nameless victim lay cold and earthen to the touch, the flesh and features turned to a claylike caricature of what they had once been. Into the room stepped Dr. Franklin Wardlaw, and for a moment the large man with his piercing, steel-gray eyes simply stared over his mask at Jessica as if she were lost.
“ The autopsy was only begun yesterday when I was interrupted by your superior Meade, P.C. Stephens and a political hack by the name of Fouintenac,” Dr. Ward law began, his voice like a biting metal file in her ear. She'd ostensibly replaced the man in his own hospital.
She didn't know quite what to say, but she could empathize with the scene he described. “Removed while in the middle of an autopsy? That's unconscionable, really.”
“ Fouintenac-whom I've never seen before-did as nice a job on me as this poor slob got.” He indicated the decapitated body lying before them. “I was curious about the decapitation, you know, since it was such a departure from the other victims and-”
She agreed instantly. “My thought too, absolutely.”
“ So here I was, staring down at the wounds, when P.C. Stephens had me bodily removed. My lawyers are fighting that action now, and have gotten a cease-and-desist order against the city and Commissioner Stephens until we go to court. The injunction holds for the time being, Dr. Coran, and so we are stuck with one another, I'm afraid… at least for now.”
She didn't miss a beat, replying, “In the meantime, then, I will assist you as best I can, Dr. Wardlaw.”
This only made him stare even harder at her, as if he suspected her of some false pretense-and to a degree, he was correct. It was a standard line meant to place the local M.E., pathologist or crime lab technician at ease. Still, she felt some compassion for the older medical professional who had slipped from grace. So she continued, saying,”And I can only hope you will accept my presence here in the spirit in which I've traveled here, to offer my full cooperation and that of the FBI.”
“ You have no idea the embarrassment, the shame they've caused me. Well, I'm not taking it lying down, and Stephens will be sorry for the day he sided against me.”
“ I was M.E. in Washington, D.C., some years before I became an agent, Dr. Wardlaw. I know about the ugly political aspects of the M.E.'s office.”
“ You were on staff at what hospital?”
“ Washington Memorial.”
“ As a junior pathologist?”
“ No, no… I was their M.E., the designated city coroner for D.C.”
“ Really? I must say that's impressive for one who looks so young.”
“ I started young, and believe me, all my life I've witnessed how narrow and stupid the bureaucrats can be.” She quickly recalled for Wardlaw's benefit a time when even her father was “let go” by a city as its M.E. In this respect, New Orleans was far behind the times; no municipal employee, including the mayor of the city, ought to have the right to summarily fire the city medical examiner. It smacked crisply of conflict of interest. An M.E. should answer to only one god-scientific truth. Knowing little of Wardlaw other than what she'd read in his reports, Jessica withheld any personal judgments about the doctor. However, it was true that his paperwork, at least on the Hearts case involving Victor Surette, was lacking. Her attitude seemed to have surprised Wardlaw, who was prepared with an angry, hell-raising speech but had not prepared a conciliatory word. He hemmed and hawed a moment before Jessica added, “Dr. Wardlaw, I'm glad to see that you've chosen to fight. There're too few of us M.E.'s in the country willing to fight for our basic rights as is.”
“ Your concern, Doctor, is deeply touching.” His bitterness had dissolved, any earlier sarcasm now dispelled by her charms. Now only his annoying smoker's cough and drinker's breath filled the room.
“ It was never my intent to have you removed, sir, I promise you that.”
“ Very well, then. Shall we go to work before that snake doctor they hired comes poking around?”
She smiled behind her own mask at his theatrical allusion to Kim Desinor. “My sentiments exactly.” In fact, she'd rushed here to get to the body before Kim had a chance to do her psychometric reading.
“ Science can't possibly outmaneuver the ramblings of a psychic, and certainly we can't hope to outpace the witch,” continued an irate Wardlaw. “Science and truth take too much time for the press, the public and the powerful concerned with holding office.”
“ I don't know her well enough to call her a witch, Dr. Wardlaw,” replied Jessica. “However, it was my intention to get as far and as fast as possible here before she arrived, yes.”
“ Then we agree on something.”
“ I hope that we can agree on many some things here today.”
“ Hmmmm…” He contemplated this, then reached out and snatched the dull white sheet from the cadaver with one even thrust, the sheet spiraling up and away like a ghost. “Then examine the neck wounds and tell me precisely how this fellow lost his head.”
She smiled at the challenge. Wardlaw was tall with hard-edged lines, an Abe Lincoln cast in granite, sorrow molded to him like some stone shroud. He was weary of seeing the kinds of atrocities that big city crime had routinely to show him, and she could well believe that the recent flurry of unholy terror which came to him in the form of cut-up young men whose hearts had been removed for God knows what unnatural cause or ritual might easily have thrown the man into a tailspin of self-destruction.
His surgeon's hands were as large as a pair of cast-iron skillets, thick blunted fingers, dark, gray, sensitive and cold as the casket itself, she thought. She guessed from his features, particularly the flat, flaring nose and natty hair, that he was certainly as much African-American as he was white, perhaps some Creole or Cajun blood there.
He pointed with his scalpel to a camera on the ceiling which had been activated with the push of a button. “We're on, Dr. Coran. Want to smile for Big Brother?”
She wondered if one of Stephens's lackeys was watching at the other end of the TV monitor somewhere; wondered if the commissioner had Dr. Wardlaw on video film in an inebriated state here in his own operating room-not that he could do much harm to the “patient patient,” though he could easily harm the evidentiary proceedings. If so, Wardlaw might well save his lawyers' fees.
Jessica rattled off the requisite information for the camera: time of day, cadaver tag, age, height, weight and sex of the victim, finishing with the victim's name, John Doe for the moment. After only a few minutes of close scrutiny over the neck wounds, she saw that the greatest gash was to the rear of the neck at the base of the skull rather than below the chin, so that if the killer had used a meat cleaver, he'd chopped at the head in execution style, from the rear. But it was by no means a clean cut; in fact it was a ghastly tear that'd made several strange rents, none of them looking like clean incisions. Either the killer had used a very dull blade and had had to repeatedly hack at the victim's neck, or something entirely different had occurred to John Doe.
“ This looks like the work of a… a machine of some sort,” she said.
“ Go on, Doctor,” he urged her.
“ A… like a propeller… a small but powerful, three-bladed propeller.”
“ And you may recall that the body was found by a group of fishermen, and fishermen do as much drinking as fishing, and they're not always careful about watching where they're headed, and none of them follow the speed rules, striking floating manatees and gators all the time.”
“ A boat propeller… the propeller severed the head,” she decided.
“ Not completely, but damned near, and the poor handling of the body from water to shore did the rest, but like the fishermen who left out the fact they'd hit the body where it bobbed in the water, no one wanted to own up to the fact that the head later tore loose. Honesty's hard to come by.”
“ Well, they might've saved your office a lot of time and effort, and nobody wanted that.” Her sarcasm, which he seemed very much to appreciate, was met with a hearty laugh on his part. Not likely that he'd had much to laugh about lately.
“ Nobody much thinks about the demands of my office, Doctor. You don't actually know anyone who really, truly gives a damn out there, do you, Dr. Coran?”
“ No, I'm no longer gullible about people, not any more than you are, Doctor.” She breathed in deeply the pungent odors of the room. “No… leastways, I shouldn't be.”
“ Still, truth dies hard…”
“ Okay, so the victim wasn't beheaded by the killer.” Score one up for science over seance, she thought. Although Dr. Desinor hadn't been up to bat on this one yet, both M.E. s were confident that the psychic couldn't
