air, and I begin gently blotting.
I touch the sterile paper to the surfaces of fragmented tissue and the edges of wounds, and one by one lay the sheets inside the hood, where the gently circulating air will facilitate evaporation, the drying of blood without disturbing anything adhering to it. I collect samples of the freeze-dried-looking tissue and save them in plasticized cartons and also in small jars of formalin, and I tell Anne we’re going to want a lot of photographs and that I’ll ask colleagues of mine to look at images of internal damage and of the tannish tough tissue. I’ll ask if they’ve ever seen anything like it before, and as I’m saying all this, I’m wondering who I mean. Not Briggs. I wouldn’t dare send anything to him. Certainly not Fielding. No one who works here. No one at all comes to mind except Benton and Lucy, whose opinions won’t help or matter. It’s up to me whether I like it or not.
“Let’s turn him over,” I say, and empty of organs, he is light in the torso and head-heavy.
I measure the entrance wound and describe what it looks like and exactly where it is, and I examine the wound track through the bloc of organs, finding every area that was punctured by what I’m now certain was a narrow double- and single-edged blade.
“If you look at the wound, you can clearly see the two sharp ends of it, the corners of the buttonhole made by two sharp edges,” I explain to Anne.
“I see.” Her eyes are dubious behind her plastic glasses.
“But look here, where the wound track terminates in the heart. Can you see how both ends of the wound are identical, both very sharp?” I move the light closer and hand her a magnifying lens.
“Slightly different from the wound on his back,” she says.
“Yes. Because when the blade terminated in the heart muscle, it didn’t penetrate as deeply; just the tip went in. As opposed to when these other wounds were made.” I show her. “The tip penetrated and was followed by the length of the blade running through, and as you can see, the one end of the wound is just a little blunted and slightly stretched. You especially can see it here, where it penetrated the left kidney and kept going.”
“I think I see what you’re saying.”
“Not what you would expect with a butterfly knife, a boning knife, a dagger, all of which are double-edged, both sides of the blade sharp from tip to handle. This brings to mind something spear-tipped—sharp on both sides at the tip but single-edged after that, like I’ve seen in some fighting knives or, in particular, something like a bowie knife or bayonet, where the top of the blade has been sharpened on both edges to make penetration easier in stabbings. So what we’ve got is an entrance that is three-eighths of an inch linear; both ends of the wound are sharp with one that is slightly more blunted than the other. And the width expands to five-eighths of an inch.” I measure, and Anne writes it down on a body diagram.
“So the blade is three-eighths of an inch at the tip, and at its widest it’s five-eighths. That’s pretty narrow. Almost like a stiletto,” she says.
“But a stiletto is double-edged, the entire blade is.”
“Homemade? A blade that injects something that explodes?”
“Without causing thermal injury, without causing burns. In fact, what we’re seeing is more consistent with frostbite, where the tissue feels hard and is discolored,” I remind her as I measure the distance from the wound on the man’s back to the top of his head. “Twenty-six inches, and two inches to the left of the mid-spine. Direction is up and anterior, with extensive subcutaneous and tissue emphysema along the track, perforating the transverse process on the left twelfth rib paraspinally. Perforating paraspinal muscle, perirenal fat, left adrenal, left kidney, diaphragm, left lung, and pericardium, terminating in the heart.”
“How long a blade for something to perforate all that?”
“At least five inches.”
She plugs in the autopsy saw, and we turn the body on its back again. I place a headrest under the neck and incise the scalp from ear to ear, following the hairline so the sutures won’t be visible afterward. The top of the skull is white like an egg as I reflect the scalp back and pull the face down like a sock, like something sad, the features collapsing as if he is crying.
15
Idon’t realize the sun is up and the arctic front has marched off to the south until I open my office door and am greeted by a clear blue sky beyond tall windows.
I look down seven floors, and there are a few cars moving slowly on the white-frosted furrowed road below, and going the other way, a snowplow truck with its yellow blade held up like a crab claw as it scuttles along, looking for the right spot, then lowering the blade with a clank I can’t hear from up here and scraping pavement that’s not going to be completely cleared because of ice.
The riverbank is white, and the Charles is the color of old blue bottle glass and wrinkled by the current, and beyond in the distance the skyline of Boston catches the early light, the John Hancock Tower soaring far above any other high-rise, overbearing and sturdy, like a solitary column left standing in the ruins of an ancient temple. I think about coffee, and it is a fleeting urge as I wander into my bathroom and look at the coffeemaker on the counter by the sink and the boxes of K-Cups that include hazelnut.
I’m beyond being helped by stimulants, not sure I’d feel caffeine except in my gut, which is empty and raw. Intermittently, I’m stabbed by nausea, then I’m hungry, then nothing at all, just the gauziness of sleeplessness and the persistent hint of a headache that seems more remembered than real. My eyes burn, and thoughts move thickly but push with force like a heavy surf pounding against the same unyielding questions and tasks to be done. I won’t wait for anyone, given a choice. I can’t wait. There is no choice. I will overstep boundaries if need be, and why shouldn’t I? Boundaries I’ve set have been stepped on right and left by others. I will do things myself, those things I know how to do. I am alone, more alone than I was because I’ve changed. Dover has changed me. I will do what is necessary, and it might not be what people want.
It is half past seven, and I’ve been downstairs all this time because Anne and I took care of other cases after we finished with the Norton’s Woods man, whose name we are no closer to discovering, or if it is known, I’ve not been informed. I know intimate details about him that should be none of my business, but not the most important facts: who he is, what he was and hoped to become, his dreams, and what he loved and hated. I sit down at my desk and check the notes Anne made for me downstairs and add a few of my own, making sure I will remember later he had eaten something with poppy seeds and yellow cheese shortly before he died and the total amount of blood and clot in the left hemithorax was one thousand three hundred milliliters and the heart was disrupted into five irregular fragments that were still attached at the level of the valves.
I will want to emphasize this to the prosecution, it occurs to me, because I’m thinking about court. For me it all ends there, at least on the civilian side of my life. I imagine the prosecutor using inflammatory language I can’t use, telling the jury that the man ate cheese and a poppy-seed bagel and took his rescued old dog for a walk, that his heart was blown to pieces, causing him to hemorrhage almost three units of blood or more than a third of all the blood in his body in a matter of minutes. The autopsy didn’t reveal the purpose of the man’s death, although provisionally at least the cause of it is simple, and I absently write it down as I continue to ponder and meditate and make plans.
A pathological diagnosis that seems trite after what I just saw, and one that would give me pause, were I to come across it somewhere. I’d find it cryptic, almost tongue-in-cheek and coy, like a bad joke if one knows the rest of it, the massive blastlike disruption of the organs and that the death is a vicious and calculated homicide. I envision the hem of the long, black coat quickly flapping past and what must have happened just seconds before when the person wearing it plunged a blade into the victim’s lower back. For an instant he felt the physical response, the shock and pain as he exclaimed “Hey… !” and clutched his chest, collapsing on his face on the slate path.
I imagine the person in the black coat quickly bending over to snatch off the man’s black gloves and briskly walking away, perhaps tucking the blade up a sleeve or into a folded newspaper or I don’t know. But as I imagine it, I believe the person in the long, black coat is the killer and was covertly recorded by the dead man’s headphones, and it causes me to wonder again who was doing the spying. Did the killer plant micro-recording devices in the victim’s headphones so he could be followed? And I imagine a figure in a long, black coat walking swiftly through the shaded woods, coming up behind the victim, who couldn’t hear anything but the music in his headphones as he’s stabbed in the back, and he falls too fast to turn around. I wonder if he died not knowing who did this to him.
