Heat had risen outside. Sweated on the way to his car, maybe a pint a yard.
County Coroner Michael Cipliano, fifty-three years old, an irascible and weatherworn veteran. Now only Italian by name, his father from the north, Piacenze, Cremona perhaps – even he’d forgotten. Cipliano’s eyes were like small black coals burning out of the smooth surface of his face. Gave no shit, expected none in return.
The humid, tight atmosphere that clung to the walls of the coroner’s theater defied the air-conditioning and pressed relentlessly in from all sides. Verlaine stepped through the rubber swing doors and nodded silently at Cipliano. Cipliano nodded back. He was hosing down slabs, the sound of the water hitting the metal surface of the autopsy tables almost deafening within the confines of the theater.
Cipliano finished the last table nearest the wall and shut off the hose.
‘You here for the heartless one?’
Verlaine nodded again.
‘Printed him for you I did, like the blessed patron saint that I am. Paper’s over there.’ He nodded at a stainless steel desk towards the back of the room. ‘Gopher’s sick. Took off day before yesterday, figured he picked something up from one of those John Does over there.’ Cipliano nodded over his shoulder to a pair of cadavers, floaters from all visible indications, the grey-blue tinge of the flesh, the swollen fingers and toes.
‘Found ’em Thursday face down in Bayou Bienvenue. Users both of them, tracks like pepper up and down their arms, in the groin, between the toes, backs of the knees. Gopher figures there’s cholera or somesuch in the Bayou. These cats roll in here with it and he contracts. Full of shit, really so full of shit.’
Cipliano laughed hoarsely and shook his head.
‘So what we got?’ Verlaine asked as he walked towards the nearest table. The smell was strong, rank and fetid, and even though he breathed through his mouth he could almost taste it. God only knew what he was inhaling.
‘What we got is a fucking mess and then some,’ Cipliano said. ‘If my mother only knew where I was on a Sunday morning she’d roll over Beethoven right there in her grave.’ The lack of reciprocal love between Cipliano and his five-years-dead mother was legend to anyone who knew him. Rumor had it that Cipliano had performed her autopsy himself, just to make sure, to make
‘Aperitifs and hors d’oeuvres are done, but at least you arrived in time for the main course,’ Cipliano stated. ‘Whoever did your John Doe here knew a little something about surgery. It ain’t easy to do that, take the heart right out clean like that. It wasn’t no pro job, but there’s one helluva lot of veins and arteries connecting that organ, and some of them are the thickness of your thumb. Messy shit, and really quite unusual if I say so myself.’
The skin of the corpse was gray, the face distorted and swollen with the heat it must have suffered locked in the trunk of the car. The chest revealed the incisions Cipliano had already made, the hollowness within that had once held the heart. The stomach was bloated, the heap of clothes bloodstained, hair like clumps of matted grass.
‘A clean-edged knife,’ Cipliano stated. ‘Something like a straight razor but without the flat end, here and here through the left and right ventricles at the base, and here… here across the carotid we have a little chafing, a little friction burn where the blade did not immediately pass through the tissue. Subclavian incisions and dissections are clean and straight, swift cuts, quite precise. Perhaps a scalpel was used, or something fashioned to the accuracy of a scalpel.’
‘Was the whole thing done in one go, or was there time between opening up the chest and severing the heart?’ Verlaine asked.
‘All in one go. Tied him up, beat his head in, opened him up like a jiffy bag, severed some of the organs to get to the heart. The heart was cut out, replaced inside the chest. The vic was already lying on the sheet, it was wrapped over him, dumped in the car, driven from wherever, and transferred to the trunk, abandoned.’
‘Lickety-split,’ Verlaine said.
‘Like the proverbial hare,’ Cipliano replied.
‘How long would something like that take, the whole operation thing?’
‘Depends. From his accuracy, the fact it was obvious he had some idea of what he was doing, maybe twenty minutes, thirty at best.’
Verlaine nodded.
‘Seems the body was moved, tilted upwards a couple of times, maybe even propped against something. Blood has laked in different places. Struck with the hammer maybe thirty or forty times, some of the blows direct, others glancing towards the front of the head. Tied initially, and once he was dead he was untied.’
‘Fingerprints on the body?’ Verlaine asked.
‘Need to do an iodine gun and silver transfers to be sure, but from what I can tell there seem to be plenty of rubber smudges. He wore surgical gloves, I’m pretty sure of that.’
‘Can we do helium-cadmium?’
Cipliano nodded. ‘Sure we can.’
Verlaine helped prepare. They scanned the limbs, pressure points, around each incision, the gray-purple flesh a dull black beneath the ambient light. The smears from the gloves showed up as glowing smudges similar to perspiration stains. Where the knife had scratched the surface of the skin there were fine black needle-point streaks. Verlaine helped to roll the body onto its front, a folded body bag tucked into the chest cavity to limit spillage. The back showed nothing of significance, but Verlaine – bringing his line of vision down horizontally with the surface of the skin – noticed some fine and slightly lustrous smears on the skin.
‘Ultra-violet?’ he asked.
Cipliano wheeled a standard across the linoleum floor, plugged it in and switched it on.
The coal black eyes squinted hard. ‘Shee-it and Jesus Christ in a gunny sack,’ he hissed.
Verlaine reached towards the skin, perhaps to touch, to sense what was there. Cipliano’s hand closed firmly around his wrist and restrained the motion.
A pattern, a series of joined lines glowing whitish-blue against the colorless skin, drawn carefully from shoulder to shoulder, down the spine, beneath the neck and over the shoulders. It glowed, really glowed, like something alive, something that possessed an energy all its own.
‘What the fuck is that for Christ’s sake?’ Verlaine asked.
‘Get the camera,’ Cipliano said quietly, as if here he had found something that he did not wish to disturb with the sound of his voice.
Verlaine nodded, fetched the camera from the rack of shelves at the back of the room. Cipliano took a chair, placed it beside the table and stood on it. He angled the camera horizontally as best he could and took several photographs of the body. He came down from the chair and took several more shots across the shoulders and the spine.
‘Can we test it?’ Verlaine asked once he was done.
‘It’s fading,’ Cipliano said quietly, and with that he took several items from a field kit, swabs and analysis strips, and then with a scalpel he removed a hair’s-width layer of skin from the upper right shoulder and placed it between two microscope slides.
Less than fifteen minutes, Cipliano turning with a half-smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. ‘Formula C2H24N2O2. Quinine, or quinine sulphate to be precise. Fluoresces under ultraviolet, glows whitish-blue. Only other things I know of that do that are petroleum jelly smeared on paper and some kinds of detergent powder. But this, this is most definitely quinine.’
‘Like for malaria, right?’ Verlaine asked.
‘That’s the shit. Much of it’s been replaced with chloroquinine, other synthetics. Take too much and it gives you something called cinchoism, makes your ears ring, blurs your vision, stuff like that. Lot of guys from out of Korea and ’Nam took the stuff. Most times comes in bright yellow tablets, can come in a solution of quinine sulphate which is what we have here. Used sometimes as a febrifuge-’
‘A what?’
‘Febrifuge, something to knock out a fever.’ Verlaine shook his head. His eyes were fixed on the faint lines drawn across the dead man’s back. Glowed like St Elmo’s fire, the
‘I’ll get the pictures processed. We’ll have more of an idea of what the configuration means.’
