The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tom understood that the NYPD had made a priority of this case: the deployment of summa cum laude Sherrill proved that. He understood why they had done it, too: the politics of New York City meant that even a terror-attack-that-wasn't, since it involved an iconic target, had to get the full-dress treatment. Still, it was hard not to be impressed by seeing it in action.

By the time Sherrill had returned to the makeshift tent the corpse had already been zipped up in a body-bag and despatched to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The post-mortem would begin immediately: preliminary results would be in within a few hours. Sherrill gestured to one of the multiple police cars still idling outside UN Plaza, its driver clearly a personal chauffeur, urging Tom to get in and join him on the back seat. This, Tom guessed, was not how the NYPD investigated the average crackhead slaying in Brownsville. The journey was short, a quick zip south along First Avenue, which had once been Tom's daily route home. The traffic was circulating again; people were out shopping. For them, the death at the UN had been a morning inconvenience that had now passed. Just past the Bellevue Hospital, Sherrill tapped on his driver's shoulder and leapt out when the car halted. ‘Ordinarily no one's allowed to witness an autopsy,’ he explained to Tom. ‘But I find a sheet of results doesn't give the full picture. And they don't say no to first-grade detectives.’

They waited only a few minutes at reception before a middle-aged woman in surgeon's scrubs appeared. When Sherrill introduced Tom she gave him an expression he translated as, ‘OK, Mr UN Lawyer. Prepare yourself for an eyeful…’

She opened a pair of double doors by punching a code into a keypad and led them down one corridor, then another. There was no smell of rotting flesh. Instead he saw fleetingly, through one half-opened door, the familiar paraphernalia of an office: zany decorations, including a stray thread of ribbon leading up to a sagging helium balloon; he heard a radio tuned to some Lite FM station. At last she walked them into what seemed to be a hospital ward. The odour of disinfectant was high.

‘All righty, let's put these on.’ She handed them both green surgical gowns and hats, pulled back a green curtain and there it was. A slab on a gurney, under a rough sheet.

She moved a pair of spectacles from her head and settled them on her nose. ‘Here's where I got to before I was so rudely interrupted,’ she said, pulling back the sheet.

The body was on its side, a vast hulk of pale white flesh like the underside of a fish, though now tinged with green. Was that the light reflecting off the curtains? Tom couldn't tell. Strangely, his eye found the unbroken flesh first. The wound, the torn opening in the back, ringed by frayed threads of red, he only saw later, and when he saw it he could not look away. It was the depth of it that appalled him, the deep, red depth of it.

‘… consistent with severe trauma to the trunk, shattered shoulder blade, ruptured lung and exploded right ventricle…’

Tom was not listening. His eye was still gazing into the crimson gash, now congealed. It had the broken, rough edges of a hole in a plaster wall, as if a fist had punched right through it.

‘Let me turn him over for you.’

The two men had been standing opposite the pathologist, with the body between them and her. Now, they moved around so that they were alongside her. There was no smell yet, but the sight was powerful enough. Tom felt a hint of nausea.

‘You can see the exit hole here. Which means you'll have to be looking for a bullet.’

Tom focused on the dead man's face. The passport photograph must have been recent; the same full, roundness of head was still visible, hard as a billiard ball. He moved his hand forward, contemplating a touch.

‘Don't!’

He looked up at the pathologist, who was holding two latexed hands up in the air. ‘You don't have gloves.’

Tom gestured his retreat and took the opportunity to ask a question. ‘Can I see his eyes?’

She stepped closer and, with no hesitation, pulled back one eyelid, then another, as roughly as if she were checking on a roasting chicken.

For that brief second, the inert lump of dead flesh, a butcher's product, was transformed back into a man. The eyes seemed to look directly at Tom's own. If they were saying something, Tom had missed it. The moment was too short.

‘I'm sorry, can I see his eyes again?’

‘Pretty striking, huh?’

Tom hadn't noticed it the first time but now, as she pulled back both lids, pinning them with her latex thumbs and holding the position, he saw immediately what she meant. They were a bright, piercing blue.

‘He was strong, wasn't he?’ Tom pointed at the thickness of the dead man's upper arms. When his father had hit his seventies his arms had thinned, the skin eventually flapping loosely. But this corpse still had biceps.

‘You bet. Look at this.’ She pulled back the rest of the sheet revealing a flaccid penis, its foreskin drooping limply, before prodding the man's thick thighs: the butcher's shop again. ‘That's some serious muscle.’

‘And that's unusual for a man this age?’

‘Highly. Must have been some kind of fitness freak.’

‘What about that?’ It was Sherrill, anxious not to be forgotten – and to remind Tom who was in charge here. He was gesturing at a patch of metal bandaged to the dead man's left leg like a footballer's shin pad.

‘That appears to be some kind of support. It's unusual. When plates are used in reconstructive surgery, they're inserted under the skin. This is obviously temporary. Maybe it was used as a splint after a muscle strain. Odd to use metal though. It will probably become clearer once we see the deceased's medical records.’

‘What about that?’ Sherrill asked pointing at the lifeless left foot. There was a big toe, another one next to it and then a space where the other three should have been.

‘I hadn't got to that yet,’ the doctor said, with a welcome implication that he was ahead of her – and Sherrill. She moved to the end of the gurney, so that she could examine the foot from above. ‘These are old wounds,’ she said. ‘Maybe an industrial accident as a much younger man.’

‘Can you tell how old they are?’

‘Put it this way, I don't imagine this playing much of a role in your investigation. I would estimate these wounds are no less than sixty years old.’