The First Victim

CHAPTER 25

Although procedure required an investigating officer to attend a victim’s autopsy, this requirement often amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. For Boldt, who understood perfectly well the need to protect the evidence’s chain of custody, it still seemed a waste of the officer’s time, because the surgical procedure could drag on for hours. He and his squad, like every other homicide squad in the country, had found ways around the requirement-attending the autopsy, but not start to finish, leaving the bulk of the cutting and sawing to the people in the white coats. But no matter what duration of time was actually spent in the tile room with the ME or one of his assistants, the assignment required a strong stomach-there was no way of avoiding at least a brief encounter with the pale and naked corpse of the bloated victim, whether bludgeoned, bullet-ridden or burned. Technically, it was LaMoia’s investigation and therefore his autopsy, but Boldt filled in both to free up his sergeant who was busy with an unusual assignment and to gain firsthand knowledge for himself.

The cadaver lay on the stainless steel table, drains beneath her feet and head, a hospital band around her ankle, the chalky discoloration of her bloodless skin, sickening. Her bald skull and shaved pubis held a dull smudge of growth and reminded Boldt of his wife during her chemotherapy. The two men in lab coats cleaned up the ligature marks, removed most of the mud, sand, and grass, the bugs, worms and weeds, bagging, labeling and indexing. All such physical evidence was destined for Bernie Lofgrin’s SID forensics lab back at Public Safety.

Preliminary exterior examination of the cadaver continued for thirty minutes. While Boldt made phone calls from a wall phone, Dixon spent equal amounts of time inspecting the cadaver’s head, genitals, hands and feet. It was ascertained that her chest showed an inflamed skin rash, that her extremities showed signs of postmortem frost burn-explaining the darkened skin on her breasts and toes. Her hands and fingers held lacerations and puncture wounds.

A few minutes later she looked like something from Gray’s Anatomy as Dixon used a scalpel to unzip her from collarbone to crotch with a sure and steady hand. There were cop stories about medical examiners using poultry scissors and chain saws, Skilsaws and power drills, not all of which were exaggeration. The procedure could run anywhere from forty-five minutes to several hours. Dry land jumpers, floaters and burns occupied the Worst of All Time list. Jane Doe, for all the tragedy of her young death, was not too bad in terms of the autopsy.

Dixon opened her up like a frog in biology class, tucking one breast under the left armpit, the other under the right, calling out his observations for the sake of the video that captured the cadaver and the spoken dialogue for use in court if needed. He worked his trade-he took a liver plug, inspected her heart, emptied her stomach contents, manipulated her kidneys and finally cut open a lung-he called it ‘‘looking under the hood,’’ and sometimes slipped in other automotive analogies.

Time crawled. Dixon mentioned bronchial occlusion, edema and renal failure.

An hour and ten minutes later the video recorder was shut off and the two men adjourned to Dixon’s office for ‘‘the postgame show.’’ An assistant was left behind to sew her up and ‘‘get her back in the cooler.’’

Despite the use of surgical gloves, Dixon used a jeweler’s screwdriver to clean under each fingernail. Some things never changed. On his desk were laid out a number of sealed plastic bags from the autopsy.

‘‘You’re an obsessive-compulsive,’’ Boldt said.

‘‘Yeah? Well catch this.’’ Dixon flicked a discolored spec toward Boldt, but missed. ‘‘The gloves rip more often than not.’’

‘‘A lovely thought. I hope you disinfect your floors.’’

‘‘Only when it starts to smell.’’

‘‘I’m never bringing the kids down here again.’’

‘‘Autopsy day care,’’ Dixon said with a smile. ‘‘Another Boldt concept that never quite caught on.’’

Boldt asked, ‘‘Any surprises in your prelim?’’

Dixon studied from some of the notes his assistant had kept during the autopsy and then set the papers back down on his desk. He began the process of cataloguing the samples laid out before him. ‘‘Technically, she died as a result of pneumonia caused by pulmonary infection. To you, she drowned in her own mucus-not unlike what we saw in the three victims from that container.’’

‘‘Okay. You’ve won my attention.’’

‘‘Couple things set her apart. One is that she’d been violently raped. We picked up semen samples, vaginally and in the esophagus. We’ll run DNA. The other is a skin irritation. I’ll get back to that. Of primary importance to you is the unusual hemorrhaging in both the intestines and lungs. That’s your bridge between the container victims and this woman. Microscopically, the kidneys show inflammatory changes and infectious changes, but I keep coming back to the intestines, because that’s what sets these women apart from other flu-related deaths. It’s the same etiology as your container victims, Lou. In my lingo, this cause of death is not unlike the earlier cases we saw. Right now, your best shot would be to make a case for depraved indifference.’’

‘‘We can connect her to the container victims,’’ Boldt stated hopefully.

‘‘Circumstantially. Our samples will go to CDC in Atlanta who already have similar samples from the container vics. Two to three weeks, minimum.’’

‘‘That’s too long,’’ Boldt complained. ‘‘I’ve got the three dead in the container, two possible suspects murdered, and a journalist missing for over a week now.’’

‘‘You do, or LaMoia does?’’

‘‘I’m his errand boy.’’

‘‘Uh-huh.’’

‘‘It’s his case,’’ Boldt stated to deaf ears. He asked, ‘‘Was she in this same container?’’

‘‘It’s the same etiology,’’ he repeated, ‘‘but unlikely the same container. This one had been frozen.’’

‘‘What?’’

‘‘We see this often enough with cruise ships. Someone dies out at sea. Captain orders her into the deep freeze. What he doesn’t realize is that the fridge would be a hell of a lot easier on us. When you defrost frozen tissue it decomposes quickly, the cells actually break as they thaw. Looks different. Behaves differently.’’

‘‘Frozen?’’

‘‘That’s what I’m saying.’’

‘‘For how long?’’

‘‘No way to know.’’

‘‘Guesses?’’

‘‘A couple weeks to a month or more. If we took it out past six weeks we’d be likely to see more freezer burn than this.’’ He added, ‘‘That’s only opinion, Lou.’’

‘‘That rash?’’ Boldt asked.

‘‘No, not freezer burn. It’s chemical or allergy. Stay tuned.’’

‘‘So she was here well ahead of the container,’’ Boldt said.

‘‘In my opinion, yes.’’

‘‘But died of a similar illness.’’

‘‘In my opinion, yes.’’ Dixon suggested, ‘‘They could all come from the same village, something like that.’’

‘‘I need that freezer. I need the location of wherever that container was headed. We’re thinking sweatshop. The fabric inside the container-’’

‘‘I can support that with two needle marks on this one’s fingers.’’

‘‘Not a cruise ship.’’

‘‘If it’s a sweatshop, Lou, then it’s near a wharf, the fishing docks, something like that.’’

‘‘Why do you say that?’’ Boldt asked.

‘‘Or inside an old cannery,’’ Dixon continued. ‘‘The canneries all had freezers.’’

‘‘You found something on her, didn’t you?’’ Boldt said expectantly. He knew the man well. Like the lab’s Bernie Lofgrin, Dixon held the best for last. ‘‘What the hell’s going on, Dixon?’’

‘‘Not going on,’’ Dixon corrected, ‘‘coming off. Her feet were covered with them. Got to be either a cannery or a ship.’’

‘‘Her. . feet. . were. . covered. . with. . what?’’ Boldt asked.

Dixon searched through the half dozen plastic bags and held one up for Boldt to see. ‘‘Fish scales,’’ he said. ‘‘Her feet were covered in fish scales.’’