Charon's landing

There was a knock on the door, and it swung open without invitation.

Dr. Lynn Goetchell was the senior lab analyst at the FBI’s Forensic Crimes Laboratory in rural Virginia and ruled her domain with the haughty demeanor of a benevolent dictator, her omnipresent lab coat taking on the importance of a robe of state. She sat next to Mercer, barely acknowledging his presence. It was not that she was a rude person, but the three doctoral degrees to her credit had called for sacrifices in her life, and social niceties had been one of the first to go. She wore a severe blue suit, and her only jewelry was a pair of paste earclips.

Mercer had no basis for reference, but he guessed that Goetchell hadn’t slept since receiving the metal scrap from the Jenny IV. Her face was pale, and the bags under her eyes were a bruised purple. Mercer could smell traces of chemicals on her skin.

“I might as well tell you right now that I got absolutely nothing from that sample you gave me,” Lynn Goetchell admitted after the perfunctory introductions. “We’ve had less than twenty-four hours, which isn’t enough time for a definitive analysis, but I’ll stake my reputation that we won’t get much further with it.”

“What do you have so far?” Henna queried.

“It’s your basic stainless steel, unremarkable in every respect. The ink used to print the word ‘roger’ is a standard product produced under license by twenty different companies in this country alone. It’s untraceable. The presence of sodium and diatoms on the surface of the sample was explained by its immersion in seawater. Salt concentrates were consistent with the waters of the North Pacific and Prince William Sound. We ran it under a two-hundred-thousand-power scanning electron microscope and found nothing out of the ordinary-”

“What about where the metal was torn?” Mercer interrupted.

“Shearing tears consistent with violent explosions, implosions, or rending force. Anything could have torn it apart. I can’t give you anything more specific than that. There were no traces of chemicals around the damaged sections, no blast residue or explosives.”

“Dead end,” Mercer said miserably.

“Yes,” Goetchell agreed. “We found only one thing that couldn’t be detected with a visual inspection. Using computer extrapolation we discovered that the fragment was torn from a cylinder approximately thirty-seven- point-nine inches in circumference.”

Mercer did the math in his head and envisioned a stainless steel tube about twelve inches wide. It still told him nothing. “So where does that leave us?”

“That leaves us with the other evidence recovered from the Jenny IV.” Goetchell pulled a folder from her briefcase. “Autopsy reports, and very poor ones too. I should have the license of Anchorage’s Medical Examiner yanked.”

She opened the slimmer of the two files, the last words written about the men who had died on the Jenny IV. “The skeletal remains found in the boat’s cabin were too far gone to get much. The level of carbonization of the bone fragments indicates a fire of over eight hundred degrees, consistent to the combustibles found on boats — wood, plastic, and fuel. There wasn’t even enough to do a DNA analysis. Identification had to be made through dental records.”

“And the body I found on the deck?”

“Cause of death was severe burn trauma. He’d lost forty percent of his body mass to the flames. His lungs were so scorched that even if he’d survived the fire, he’d have died within hours.” She passed around a series of gruesome photographs. The corpse was as horribly disfigured as Mercer remembered, burned hands with skin peeled back like shredded paper, charred stumps that had once been his legs, and a face more ruined than Mercer thought possible. There were no eyelids, ears, or nose, and the lips had burned away to reveal crooked yellow teeth.

“What’s this one?” Henna held up one of the pictures.

Goetchell peered at it. “It wasn’t labeled in the ME’s report, but it looks like a picture of a cell biopsy. They look like subcutaneous fat cells.”

“They look like they’ve collapsed,” Mercer remarked. He’d watched enough science programs on television to know a healthy cell structure. These looked like haphazard bricks on a crumbling wall. The cell walls, usually well defined and rigid, were smeared and distended.

Dr. Goetchell took the picture from Henna, studying it much more carefully. “I’ll be damned. I missed that entirely. Another mystery on top of everything else.”

“What could cause that?” Mercer asked.

“An increase in extracellular salts, sugars, and proteins will cause cells to leach out water in an effort to rebalance the concentration,” Lynn Goetchell lectured patiently. “If the chemical imbalance is bad enough, the cells can’t excrete enough water to dilute their protective fluid. They drain themselves and subsequently collapse, or more accurately implode. It starts out as a protective function that ends up destroying the cells themselves.”

“What could make it start in the first place?” Henna asked. He was out of his element entirely and doing his best to keep up.

“Any number of chemical compounds could do it. The human body is very attuned to toxicity in its environment. Also, when a body is frozen, this kind of damage will occur.”

“Jesus,” Mercer exploded. “Freezing. Why the hell didn’t I think of that before?”

“What’s the big deal?” Henna shook his head. “The body was recovered from Alaska in unseasonably cold weather. It’s no surprise that the body was freezing.”

Mercer turned to him as a thin tendril of the mystery began to unravel. “Dick, pay attention to the tenses. She didn’t say when a body freezes; she said when a body is frozen.” He glanced to Lynn Goetchell and was rewarded with a slight nod. “What are we talking about — temperatures below two hundred degrees Fahrenheit?”

“The destruction to the cells is complete, and since the reaction wasn’t timed, there’s no way to calculate.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mercer replied. He tore a piece of paper from the legal pad at Henna’s elbow and pulled a pen from the inside of his jacket. Henna and Goetchell watched silently as Mercer wrote out the name whose meaning had eluded them all: roger.

“Now, that piece of steel was ripped just at the end of the last letter r, right?” He didn’t wait for a response. “But what if it wasn’t an r at all.” He continued the upper arm of the letter, curling it down to spell out rogen.

He looked up quickly. Lynn Goetchell instantly understood where he was leading, but Henna was still baffled, the corners of his mouth hanging down in concentration. Mercer finished the remainder of the word with a flourish, filling in the letters that had been torn away by the explosion aboard the Jenny IV: nitrogen. And then he added the word he knew preceded it on the twelve-inch-diameter cylinder that rested within the doomed ship’s hold: liquid nitrogen. He went so far as to add the triangled circle that denotes biohazard.

“I’m willing to bet that there was a hell of a lot more than one tank of liquid nitrogen on the Jenny IV,” Mercer said triumphantly. “I remember that her stern-mounted crane and all of her radio antennas had snapped off. Now it makes sense. The fire must have boiled the liquid nitrogen in the holds. Since I found one body still in his bunk, the fire must have consumed the ship quickly. The other crewman was on the deck when the heat of the flames caused the tanks to explode. The ship would have been engulfed in a fog of supercooled gas that snuffed the flames. That’s why he was so badly burned in some areas and unaffected in others. The fire was put out before it could finish roasting him.” Mercer paused, imagining the agony of such a death. He shivered off the gruesome image. “The intense temperature change would have weakened the cranes and antennas. They snapped under their own weight.”

Henna looked at Goetchell for confirmation.

“It makes sense given the preliminary findings of the autopsy. Nitrogen liquefies at three hundred thirty-eight degrees below zero, about seventy-seven degrees above absolute zero on the Kelvin scale, more than cold enough to do this type of cellular damage. And it doesn’t require expensive refrigeration equipment like liquefied hydrogen or helium. A fire near the cylinders could conceivably cause them to boil and rupture, spilling their contents in an evaporative cloud. And that kind of cold will weaken metal, plastic, and wood to the point where they can collapse under even minor strain. There isn’t a physics student in the country who hasn’t seen a nail dipped in liquid nitrogen shatter when hit by a hammer.”

“Why?” Henna directed his question at Mercer like a pistol shot.

“Hey, give me a moment. Ten seconds ago we didn’t even know what she was carrying.”