“It’s about time you got here,” William Saunders said. The doctor’s voice was raspy—an old throat wound from his time on the Western Front during the last world war.
“Couldn’t be helped,” Sam replied. “Yesterday both my boss and the mayor had to have a piece of my butt.”
“Hell of a thing, to be so popular,” the medical examiner said. He was tall and thin, with a thick thatch of gray hair, and as he stepped up from his chair, he remained stooped, as though working in the basement of the hospital had permanently weighed him down. “But I won’t give you any more grief, Inspector. You’ve given me a delight this fine morning.”
From a rack he pulled down a black rubber chest-high apron, which he tossed over his head and tied behind him. Sam followed him.
The examination room, like the office, was cluttered. On the far wall were three heavy refrigerator doors. Three metal tables stood centered on the tile floor, the middle one occupied by a sheet-covered lump. Saunders picked up a clipboard and started flipping through the sheets of paper. Sam imagined bits of bone, flesh, and brain tissue stuck in the cracks and grooves of the tiles and metal equipment.
“Why is it a delight?” Sam asked.
“You know what my customers are like day in, day out? A hobo from one of the encampments with a knife wound. A drunk pulled from a car crash. Or some wretched fisherman who fell into the harbor and was found a month later. Do you know how much a body in the water swells and decomposes after a month?”
“I have a hunch,” Sam said. “You still haven’t told me why this body is a delight.”
“Because the bodies I usually get are boring. They’re traditional. They’re easy. Lucky for me, no corpses have come by with their hands tied behind them and two bullets in their skull.” Saunders tapped the clipboard on the feet of the body on the metal table. “This John Doe, this one is a mystery. I’ve been with this good man for hours now, and I’ve only come up with a few crumbs of information.”
“So tell me what your crumbs are.”
“Ah, the crumbs.” Saunders tugged the sheet down. The dead man looked ghastly in the yellow basement light, the Y-shaped incision ugly on the pale skin of his sunken chest. “What we have here is a malnourished white male, approximately fifty to fifty-five years in age. There was no identification in his clothing, and his clothing had no store tags, no laundry marks.”
“Yeah, I know. I noticed that when I first examined him.”
“Something, isn’t it, Inspector? It was like someone—either him or somebody else—wanted to make sure that identifying him would be impossible. Which is probably true. But you see, this poor dead man has one distinct advantage.”
Sam really wanted Saunders to pull the sheet back over the body, but he didn’t want to show a weakness. “And what’s that?”
“He ended up in my county and faced me, that’s what. Any other county in this state, he’d be in a potter’s field. But here, not quite yet. First of all, I believe the man is European.”
“Why?”
“Two reasons. One, the clothing. The stitching is different, the quality of the cloth. Second, his dental work. There’s a difference in American and European dental work—the amount of gold and how it’s used, for example.”
“Can you be more specific? French? English? German?”
“They’re all German now, aren’t they? Sorry, no way to tell which occupied land this man is from.”
“You said he’s malnourished. What do you mean by that?”
“There’s a scale you use when you have a male subject of a certain height and certain age. This gentleman should have weighed between one hundred sixty pounds and one hundred seventy pounds. He actually weighs one hundred twenty. Almost skeletal.”
“Did he have cancer or TB?”
Saunders shook his head. “Internal organs were distressed from being underweight, but there was no obvious sign of disease. I sent his blood out for analysis, but it seems to me, odd as it sounds, that your friend here hadn’t eaten a good meal in a very long time. Some of the hoboes I’ve examined over the years have been underweight, but nothing like this man. It was like he was deliberately starved. However, just to advise you, his lack of eating didn’t kill him.”
Sam felt frustrated, like he was being lectured to. “So you don’t know what killed him. Good for you. Then what was the cause of death?”
The medical examiner stepped up to the dead man’s head. “His neck was snapped.”
“Broken neck. All right, accident or homicide?”
“Homicide, without a doubt. Here”—Saunders pointed to the neck and jaw with a pencil—“and here, there are bruises that indicate to me your John Doe was forcibly grabbed from behind. He had his neck snapped. By someone taller and stronger than he. Left-handed, I have no doubt. To be fair, in his frail and malnourished state, a teenage boy could have probably killed him. There you have it. One older European male, neck snapped, and dropped right in your lap.”
“There was a tattoo on his wrist. A bunch of numbers. Did you see any other tattoos?”
“Not a one,” Saunders said. “But it’s intriguing, isn’t it?” He lifted up the left arm. “Six digits in a row. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Any guess what it can mean?”
“Who knows? Mother or girlfriend’s birth date. A safe combination or a bank account number. Like I said, intriguing. In the meantime, I’ll write up a preliminary report and have it sent over this afternoon. I won’t officially put down the cause of death—I want to wait for blood work—but you can be sure it was murder.”
Despite his earlier frustration, Sam was pleased. Saunders could be a pain in the ass with his lecturing style, but he knew his job. “Appreciate the work, Doc.”
“Let me know how this one turns out before it appears in the newspapers. Half-starved European with a broken neck dropped off in our fair city. Before you go, would you care for a bit of advice from someone who’s been on the job longer than he should have been?”
“Depends on the advice, I guess.”
Saunders slowly tucked the sheet back into place, as tenderly as if preparing the dead man for a long nap. “This is an unusual case, and unusual cases tend to have something sinister attached to them. Be careful, Sam. So many think that the story ends here, with a dead man on a slab. More often than not, this is where the story begins.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Back at his desk at the police station, Sam typed up another memo, in triplicate, while Mrs. Walton sat glumly nearby, working at her own typewriter.
TO: City Marshal Harold Hanson
FROM: Inspector Sam Miller
An autopsy performed by Rockingham County Medical Examiner DR. WILLIAM SAUNDERS has determined the cause of death for the unidentified male found last night by the B&M railroad tracks to be a HOMICIDE. According to DR. SAUNDERS, his autopsy results have not yet been finalized, although he is confident in his finding of HOMICIDE. No progress has yet been made on the victim’s identification, although the investigation continues.
It was time to notify the state. In New Hampshire, the state’s attorney general was brought in for all homicide cases, and for the first time in his career—feeling just a bit nervous, despite the giddiness of having a murder case before him—Sam picked up the phone, got an operator, and placed the call to Concord.
A bored-sounding woman on the other end of the line informed him that all available assistant attorney generals were at court, with the state police, or otherwise engaged. She promised a return phone call later today or
