Two Graves

3

LONG AGO, DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT VINCENT D’AGOSTA had learned to be late to any appointment at the M.E. building on East Twenty-Sixth Street. He had found out the hard way that there were distinct disadvantages to being early, most of which involved arriving while an autopsy was still ongoing and thus being compelled to witnesses the final stages, which were inevitably the worst. They’d told him he would eventually get used to it.

He hadn’t.

This one, he knew, would be more challenging than most. A young IT consultant down from Boston on a business trip, butchered and dismembered in a New York luxury hotel, security feeds showing a killer who looked like a model, with a victim who was equally attractive. The nature of the crime—which had all the hallmarks of a random killing for pleasure, perhaps involving a libidinous component—guaranteed strong public interest. Even the Times had run a story.

At a certain level, while he hated to admit it to himself, he was not displeased to be here. The zone captain had assigned the case to him, making him squad commander. It was his crime, his baby.

He passed through the doors containing the famous phrase, TACEAT COLLOQUIA. EFFUGIAT RISUS. HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE. “Let conversation cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living.” And this made him think, with some satisfaction, how well things were going in his own life. His heart injury was just about fully healed, his relationship with Hayward was on track, his ex-wife was out of the picture, he was in regular touch with his son, and his unreliable employment history and disciplinary letters were now firmly in the past. The only unsettled issue was Pendergast and the man’s pursuit of his kidnapped wife. But if anyone could take care of himself, it was the FBI agent.

His mind returned to the case at hand. It was more than an opportunity; it marked a crossroads in his career, a new beginning. Perhaps even the first step on his path to captain.

With this in mind he entered the main corridor of the M.E. building, flashed his shield at a nurse by way of greeting, signed in, and headed for Autopsy 113. He gowned up outside, then entered the room—to find that his timing had been perfect.

The dismembered body lay on a gurney. On a second gurney next to it, arrayed in rows with military precision, were the missing pieces, large and small, that had been cut from the corpse, along with Tupperware containers holding the various organs removed by the pathologist in the course of the autopsy.

The forensic pathologist was weighing the last one to be removed from the body cavity—the liver—and transferring it to its own container.

Arrayed around the body were two people from his freshly assembled team: Barber, the precinct-assigned investigator; and the guy from latent prints with the funny name he couldn’t recall. Barber was in fine form, his usual cheerful self, his baby-brown eyes taking in everything. The guy from latents—what the hell was his name?—had the face of a man with big news. It irritated D’Agosta that neither looked the slightest bit queasy. How did they do it?

He tried to avoid dwelling on the details, keeping his eyes moving, not coming to rest on any particular item. Under the circumstances, he actually felt pretty good: that morning, to the annoyance of his girlfriend, Laura, he had turned down his favorite breakfast—challah bread French toast—along with orange juice and even coffee, satisfying himself with a tall glass of Italian mineral water.

A murmur of greeting, nods. He didn’t recognize the gowned-up forensic pathologist, who was still reporting data into a headset. It was hard to see much of her, but he could tell she was young and strikingly good looking, with lustrous black hair pulled back—but very tense, brittle.

“Doctor? I’m Lieutenant D’Agosta, squad commander,” he said to her by way of greeting.

“Dr. Pizzetti,” she replied. “I’m the new forensic pathology resident.”

Nice. Italian. A good omen. The “new” part explained her nervousness.

“When you have a chance, could you fill me in, Dr. Pizzetti?” he asked.

“Of course.” She began tidying up the corpse, dictating the last of her observations. It lay on the gurney like a loosely assembled human jigsaw puzzle, and she now straightened some of the pieces that had become displaced during the autopsy, returning the corpse to a semblance of human shape. She shifted some organs, fixed lids on a few still-open Tupperware containers. And then her assistant spoke to her in a low voice and handed her a long, evil-looking needle.

D’Agosta felt himself go rigid. What was this? He hated needles.

Pizzetti bent over the head. The cranium was already open, the brain removed. Wasn’t it over? What the hell was she doing?

As he watched, she reached down, opened the corpse’s eye with her thumb, and inserted the needle.

D’Agosta should have looked away quicker, but he didn’t, and the sight of the needle sliding into that bright blue staring eye tightened his stomach in the most unpleasant way. Usually they took samples of ocular fluid for toxicology tests at the beginning of the autopsy—not at the end.

D’Agosta pretended to cough into his mask, still looking down and away.

“We’re almost done, Lieutenant,” said Pizzetti. “We just needed one more tox sample. Didn’t get enough the first time.”

“Right. Fine. No problem.”

She ejected the needle into a medical waste bag and handed the syringe, filled with a yellowish orange fluid, to her assistant. Then she stepped back and glanced around the room. She peeled off her fouled gloves, tossed them into the red-bag waste, pulled down her mask, and unhooked her headset. Her assistant handed her a clipboard.

She was tense. D’Agosta’s heart softened for her: young, a new resident, probably her first high-profile case. Worried about making a mistake. But from what he could see spread out in front of him, she’d done a fine piece of work.

She began the briefing with the usual litany: height, weight, age, cause of death, distinguishing marks, old scars, health, morbidities, pathologies. Her voice was pleasant although tight. The latents guy was taking notes. D’Agosta preferred to listen and retain by memory; note taking often caused him to miss things.

“Only one wound contributed to death: the one to the throat,” she said. “No tissue under the fingernails. Prelim tox tests all negative. No sign of struggle.”

She went on with a meticulous description of the depth, angle, and anatomy of the single stab wound. This was an organized, intelligent killer, D’Agosta thought, as he heard how efficient the fatal wound had been in exsanguinating the body, silencing the victim immediately and causing her to bleed out very quickly, all with one thrust with a razor-sharp, double-bladed knife about four inches long.

“Death,” she concluded, “occurred within thirty seconds. All the other cuts were made postmortem.”

A pause.

“The body was dismembered using a Stryker saw, perhaps one very much like the one beside me.” She pointed to a saw mounted on a rack next to the body. “The Stryker has a wedge-shaped blade that moves back and forth at high speed, driven by compressed air. It is specifically designed to cut through bone but to stop instantly when encountering soft tissue. It is also designed not to cause any spraying of bone or fluids as it cuts. The perpetrator’s use of it appears to be expert. Unusually expert.” She paused again.

D’Agosta cleared his throat. The bolus in his stomach hadn’t gone away, but at least it wasn’t threatening to erupt. “So the perp might be an M.E. or orthopedic surgeon?” he asked.

A long silence. “It’s not my place to speculate.”

“I just want an off-the-cuff opinion, Doctor. Not a scientific conclusion. I won’t hold you to it. How about it?” He tried to speak gently, so she wouldn’t feel threatened.

Another hesitation. D’Agosta started to get a clearer idea of why she was so tense: she might be wondering if the murderer was a colleague. “It seems to me the person who did this had professional training.” It came out in a rush.

“Thank you.”

“The perpetrator also used surgical tools to cut the flesh down to the bone—the precision is remarkable—retractors to draw away the flesh—we documented the marks—and, as I said, used the Stryker to cut the bone. All the cuts were done very precisely, with no slips, no mistakes, much as a surgeon would in an amputation. Except, of course, the vessels weren’t tied off or cauterized.”

She cleared her throat. “The body was dismembered symmetrically: one cut three inches below the knee, one three inches above, one two inches above the elbow and another two inches below. And then the ears, nose, lips, chin, and tongue were removed. All with surgical precision.”

She indicated the body parts, laid out on the second gurney positioned next to the corpse. The ears, nose, lips, and other small bits and pieces had been washed and looked like waxwork fakes, or parts from a clown kit.

D’Agosta felt the knot in his stomach tighten, a burning rise in his throat. Christ, even that glass of mineral water had been a mistake.

“And then there was this.” Pizzetti turned and indicated an eight-by-ten print tacked to a corkboard, along with many others taken at the crime scene. D’Agosta had already seen this at the scene, but still he braced himself.

Written on the stomach of the victim was a message traced in blood. It read:

Proud of me?

D’Agosta looked at the guy from latents. What was his name? It was now his turn, and D’Agosta could tell from the gleam in his eye that he had something to say.

“Yeah, ah, Mr.—”

“Kugelmeyer,” came the quick, eager response. “Thank you. Well. We got practically a full series off the body. Right and left thumb, right and left index, right ring, some partial palms. And we got two beauties right from that message there, in the victim’s blood, no less, written with the left index finger.”

“Very good,” said D’Agosta. This was more than good. The killer had been shockingly careless, allowing himself to be recorded by half a dozen security cameras, leaving his prints all over the crime scene. On the other hand, the crime-scene unit hadn’t been able to recover much from the scene itself: no saliva, semen, sweat, no blood or other bodily fluids from the perp. Naturally they had a lot of hair and fiber—it was a hotel room—but nothing that looked promising. No bite marks on the body, no scratches, nothing yet that would yield the killer’s DNA. They had swabbed many of the latents, however, hoping to pick up some stray DNA, and they were confident the lab would succeed in this.

Pizzetti went on. “There was no sign of sexual activity, penetration, sexual violence, or molestation. The victim had just taken a shower, which made recovery of potential evidence from the body easier.”

D’Agosta was about to ask a question when he heard, behind him, a familiar voice.

“Well, well, if it isn’t Lieutenant D’Agosta himself. How are you, Vinnie?”

D’Agosta turned to see the hugely imposing figure of Dr. Matilda Ziewicz herself, chief medical examiner for New York City. She stood there like a linebacker, a cynical smile on her red-lipsticked mouth, her bouffant blond hair covered by an oversize cap, her specially sized smock bulging. She was brilliant, imposing, physically repellent, sarcastic, feared by all, and extremely effective. New York had never had a more competent chief M.E.

Dr. Pizzetti tensed up even more.

Ziewicz flapped a hand. “Carry on, carry on, don’t mind me.”

It was impossible not to mind her, but Pizzetti made an effort, resuming her rundown of all the preliminary results, relevant or not. Ziewicz listened with great attention and then, as Pizzetti continued, clasped her hands behind her back and made an excruciatingly slow turn around the two gurneys, the one holding the body and the other all the parts, examining them with redly pursed lips.

After several minutes, she issued a low hmmmm. And then another, with a nod, a grunt, a mumble.

Pizzetti fell silent.

Ziewicz straightened up, turned to D’Agosta. “Lieutenant, do you recall, these many years ago, the museum murders?”

“How could I forget?” It was the first time he had encountered the formidable woman, back in the days before she’d been appointed chief M.E.

“I never thought I’d live to see a case as unusual as that one. Until now.” She turned to Pizzetti and said, “You’ve missed something.”

D’Agosta could see Pizzetti freeze. “Missed… something?”

A nod. “Something crucial. Indeed, the very thing that lifts this case into…” She gestured toward the sky with a plump hand. “The stratosphere.”

A long, panicked silence followed. Ziewicz turned to D’Agosta. “Lieutenant, I’m surprised at you.”

D’Agosta found himself more amused than challenged. “What, you glimpse a claw in there somewhere?”

Ziewicz tilted her head back and issued a musical laugh. “You are very funny.” She turned back to Pizzetti while everyone else in the room exchanged puzzled glances. “A good forensic pathologist goes into an autopsy with no preconceptions whatsoever.”

“Yes,” said Pizzetti.

“But you did come in here with a preconception.”

Pizzetti’s visible panic mounted. “I don’t believe I did. I had an open mind.”

“You tried, but you did not succeed. You see, Doctor, you assumed you were dealing with something—a single corpse.”

“Respectfully, Dr. Ziewicz, I did not. I’ve examined each wound and I specifically looked for substituted body parts. But each part goes with the others. They all match up. None were switched with any other corpse.”

“Or so it seems. But you did not do a complete inventory.”

“An inventory?”

Ziewicz moved her ponderous bulk over to the second gurney, where pieces of the face had been rinsed and laid out. She pointed to a small piece of flesh. “What’s this?”

Pizzetti leaned forward, peering. “A piece of… the lip, is what I assumed.”

“Assumed.” Ziewicz reached out, selected a set of long tweezers from a tray, and picked up the piece with great delicacy. She placed it on the stage of a stereo zoom microscope, switched on the light, and stepped back, inviting Pizzetti to look.

“What do you see?” Ziewicz asked.

Pizzetti looked into the scope. “Again, it seems like a bit of lip.”

“Do you see cartilage?”

A pause. Pizzetti poked at the bit of flesh with the tweezers. “Yes, a tiny fragment.”

“So I ask again: what is it?”

“Not a lip then, but… an earlobe. It’s an earlobe.”

“Very good.”

Pizzetti straightened up, her face a mask of tension. Ziewicz seemed to expect more, however, and so after a moment Pizzetti stepped over to the gurney and examined the two ears lying like pale shells on the stainless steel.

“Um, I note that the ears are both present and undamaged. The lobes are not missing.” Pizzetti paused. After a moment, she went back to the stereo zoom and stared once more into the eyepieces, poking and prodding the earlobe with the tip of the tweezers. “I’m not sure this belonged to the perpetrator.”

“No?”

“This earlobe,” said Pizzetti, speaking carefully, “does not appear to have been torn or cut off in the process of struggle. Rather, it appears to have been removed surgically, with care, using a scalpel.”

D’Agosta remembered a small detail from the surveillance tapes he had spent hours watching, and it sent a shock through his system. He cleared his throat. “I will note for the record that the surveillance tapes indicate the perp had a small bandage over his left earlobe.”

“Oh, my God,” Pizzetti blurted into the stunned silence that followed this announcement. “You don’t think he cut off his own earlobe and left it at the scene of the crime?”

Ziewicz gave a wry smile. “An excellent question, Doctor.”

A long silence developed in the room, and finally Pizzetti said: “I’ll order up a full analysis on this earlobe, microscopics, tox tests, DNA, the works.”

Her smile broadening, Dr. Ziewicz peeled off her gloves and pulled down her mask, tossing them in the waste. “Very good, Dr. Pizzetti. You have redeemed yourself. A good day to you all, ladies and gentlemen.”

And she left.