Black Notice - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 20

"Do you see this, Marino? Or is it just my imagination?" I asked.

He sniffed more Vicks vapors up his nose and leaned against the table. He looked and looked.

"Maybe," he said. "I don't know."

I wiped off the skin with a wet towel, and the outer layer, or epidermis, slipped right off. The flesh beneath, or dermis, looked like soggy brown corrugated paper stained with dark ink.

"A tattoo." I was pretty sure. "The ink penetrated to the dermis, but I can't make out anything. Just a big splotch."

"Like one of those purple birthmarks some people have," Marino offered.

I leaned closer with the lens and adjusted a surgical lamp to its best advantage. Ruffin was obsessively polishing a stainless steel countertop and pouting.

"Let's try UV," I decided.

The multiband ultraviolet lamp was very simple to use and looked rather much like the handheld scanners in airports. We dimmed the lights and I tried longwave UV first, holding the lamp close to the area I was interested in. Nothing fluoresced, but a hint of purple seemed to feather out in a pattern, and I wondered if this might mean we were picking up white ink. Under UV light, anything white, such as the sheet on the nearby gurney, will radiate like snow in moonlight and possibly pick up a blush of violet from the lamp. I slid the selector down and tried shortwave next. I could see no difference between the two.

"Lights;" I said.

Ruffin turned them up.

"I would think tattoo ink would light up like neon," Marino said.

"Fluorescent inks do," I replied. "But since high concentrations of iodine and mercury aren't so great for your health, they're not used anymore."

It was past noon when I finally began the autopsy, making the Y incision and removing the breastplate of ribs. I found pretty much what I expected. The organs were soft and friable. They virtually fell apart at the touch and I had to be very careful when weighing and sectioning them. I couldn't tell much about the coronary arteries except that they were not occluded. There was no blood left, only the putrefied fluid called oily effusate that I collected from the pleural cavity. The brain was liquefied.

"Samples of the brain and the effusate go to tox for a STAT alcohol," I said to Ruffin as I worked.

Urine and bile had seeped through the cells of their hollow organs and were gone, and there.was nothing left of the stomach. But when I reflected back flesh from the skull, I thought I had my answer. He had staining of the petrous ridge of the temporal bones and mastoid air cells, bilaterally.

Although I couldn't diagnose anything with certainty until all toxicology results were back, I was fairly certain this man had drowned.

"What?" Marino was staring at me.

"See the staining here?" I pointed it out. "Tremendous hemorrhaging, probably while he struggled as he was drowning:"

The phone rang and Ruffin trotted over to answer it.

"When's the last time you dealt with Interpol?" I asked Marino.

"Five, maybe six years ago, when that fugitive from Greece ended up over here and got in a fight in a bar off Hull Street."

"There certainly are international connections in this one. And if he's missing in France, England, Belgium or God knows where, if he's some sort of international fugitive, we're never going to know it here in Richmond unless Interpol can link him with someone in their computer system."

"You ever talked to them?" he asked me.

"No. That's for you guys to do."

"You ought to hear all these cops hoping they get a case that involves Interpol, but if you ask 'em what Interpol is, they ain't got a clue,' Marino said. "You want to know the truth, I got no interest in dealing with Interpol. They scare me like the CIA. I don't even want people like that knowing I exist."

"That's ridiculous. You know what Interpol means, Marino?"

"Yeah. Secret Squirrels."

"It's a contraction of international police. The point is to get police in member countries to work together, talk to each other. Sort of what you wish people in your department would do."

"Then they must not have a Bray working for them."

I was watching Ruffin on the phone. Whomever he was talking to, he was trying to keep it private.

"Telecommunication, a restricted worldwide law enforcement web… You know, I don't know how much more I can stand this. He not only counters me, he flaunts it," I muttered, staring at. Ruffin as he hung up.

Marino glared at him.

"Interpol circulates color-coded notices for wanted and missing people, warnings, inquiries," I went on in a distracted way as Ruffin stuffed a towel in the back pocket of his scrubs and got a pill counter out of a cabinet.

He sat on a stool in front of a steel sink, his back to me. He opened a brown paper bag marked with a case number and pulled out three bottles of Advil and two bottles of prescription drugs.

"An unidentified body is a black notice," I said. "Usually suspected fugitives with international ties. Chuck, why are you doing that in here?"

"Like I told you, I'm behind on it. Never seen so many damn pills come in with bodies, Dr. Scaipetta. I can't keep up anymore. And I get up tу sixty or seventy or something, and the phone rings and I lose count and have to start all over again."

"Yeah, Chuckie-boy," Marino said. "I can see why you'd lose count real easy."

Ruffin started whistling.

"What are you so happy about all of a sudden?" Marino irritably asked, as Ruffin used tweezers to fill rows with pills on the little blue plastic tray.

"We're going to need to get fingerprints, dental charts, anything we can," I said to Marino as I removed a section of deep muscle from the thigh for DNA. "Anything we can get needs to be sent to them," I added.

"Them?" Marino asked.

I was getting exasperated.

"Interpol," I said tersely.

The phone rang again.

"Hey, Marino, can you get that? I'm counting."

"Tough shit," he said to Ruffin.

"Are you listening to me?" I looked up at Marino.

"Yeah," he said. "The state liaison's at State Police Criminal Investigation, used to be some guy who was a first sergeant and I remember asking him if he wanted to have a beer sometime at the F.O.P, or go grab a bite at Chetti's with some of the guys. You know, just being friendly, and he never even changed his tуne of voice. I'm pretty sure I was being taped."

I worked on a section of vertebral bone that I would clean with sulfuric acid and have trace check it for microscopic organisms called diatoms that were found in water all over the world.

"Wish I could remember his name," Marino was saying. "So he took all the info, contacted D.C., and D.C. contacted Lyon, where all the secret squirrels are. I hear they got this real spooky-looking building on a hidden road, sort of like Batman and his cave. Electrified fences, razor wire and gates and guards carrying machine guns, the whole nine yards:' "You've watched too much James Bond," I said.

"Not since Sean Connery quit. Movies suck these days, and nothing's good on TV anymore. I don't even know why I bother."

"Maybe you ought to consider reading a book now and then.,.

"Dr. Scarpetta?" Chuck said, hanging up. "That was Dr. Cooper. The STAT alcohol's oh-point-oh-eight in the effusate, and zip-o in the brain."

The 0.08 didn't mean much, since the brain didn't show an alcohol level, too. Perhaps the man was drinking before he died, or maybe what we had was postmortemgenerated.alcohol caused by bacteria. There were no other fluids for comparison, no urine or blood or fluid of the eye known as vitreous, which was too bad. If 0.08 was a true level, it might, at the very least, show that this man would have been somewhat impaired and therefore more vulnerable.

"How are you going to sign him out?" Marino asked.