutely insane,’ Agent Fisher said, shaking her head.

‘Perhaps,’ the doctor agreed. ‘But nevertheless effective and seriously clever.’