bleed from his wound. When I spread open the denim shirt, long-sleeved, a men’s size small, that still smells faintly of a cologne or an after-shave, I find only a spot of dark blood that has dried stiffly around the slit made by the blade. What Marino and Anne have reported seems to be accurate, that the man began bleeding from his nose and mouth while he was fully clothed inside the body bag, his head turned to the side, probably the same side it was turned to when I examined him in the x-ray room a little while ago. Blood must have dripped steadily from his face and into the bag, pooling in it and leaking from it, and I can see that easily when I look at it next, an adult-size cadaver pouch, typical of ones used by removal services, black with a nylon zipper. On the sides are webbing handles attached with rivets, and that’s often where the problem with leakage occurs, assuming the bag is intact with no tears or flaws in the heat-sealed seams. Blood seeps through rivets, especially if the pouch is really cheap, and this one is about twenty-five dollars’ worth of heavy-duty PVC, likely purchased by the case.
As I imagine what I just saw on the CT scan and realize how quickly the damage occurred in what clearly was a blitz attack, the bleeding makes no sense at all. It makes even less sense than it did when Marino first told me about it in Dover. The massive destruction to the man’s internal organs would have resulted in pulmonary hemorrhage that would have caused blood to drain out of the nose and mouth. But it should have happened almost instantly. I don’t understand why he didn’t bleed at the scene. When the paramedics were working to resuscitate him, he should have been bleeding from his face, and this would have been a clear indication that he hadn’t dropped dead from an arrhythmia.
As I leave the autopsy room to go upstairs, I envision the video clips again and remember my wondering about his black gloves and why he put them on when he entered the park. Where are they? I haven’t seen a pair of gloves. They weren’t in the evidence locker or in the drying cabinet, and I checked the pockets of the coat and didn’t find them. Based on what I saw in the recordings covertly made by the man’s headphones, he had the gloves on when he died, and I envision what I saw on Lucy’s iPad when I was riding in the van to the Civil Air Terminal. A black-gloved hand entered the frame as if the man was swatting at something and there was a jostling sound as his hand hit the headphones while his voice blurted out, “What the…? Hey… !” Then bare trees rushing up and around, then chipped bits of slate looming large on the ground and the thud of him hitting, and then the hem of a long, black coat flapping past. Then silence, then the voices of people surrounding him and exclaiming that he wasn’t breathing.
The x-ray room door is closed when I get to it, and I check inside, but everyone is gone, the control room empty and quiet, the CT scanner glowing white in the low lights on the other side of the lead-lined glass. I pause to try the phone in there, hoping Anne might answer her cell, but if she’s already at McLean and in the neuroimaging lab, it will be impossible to reach her through the thick concrete walls of that place. I am surprised when she answers.
“Where are you?” I ask, and I can hear music in the background.
“Pulling up now,” she says, and she must be inside the van with Marino driving and the radio on.
“When you removed his clothing,” I say, “did you see a pair of black gloves? He may have been wearing a pair of thick black gloves.”
A pause, and I hear her say something to Marino and then I hear his voice, but I can’t make out what they’re saying to each other. Then she tells me, “No. And Marino says when he had the body in ID first thing, there were no gloves. He doesn’t remember gloves.”
“Tell me exactly what happened yesterday morning.”
“Just sit right here for a minute,” I hear her say to Marino. “No, not there yet or they’ll come out. The security guys will. Just wait here,” she says to him. “Okay,” she says to me. “A little bit after seven yesterday morning, Dr. Fielding came to x-ray. As you know, Ollie and I are always in early, by seven, and anyway, he was concerned because of the blood. He’d noticed blood drips on the floor outside the cooler and also inside it, and that the body was bleeding or had bled. A lot of blood in the pouch.”
“The body was still fully clothed.”
“Yes. The coat was unzipped and the shirt was cut open, the EMTs did that, but he was clothed when he came in and nothing was done until Dr. Fielding went in there to get him ready for us.”
“What do you mean, ‘to get him ready’?”
I’ve never known Fielding to get a body ready for autopsy, to actually go to the trouble to move it out of the refrigerator and into x-ray or the autopsy room, at least not since the old days when he was in training. He leaves what he considers mundane tasks to those whom he still calls
“I only know he found the blood and then hurried to get us because he took the call from Cambridge PD, and as you know, it was assumed the guy was a sudden death that was natural, like an arrhythmia or a berry aneurysm or something.”
“Then what?”
“Then Ollie and I looked at the body, and we called Marino and he came and looked, and it was decided not to scan him or do the post yet.”
“He was left in the cooler?”
“No. Marino wanted to process him in ID first, to get his prints, swabs, so we could get started with IAFIS and DNA, with anything that might help us figure out who he is. The important point is there were no gloves at that time, because Marino would have had to take them off the body so he could print him.”
“Then where are they?”
“He doesn’t know, and I don’t, either.”
“Can you put him on, please?”
I hear her hand him the phone, and he says, “Yeah. I unzipped the pouch but didn’t take him out of it, and there was a lot of blood in it, like you know.”
“And you did what, exactly?”
“I printed him while he was in the pouch, and if there had been gloves, I sure as hell would have seen them.”
“Possible the squad removed the gloves at the scene and put them inside the pouch and you didn’t notice? And then they got misplaced somehow?”
“Nope. I looked for any personal effects, like I told you. The watch, ring, keychain, the stash box, the twenty-dollar bill. Took everything out of his pockets, and I always look inside the pouch for the very reason you just said. In case the squad or the removal service tucks something in there, like a hat or sunglasses or whatever. The headphones, too. And the satellite radio. They were in a paper bag and came in with the body.”
“What about Cambridge PD? I know Investigator Lawless brought in the Glock.”
“He receipted it to the firearms lab around ten a.m. That was all he brought in.”
“And when Anne put his clothing inside the drying cabinet, well, obviously she didn’t have the gloves if you say they weren’t there in the first place.”
I hear him say something, and then Anne is back on the phone, saying, “No. I didn’t see gloves when I put everything else in the cabinet. That was around nine p.m., almost four hours ago, when I undressed the body to get it ready for the scan, not long before you got to the CFC. I cleaned the cabinet to make sure it was sterile before I put his other clothing in there.”
“I’m glad something’s sterile. We need to clean my station.”
“Okay, okay,” she says, but not to me. “Wait. Jesus, Pete. Hold on.”
And then Marino’s voice in my ear: “There were other cases.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We had other cases yesterday morning. So maybe someone removed the gloves, but I got no friggin’ idea why. Unless they maybe got picked up by mistake.”
“Who did the cases?”
“Dr. Lambotte, Dr. Booker.”
“What about Jack?”
“Two cases in addition to the guy from Norton’s Woods,” Marino says. “A woman who got hit by a train and an old guy who wasn’t under the care of a physician. Jack didn’t do shit, was gone with the wind,” Marino says. “He doesn’t bother with the scene, and so we get a body that starts bleeding in the fridge and now we got to prove the guy was dead.”
