I don’t like autopsies and I don’t ordinarily attend them. I’m not an overly squeamish man, so neither the sounds, the plops, crunches and squishes, or the incredibly foul odor, bother me all that much. It’s more a question of loss. You’d think that when an individual is inflicted with an injury sufficient to end her life, there’d be nothing more to take from her. But you’d be dead wrong. At autopsy, murder victims are reduced to meat on a table, to the bare mechanics. The various organs — the ones sill left, anyway — are examined, measured and weighed on a scale that might be found in any butcher shop. The stomach is squeezed of its contents, like icing from a pastry bag. The scalp is peeled down and left to hang over the face. The ribs are cut away with shears that might be used to prune the dead branches of trees.
There is no dignity for the victim in any of this. There is only a further reduction, a second stripping away. The Buddhists say that the spirit lingers for a time after death, to watch over the body, to observe the rituals of mourning. As a rule, I’m not one to question another’s beliefs, but as I listened to the whine of a Stryker saw cutting away the top of my victim’s skull, I found myself hoping the Buddhists were wrong, that her spirit wasn’t hovering above that cold metal table, whispering ‘help me, help me, help me’.
Like I said, I don’t like to watch autopsies, and I didn’t watch this one. Though I was physically present on that Monday at three o’clock in the afternoon, a single glance at the victim, now in an advanced state of decomposition, was enough. The rest of the time, I kept my eyes on the floor. Nevertheless, I did learn a number of facts that were to play a key part in the later stages of the investigation. First, the victim was not in her twenties, as I’d concluded after examining her at the crime scene, but in late adolescence, between sixteen and nineteen years old. Dr Kim Hyong established this fact with an X-ray of the long bones of her forearm where they met her wrist.
I listened attentively while Hyong recorded this observation, speaking into a microphone clamped to the autopsy table, but I asked no questions. I was more interested in Hyong’s tone of voice, which remained matter-of- fact. There was no doubt in his mind, and nothing to be gained by challenging his conclusion, even if I’d had the expertise to frame a relevant question.
Hyong wound it up with an appropriately grisly flourish. The victim’s prints could not be taken because the skin on her fingertips had grown slack, a condition known as slippage. Hyong overcame this difficulty by peeling off the skin of each finger, then inserting his right forefinger into the resulting pouch. By gently stretching this pouch with his free hand, he was able to produce a credible set of prints. ‘It’s all in the wrists,’ he explained. ‘All in the wrists.’
The autopsy finally complete, Hyong took the crime scene photos to a metal shelf extending from the wall opposite the door, where he re-examined them under a large magnifying glass. Knowing my place in Hyong’s scheme of things, I waited patiently for him to complete this examination. A few minutes later, he called my attention to a full-length photo of the victim as I’d discovered her.
‘Tell me what happened here. Tell me why her skin is pink.’ Kim Hyong was short and thick, his torso running in a straight line from his armpits to his hips. His hands, by contrast, were very small, his movements precise enough to appear finicky.
‘I’ve seen this before, doctor, with a suicide. The man-’
‘Carbon monoxide, fine. What else?’
‘Cyanide?’
‘Very good. What else?’
My first impulse was to smack him, then count the revolutions before he contacted a solid object, say the far wall. But ever the goal-oriented detective, I merely sighed before shrugging my shoulders.
‘I have no idea.’
‘Then answer another question. This woman died from blunt force trauma resulting in severe intracranial hemorrhaging. Now, why would anyone strike her with enough force to produce this level of injury if she’d already been poisoned?’
‘I’ve been trying to figure that out from the time I found her.’
Hyong glanced at me before shaking his head. ‘Exposure to cold temperatures prior to death will produce lividity anywhere from pink to cherry red. We commonly see this in alcoholics who pass out on the streets in winter, and in cold-water drownings. Of course, we’ll test for carbon monoxide and cyanide, but I’d be shocked if either test was positive.’
Now he had my full attention. ‘Prior to death?’ I asked. ‘Is that what you said? Or after?’
‘Certainly prior, though perhaps both. Let me explain.’ Hyong was smiling now, exposing the yellowed teeth and coated tongue of a heavy smoker. ‘Lividity was fully set before the removal of the victim’s organs. I know this because the volume of blood in her body would have been greatly reduced if she’d been eviscerated immediately after death, producing a much fainter lividity. I can’t be certain, of course, that she was returned to a cold space in the hours between her death and the removal of her organs. But it does make sense.’
Hyong’s response directly addressed an anomaly I’d already considered. Blunt force injuries are almost always driven by passion, by the heat of the moment, yet the preparation of the body for disposal had been carefully thought out. A gap of many hours between the two events would go a long way toward resolving the dilemma. Perhaps the killer simply cooled down enough to get his act together, or perhaps a second actor had arrived, somebody more experienced, to lend a guiding hand.
‘The organ removal,’ I asked, ‘do you think it was done by somebody with medical knowledge?’
‘No, this is the work of a hunter or somebody who works at a slaughterhouse. The victim’s sternum was cut with a heavy-bladed knife, and there are nicks, probably from the same knife, on her ribs.’
I considered this for a moment, before asking an obvious question. ‘You said she was exposed to cold prior to her death. How much cold?’
‘Thirty-five to forty degrees would be my guess, the internal temperature of a common refrigerator. But I want you to take a look at her dentition.’ He pulled down the woman’s jaw, then stretched her lips away from her teeth. ‘Please, look,’ he said.
Though I didn’t understand why he couldn’t just describe whatever he’d discovered, I walked over to the table and stared down at my victim’s molars, two of which bore gold crowns. But that wasn’t what struck me as odd. It appeared that she had no cavities.
‘Notice those fillings?’ Hyong asked.
‘Do you mean the crowns?’
Hyong’s face was round and slightly dished in the center. When he compressed his lips, his disapproval apparent, his mouth all but vanished. ‘Look closer,’ he demanded.
I did as I was told, noticing that my victim’s many fillings were white instead of the silver I was used to seeing. ‘It’s quite likely your victim was born and raised behind the Iron Curtain. In the East, they use composite fillings, the white you see in her mouth; in the West, metal or silver. Notice the gold crowns, common in Europe, while here we cap teeth with porcelain.’
My first thought was of the neighborhood just to the north of Williamsburg, to Greenpoint and the many thousands of Poles who’d emigrated there following the break-up of the Soviet Union. From even the furthest reaches of Greenpoint, it was only a few miles to where my victim’s body was discovered. Now I had a place to begin.
‘I hope you’re not going to ask me about time of death,’ Hyong declared when I turned away from the body and took up a position near the door.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any point.’ In fact, every physical indicator of time of death is altered by cold: rigor mortis, livor mortis and insect activity are greatly retarded, while the loss of body heat is accelerated.
‘There’s a case reported by the DiMaios, father and son,’ Hyong announced, ‘in which the body of a young boy who’d drowned in a cold lake was still in full rigor when it was recovered seventeen days later.’
I looked back at my victim. Hyong had left her with her mouth agape, her lips folded back in what could have been mistaken for a smile. ‘How long will she be here?’ I asked. ‘If I can’t find someone to claim her body?’
‘A couple of months.’
‘And then what?’
‘And then the city will pick up the cost of her burial.’
‘On Hart’s Island?’
Hyong snorted. ‘What were you expecting, detective? A mausoleum?’
I moved toward the door without responding. What questions could be answered had been answered and
