Judging Time

17

M

ike concentrated on the medical examiner preparing for the autopsy of Tor Petersen. She was like an actor, dominating the stage. He guessed all doctors were like that, even doctors of the dead. He glanced at Ducci standing beside him, all anticipation. Why was the dust and fiber expert so hot to be there today? Mike chewed on the ends of his mustache, mulling things over. This was Mike's second autopsy in as many days, and part of him felt as if he were wasting precious hours in the ugliest part of this squat blue brick building, just spinning his wheels. Autopsies took a lot of time. He watched the preparations, trying to let go of the conversation he'd had last night with his mother about April Woo.

"This is the body of a well-nourished, well-developed white male measuring six feet one inch in height and weighing approximately one hundred and ninety pounds. He is wearing a gray knitted sweater— cashmere, and gray slacks with an alligator belt. Slip-on leather shoes, gray and red tweed socks." Rosa Washington switched off the recorder and moved away from the microphone and the autopsy table to let the photographer take one more picture of the dead man clothed as he had been at the time he died. Flash. "Finished?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, boys, your tum." She gestured to the techs to come in and undress the corpse and moved to where the green-suited Sanchez and Ducci stood gloveless, with their masks pulled down around their necks, each casually using the bottom of his metal throw-up pan as a writing support.

No part of the ME, however, was visible under the green surgical pajamas, green cap, rubber gloves, glasses, and mask with a respirator. Clearly the woman did not like getting splashed with body fluids and did not want to breathe in any contaminated air with the potential to fatally infect her. For a few minutes she was silent, as off came the dead man's shoes, labeled and dumped by two burly assistants into the box Ducci would take away with him to examine later. Off came his socks. Into the box. The dead man's alligator belt was already undone, his mud-and blood-splattered pants already unzipped. The two techs lifted the body at the hips and tugged off the damp, stained trousers. Underneath, the shorts were soiled with urine and feces. The odor soared above the pervasive formaldehyde stench. Off came the shorts. Mike put on his mask.

"Only the shorts, please," Ducci said sharply, as if the techs might add a turd to the box as an extra.

The dead man's penis popped into view. The ME glanced at it, then turned away. "Hey, Ducci. Haven't seen you since Nashville." Through the mask her voice sounded strangely mechanical, like the voice of telephone operators.

"Yeah, don't get around too much anymore." He watched the techs pull off the dead man's sweater. Nothing under it. The dust and fiber expert's thick gray-flecked eyebrows went up at that, and he pulled on an ear.

"Something?" Washington asked about the corpse, but kept her gaze on Ducci. "What brings you here?" She adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose.

"Cut on his chest?" Ducci pointed to a tiny irregularity among a sparse furring of chest hairs below his sternum.

The ME moved under the light to look at it. "Looks like a little nothing," Rosa munnured, running a gloved finger lightly over the area Ducci indicated. "Maybe a pimple, I don't see any blood here."

"Mark it and measure it," Mike said.

Flash. The very first picture of the naked body was the chest area photographed with an arrow pointing to the spot of Ducci's query. "Very thorough." Rosa nodded her approval and turned to Ducci again.

"We're honored to have you with us, Freddy. What brings you into the light of day?" she asked again.

The macabre autopsy room—gruesomely fitted out with electric saws, carts of cutting instruments in all sizes, aspirators, containers to save tissue and fluid samples from many sources, and the ageless metal dissecting table, ducted and plumbed for the draining and sluicing of body 'fluids—intensely flood-lit as it was for the best possible investigation of the examinant of the moment, was hardly the light of day.

"Very funny." Ducci guffawed politely at the joke. "Gotta make sure you guys do your job right, don't I?"

The ME laughed politely herself. "You know I do my job right." Even distorted, her tone held the sharp edge of defensiveness.

Ducci made an offering. "I liked your talk in Nashville."

"Well, it's a damned shame autopsy is becoming a dying art. No one's doing them anymore. Insurance companies won't foot the bill in hospitals. Families don't want them." Rosa widened her audience to include Mike. "With all the lab tests, MRI scans, X rays—everybody figures they already know what killed their loved ones. Nobody wants to learn any more." Angry at the loss to science, she glared at them through her glasses.

"Lot of good work being done," Mike said soothingly of the forensic field in general.

"Maybe in some areas, but a lot of people out there who should know the difference between the bruise from a fall and the battering from a club don't know.

A lot of people out there are getting away with murder. Makes me mad."

"Well, not here in New York, Rosa. That should be a comfort to you."

"No, it isn't. Those ignorant coroners in the big field look at a female body or child's covered with bruises—scars accrued over months, years maybe— husband, father says, 'She fell off a ladder. Can I bury her now?' idiot buys it, doesn't even do X rays. People beat and kill every day and get away with it. Makes me really mad."

A thousand times Ducci had heard the complaints from MDs about coroners in the great Midwest. MDs called the Midwest "the big field" and said it was the best place in the country to commit murder. There, coroners were elected. They were untrained in medicine, certainly untrained in forensic medicine, and they had no idea how to assess the questions and answers on the death reports they filled out. Everybody had a soapbox. He glanced at Mike and changed the subject.

"I'm surprised Malcolm isn't here doing the honors himself." The chief medical examiner, Malcolm Abraham, was a well-known celebrity hound who hated to miss an important body.

Flash. The photographer started photographing the rest of Petersen's naked body.

"Believe me, he wanted this one. He's in the hospital, high fever. They're not sure what it is. Lucky for me. I got to do the girlfriend yesterday. Malcolm wanted to wait another day for this guy, but you know how it is. You can't fight City Hall. Lucky for me." Rosa snorted at her luck, then turned back to the dead man. "Well-built fellow, looks like no one abused him."

Mike scratched his neck as they turned the corpse over to photograph the other side. The ME was right. He didn't see any other mark on the body anywhere. No sign of struggle, no defensive wounds. Unbroken manicured nails. Mike looked away as the techs washed the body.

When they were done swabbing, Rosa moved back to the table and switched on the tape, began talking into it as she picked up a scalpel and carefully made the Y incision that cut the late Tor Petersen open from each shoulder down to the pit of the stomach and through the pelvis. For a second the whole of his lower body cavity was visible. Stomach gases and feces further sickened the air. Fluids began gushing into the area faster than they could be suctioned out. Mike breathed in and out through his mouth, pinching his nose in his mind.

Ducci remained motionless, seemingly oblivious to the stench as Rosa Washington clipped the dead man's rib cage apart from bottom to top, dividing it into two sections.' Clotted blood and other fluids reeking of iron covered her rubber-gloved hands. Clamps cracked the ribs apart, and the lungs and liver were revealed. Mike swallowed, swallowed again. Body fluids spewed out, splashing the sleeves of the ME's surgical gown and filling the channels on the table. A tech turned on the tap to wash down the table.

"How's it going?"

Mike was startled by the familiar voice behind him.

"What are you doing here?' ' He gaped at April, who hadn't made it yesterday, then swallowed again, gagging a little in spite of himself.

"I got a message from the doc here to join the party" April offered him her vomit pan. "You know the rules. You use it, you clean it."

Mike waved it away with his own. "I'm fine."

"Shush, please. The microphone picks up everything." Up to her elbows in stinking gore, Rosa Washington peeled away the lungs, lifted out the liver, weighing it in her hands and exclaiming over it.

"Just what I would have guessed. Must have been a big drinker, look at the size of this." She told her recorder the liver was enlarged, examined it carefully, took some sections for further examination under the microscope, and dropped it on the scale with a splat. Very enlarged indeed.

Then she dug into the chest cavity for the heart and dissected it free with a series of swift cuts. This, too, she held up to the light in her two hands like a trophy she had just won.

"I think we'll find this to be the heart of the matter," she told them. "You noticed, of course, the amount of blood when I opened the chest area. Hello, April Woo, glad you were able to make it. I like to have the detectives on a case with me. It isn't often I get the pleasure of really conscientious ones, however. You all right?"

April had sneezed into her mask. "Yeah."

"Where was I? Oh, yes. The heart of the matter. I think we'll find a perforated infarction here." The ME put the heart and pericardium down on a separate table and began to dissect them.

"What, you ask, is a perforated infarction? Possibly a ruptured aneurism caused the blood to flow out into the pericardial sac until the pressure was elevated to a point where the heart can't beat anymore under natural circumstances. The heart dies so fast it actually perforates—tears. Yes, yes, it's perforated. Here's the hole."

She fell silent for a long time, forgetting her audience as she examined the heart, then told her recording machine in technical terms what she found. Finally she moved on, methodically, removing each organ, examining and weighing it and taking tissue samples for slides. She opened the stomach and examined the contents.

"What's your take?" Mike had been fidgeting.

"He'd just finished quite the hearty meal. Nothing's digested here. Looks like chicken, cooked apples. Rice. Beans, greens. Hmm, bananas. Looks like soul food."

"I mean, is there anything for us to stay for?"

"Oh, we've got a long way to go. Got to x-ray, got to do testes and aspirate his bladder for urine samples. We got to open his head and take a look at his brain. More than once I've missed a cause of death until I opened the head. Once there was blood all over the place, but I couldn't find a point of entry on the corpse anywhere. It turns out the guy had been shot in the mouth with a twenty-two. Bullet was lodged in his skull. "

"Oh, yeah, the jumper," April said.

Dr. Washington ignored the remark.

"But that's not the case here," Mike said quickly, shooting April a quizzical look.

"Oh, no. This guy died of a heart attack. Doesn't mean I won't find he had prostate cancer or something else, though."

"Well, I've about had it, then," Mike said. "How about you, Duke?"

"Yeah, thanks."

April accompanied the two men to the door, then peeled off to the ladies' locker room. "Don't you dare leave without me," she said. "I'll meet you in five."

"What'd she have to go and bring up the jumper for?" Mike muttered.

Ducci laughed. "Probably has her reasons."

Mike gazed after her, wondering if his mother could be right about April after all.

The dust and fiber department in the police lab was a long narrow room with three windows on one side and sea green porcelain tiles halfway up the wall on the other. The floor was a grungy gray-green linoleum that hadn't known a shine since the day it was laid. Years ago, the room served as a dust and fiber lab for one scientist. Now there were supposed to be three dust and fiber people to cover all the felonies in New York City, but one had retired six months ago in fear of losing his vision after twenty years of focusing his whole being into the eye of a microscope. He hadn't been replaced.

These days Fernando Ducci, who'd started as a patrolman thirty years ago, and Nanci Castor, a thin-faced civilian with a good blond dye job who'd just hit forty and didn't look it, manned the microscopes alone. Since very few crimes could be committed without the perpetrator taking something from the scene away with him and leaving something of himself behind, Ducci and Castor thought theirs was the most important job in law enforcement. They had to identify and match those physical traces that could prove a suspect had been at the scene of a crime: a snag from a victim's jacket in the backseat of the suspect's car, a spot of oil from the suspect's basement on the murder victim's sleeve, a clump of asphalt from the suspect's driveway on the robbery victim's front porch. A hair with an unusual dye found in a cap by the body of a murder victim that matched the hair of a suspect who said he'd never been near the murder victim.

Ducci and Nanci went through the items collected by the criminologists in the Crime Scene Unit. They searched for connections that were more subtle than fingerprints and DNA, for the means to make a match between disparate people who might live far away from each other but who were somehow linked by a deadly crime.

Nanci was out when Mike, Ducci, and April returned from the ME's office only a few blocks uptown. Mike picked up the skull on Ducci's guest chair and examined it briefly before setting it on the desk. The skull sitting there the last time Mike had visited Dust and Fiber had had a bullet hole in it and buck teeth with many cavities. This skull had no bullet hole and perfect teeth.

"What happened to Roberto?" Mike asked, meaning the old skull.

"Someone stole him. He was a gift, you know, from the Guatemalan police." Ducci's slicked-back, shiny black hair did not move as he shook his head sadly at what the world had come to. Then he sank into his desk chair. In a dark suit, black-and-purple silk tie, blue shirt with white collar and cuffs, Ducci was an anomaly. His mouth was small and puckered with concern. His face was round and unlined. Except for the winged eyebrows flecked with gray, he still looked like the choirboy he'd been forty-five years ago. He opened the side drawer of his desk that was filled with Snickers bars and took three out.

"How about some lunch?" He offered the first to April. She shook her head, still very quiet.

"Queasy?"

She shook her head again. Just not hungry. Mike gestured to the chair. "Sit down."

"So who's this?" he asked about the new skull.

"I think she's Asian, look at that set of teeth. Now, there's a woman who didn't eat sugar. I think I'll call her Lola." He peeled open the paper on one of the Snickers bars.

Mike's mustache twitched as the scent of chocolate suddenly mixed with the chemical and death smells that recently had lodged in his sinuses.

Ducci pushed a candy bar across the desk. "Come on, I'm paying."

"Uh, no thanks."

"You two. Can't enjoy a party." Ducci took a huge bite of his and chewed happily. "Don't ever say I don't buy you lunch," he said with his mouth full.

"If you bought us a food lunch, we'd eat it, right, April?" Mike glanced at April. She didn't look good.

"Oh, come on, this is food. Take. It'll do you good." Ducci finished the first bar, shrugged, started on the second.

Mike swallowed a rising tide of stomach acid. "We've gotta go in a minute," he muttered. "Any thoughts before we leave?"

Ducci threw the candy wrappers in his wastebasket and brushed his hands together, cleaning up for business.

"Well, remember Rosa said the Liberty woman was struck just once. The site of the wound was barely above the clavicle. There were no hesitation marks on the neck or chest. Her injury was a direct hit to the carotid artery, and the victim bled to death. Probably fairly quickly."

Ducci put his hand to his mouth and rubbed his pink lips with his fingers. "We're still drying out her stuff. I haven't even got all his things. So it will be a while before I've done my analysis. The thing is, I can't picture what happened." Absently he stroked Lola's uninjured skull.

Mike sucked on his mustache. "No hesitation marks. So she wasn't threatened or tormented. No bruises, nothing under her fingernails or his. So neither fought back."

"Maybe there wasn't time," Ducci murmured.

"Maybe they weren't afraid," Mike said. He glanced at April again. She wasn't talking.

"Someone they knew."

"Yeah. Quite possibly it was someone they knew." Mike tapped a pencil on the desk. "April, are you all right?"

"Sure."

"Mike, I get the feeling it was an accident," Ducci said.

"Oh, yeah? How do you see that? You think a friend showed up, just happened to be carrying an ice pick. And this person who just happens to be carrying an ice pick meets his two pals coming out of the restaurant on a night when their driver was not waiting on the street. So what's the scenario, Duke? This friend greets them, then strikes the woman a lethal blow. And this blow occurs in a very special place—"

Ducci nodded, demonstrating the sites with his hands. "Higher in the neck the thyroid and trachea cartilage is in front of the carotid artery. A person would have to slit the throat with a knife or a razor to get to it. Where this guy strikes is where the carotid artery has turned the corner and is in the very front, the most exposed place. No knife or razor was necessary."

Mike scowled. "Then how do you see accident here?' "

"It was too direct a hit, but not a professional hit. A professional wouldn't use an ice pick, too uncertain.

He'd have to get too close to the victim and would never go for one and not the other. Nah, this person struck once and took off, probably in terror. . . ."

"How about somebody saw him?"

"Well, that might be your man Patrice. But accident keeps coming to mind. You know what jealousy and rage is like. They lose their minds, keep stabbing away, killing the victim over and over. This just isn't that."

"One homicide, one bum ticker. The DA's going to go crazy with this, huh, April?"

" Yes, he is," she said, opening her mouth for the first time.

"You're looking for someone who knew them real well," Ducci said.

"How about the wife?" April said.

"Why would she kill Merrill Liberty if her husband was already dead of a heart attack?" Mike said.

"Petersen didn't have the heart attack until the killer arrived. Maybe Daphne intended to kill him, but he died of shock before she got to it. Stranger things have happened."

"Imagine the prosecution trying to prove that she scared him to death."

"She'd scare me to death," Mike muttered.

"Daphne Petersen still has the most to gain," April pointed out.

"Ah, I don't know. What about Liberty? What's his profile? Is he a man of iron control—a person capable of studying medical books, planning a job like this, hitting her in just the right spot?" He shrugged again. "He ever hurt people before, off the field, I mean? How cold a guy is he? Most of them kill the boyfriend first, and then the wife. They don't kill the wife and leave the boyfriend to die of a heart attack. A little too pat, somehow, isn't it?"

"I'm having someone do a profile on him."

Mike turned to her in surprise. "You didn't tell me that."

"We haven't spoken recently."

Ducci tapped his pencil. "That's good. I'm wondering if maybe Liberty knew he didn't have to kill the boyfriend. Maybe Petersen was incapacitated already."

"In the restaurant?"

"Yeah, in the restaurant. That would ring, wouldn't it?" Ducci said.

"That would ring." Mike patted the skull.

"Doesn't ring to me," April said.

"Why not?"

"You're talking about a big strong guy who could snap a neck like his wife's with two fingers. Why kill her with an ice pick? Well, I've got to go." April grabbed her coat.

"I'll come with you. See you, Lola," Mike murmured to the skull. '