with sixteen maimed and seven deaths on his head.
“The software was created when Kurlandinsky's body experienced postmortem freezing in a cryogenics chamber. Frozen rock-hard solid in order that every inch of his body- from crown to toe-could be cut into cross sections,” explained Jessica. “Then each section was scanned into the computer.”
“The entire body?” young, petite Chen chirped, birdlike.
“Like a stack of large, oddly shaped poker chips,” supplied J. T.
Flashing on their ill-fated trip to Las Vegas a few years back, Jessica thought it just like J. T. to use a gambling metaphor. She continued saying, “Now that each section of an entire human body is filmed and on computer, scientists and autopsiests, such as we, benefit by seeing, for the first time in history, the human organs in three-dimensional form from top to bottom in successive sections.”
“All in 'living' color,” J. T. happily added, “so now you can call up any organ, and the computer will give you a full three-dimensional look at it.”
Today's John Doe autopsy benefited from the inmate's generosity, and certainly Jessica did, as the new imaging software saved hours in the lab. A simple, straightforward autopsy could be completed in an hour, but one faced untold complications whenever opening a cadaver and rummaging about in the cranium and below the breastplate. With the new technology, she didn't have to cut so many sections; she could use the templates created by the software to see if the victim's organs proved oversized, overweight, distended, ballooned up, too small, shriveled or lacking in proper color, texture, diseased or healthy. If an organ checked out against the software, then there was no need to cut any sections, because the computer wand had just told the computer brain that the measurements figured accurately. But whenever an organ didn't fit the profile as determined by the computer, a cute little Daffy Duck who-who laugh sounded an alarm. The alarm notified the people doing the autopsy that sections of a given organ absolutely had to be taken.
In John Doe's case, the Daffy Duck alarm had gone off repeatedly, signaling a hard life, despite his relatively young age.
Jessica had fought long and hard to finally persuade Quantico that the new technology must be had for their labs and teaching theaters here in Virginia, if the FBI wished to stay current with new advances in medical procedures. And she'd been absolutely right. Today alone, six hours of guesswork and searching about the body, rooting around in the “rack”- as the professionals called the organs below the rib cagehad been saved due to the new imaging wonder. And now she tried to imagine how they had ever gotten by without it.
But now a new mystery presented itself-today's cadaver. The strange case of Mr. John Doe-Horace, J. T. had taken to calling him because he “looked like a Horace”-whose body had gone unclaimed, whose identity remained a mystery, and whose unruly hair, from ponytail to thickly bearded chin, kept falling out and clogging the drain below the slab. The man's wild hair, black with streaks of gray throughout, gave him the appearance of a modern-day mountain man; his clothing marked him as both a biker and a gang member. But the gang jacket emblem, The Flesheaters, didn't exist according to the FBI's extensive records on outlaw biker gangs. They surmised that Horace had begun his own new club, and perhaps some rival had killed him for his trouble. It was all rank speculation.
All the same, someone with extreme patience had set this Tattoo Man up for murder. Someone with access to a rabid animal and time enough to infect five other canines and thus had introduced that unfortunate to six mad dogs. Someone had set those killing dogs in motion. The evidence pointed to a strong hand or two working the strings.
“Think of the sheer amount of planning that had to go into this killing.” Jessica clenched her teeth. “G'damnit. “
“It'd take months to set up, maybe a year,” agreed J. T.
Young Holbrook, one of her protdgfs, stared openmouthed at Jessica, having never heard her swear before. The Chinese intern, Chen, her nose dimpled and curled, offered an agreeing frown.
Jessica half-smiled to lighten the moment as much as possible and said, “The skin-art and hairiness of the victim presents you interns with a good lesson. We're not in the business of prejudging the victim from the evidence of the way he led his life. We don't write a body off just because of the chosen lifestyle, which often dictates the deathstyle, if you follow me.” Jessica half-joked, but it remained a serious point. The foul-of-the-earth issue raged as hot debate among medical people in the U.S. and elsewhere. Whom to serve first and foremost, those who live a clean life, or those who live a foul life? Jessica saw that while Holbrook accepted the notion on its face, that Yon Chen appeared to mentally grapple with it. Good, Jessica thought.
She decided to go on. “Well, it represents only one of a multiple set of problems surrounding Horace. This stone-cold John Doe represents a mystery. He's died with absolutely No distinguishing or identifying marks or papers on him, no wallet, no cards, very few teeth-the assumption already having been made that his killer took his dental plates to retard identification efforts. Somebody somewhere went to a great deal of trouble to confuse any efforts we make to identify Tattoo Man.”
J. T. had returned from the intercom where he'd shouted at maintenance, as he believed the temperature, and thus the odors in the room, was on the rise. He returned just in time to dovetail on Jessica's words for the benefit of the interning students. “No explanations as to who Horace had been in life, save the largest calling card Dr. Coran and I have ever seen on a body-the full-body tattoos that he accumulated over a lifetime of what one might assume-”
“Assume at one's own risk,” Jessica cautioned.
“-to be the result of hard and fast living, a lifestyle which may well have contributed to his untimely death.”
“The body's age, according to bone structure and what few teeth he has in his head, puts him at between fifty-five and sixty years of age,” Jessica estimated. “I'd take the conservative path, guess the lower end of the scale more accurate.”
“Whatever his age, he's lived the life of a hard-bitten, crusty old salt,” J. T. put in.
Jessica immediately replied, “And the man appears to have had a 'hard-bitten' death as well.”
Only young Chen remained silent as the other three laughed aloud. “Hard-bitten?” she asked.
“Later,” Holbrook assured her. “I'll explain it to you later.”
Still, Jessica hated the typical cop mentality that the deceased had probably brought on himself. In some ways, maybe so, but Jessica knew only a handful of men-serial killers she had hunted down-whom she honestly felt deserved a death as heinous as that which Horace had met, to be mauled to death by animals starved and made rabid by someone Horace knew.
“Horace's murder, and indeed it is murder,” Jessica said for the record and the interns, “represents a particularly brutal one.
Jessica's sense of awe at the flamboyant needle etchings and delightful, multicolored designs covering Horace's form only grew as she worked. She had to keep reminding herself to focus on the autopsy and to stop “reading” the illustrated man lying like an open book before her, but this proved impossible.
One set of images spiraled into a depiction of hell, while another displayed a rose garden that looked as peaceful and virginal as any heaven. Overall, Horace the Tattoo Man preferred dark and sinister themes in his body art, even incestuous scenes of twisted family life and child abuse. She wondered if such scenes meant a graduation from skeletons swallowing snakes and women whole, and eyeballs with all manner of terrible instruments plunged through them. Chains and peculiarly designed machines held people in limbo all about Horace's body. Torture all mixed up with sex appeared his main theme.
She wondered if his choice of artwork reflected anything of the man himself, or if the raw artwork with its undisguised themes of hatred toward women and lust for sexual power over them and children amounted to simple affectations taken on to make the man appear more sinister than he actually was. Either way, the artwork itself proved, by anyone's standard, superb. The artist was a master at his craft, likely at the apex of his career when he did John Doe's body. What year would that have been?
“We need to get an ink expert down here to make some estimation of how old the tattoos are,” she said to J. T., who nodded appreciatively.
“Sure, it would tell us a lot to know when the most recent tattoo was applied.”
“Exactly. Maybe after the when, we can begin to hone in on the where and the who.”
“The artist, sure.”
“Maybe he'll have a record or at least a recollection of the client. Either that or perhaps someone in the know about tattoos might recognize the artist's work. Lead us to the artist, and perhaps we're in Horace's
