Darwin's Blade (18 page)

Steve had used a rather steep angle of descent and now so did Dar, using his spoilers and flaps to keep himself on the proper glide path, finally smoothing out the glide perfectly parallel to the ground at an altitude of exactly one foot, feeling the slight crosswind at the last second and ruddering around to perfectly align the nose of the L-33, and then touching down so gently with the nosewheel that he could hardly feel the contact. Dar focused his attention on the rudder, keeping the Czech-built aircraft moving smoothly across the short-cropped grass and finally braking to a stop less than six feet from the left wing of Steve's Twin Astir.

Dar popped the canopy and was out of his parachute harness and shoulder straps in a few seconds. Syd was already jogging toward him.

“Dickweed called,” she said before Dar could speak. “Jorgé Murphy Esposito is dead. If we hurry, we can get to the scene before everyone mucks it up.”

It was raining hard when they arrived at the construction site in south San Diego. They had decided to get their luggage, documents, and videotapes, so it had taken extra time to go back to the cabin, load up, lock up, and then get back to the city. By the time they arrived, Esposito's body had been taken away, and there was yellow police tape around the accident site, but the place was still milling with uniformed police and others.

Captain Frank Hernandez, who had been at Wednesday's meeting in Dickweed's office, was the ranking plainclothes officer on the scene. Hernandez was short but solid—a light heavyweight without the altitude but with all the attitude, his face all angles and planes—and he wasted neither his words nor his time on fools. Dar had heard from Lawrence and others that Hernandez was an honest cop and an excellent detective.

“What are you two doing here?” asked the captain as Dar followed Syd through the pouring rain to the collapsed scissors lift which was wrapped about with yellow tape.

“The DA's office called,” said Syd. “Esposito was a potential witness in our investigation.”

Hernandez grunted and smiled slightly at the word
witness.
“I could see why you would have an interest in Mr. Esposito, Chief Investigator,” he said. “He was definitely one of the area's top cappers.”

Syd nodded and looked at the scissors lift. If the heavy platform had fallen from its highest point, it would have been about a thirty-five-foot drop. Now the platform itself was held up by jacks on each side. While the ground around the area was a sea of mud, it was dry under the scissors lift platform except for sprays of blood, brains, and a darker liquid. Flecks and spatters of brain matter were also visible on the cinder-block wall at the far side of the scissors lift.

“Are you here because it's being considered a homicide?” Syd asked Hernandez.

The detective shrugged. “We have an eyewitness who says otherwise.” He nodded toward where a construction foreman holding a clipboard was talking to a uniformed officer. “There were only a few workers on the site today,” continued Hernandez. “Vargas—that's the foreman there—he didn't see Attorney Esposito show up, but noticed him talking to someone by the scissors lift.”

“Did he recognize the other man?” asked Syd.

Hernandez nodded again. “Paulie Satchel. Used to work this site but has been laid up due to a fall. Paulie's suing the company…”

“Let me take a wild guess,” said Syd. “Esposito was his attorney.”

Hernandez's dark eyes showed no amusement as he smiled.

“So is this Satchel a suspect?” asked Syd.

“No.” Hernandez sounded certain. “We're looking for him to interview him, but only as a witness. The foreman…Vargas…saw Satchel leaving just as it started raining. Esposito stepped under the scissors lift to get out of the rain. The lift was up at the third-floor level there. Esposito was all by himself the last time Vargas saw him there. Then the lift suddenly gave way, it looks like Esposito jumped the wrong way—toward the wall—and his head was caught in the scissors.”

Syd looked at the spray of gray matter on the dry cinder-block wall and said, “Did Vargas actually see the accident?”

“No,” said Hernandez, “but he turned his head as soon as he heard the sound it made. He didn't see anyone else around.”

“How does a scissors lift just collapse?” asked Dar. He was snapping images with his digital camera.

Hernandez looked the insurance investigator up and down a long moment, as if sizing him up, and said, “Vargas thinks that Esposito was fucking around with that oversized bolt and screw there on the closest column. That's where they fill and drain the hydraulic reservoirs. When the screw came out, the hydraulics lost pressure almost at once and the lift came down just as fast.”

“Why would Esposito do that?” said Syd.

Hernandez mopped his wet, black hair off his forehead. “Esposito was a fuckup,” he said simply.

Dar came close to the lift, did not step under it, but crouched to look at the dry area underneath. “There are more footsteps here than Mr. Esposito's.”

“Yeah,” said Hernandez. “The paramedics who extricated him. And the ME who declared him deceased. Only Esposito's footprints were under there when the uniforms and I arrived.”

“How could you tell?” said Dar.

Hernandez sighed. “You see any of the construction guys wearing Florsheims with a reinforced heel?”

Syd crouched next to Dar and reached into the taped-off zone, dipping two fingers into some of the dark fluid on the ground and raising the fingers to her face. “So this longer, narrow spray is hydraulic fluid…”

“Yeah,” said Captain Hernandez. “And the rest is Esposito.”

“But you're keeping the case open,” said Syd. “Considering foul play.”

“We're going to talk to Paulie Satchel,” said Hernandez. “Do formal interviews with some of the other guys who were on site at the time. Somebody like Jorgé Esposito makes a lot of enemies and has a lot of rivals. But right now it looks like it'll be logged as an accident.”

“What about Vargas?” said Dar.

Hernandez frowned. “The foreman? He's been with the company for eighteen years. Doesn't even have a parking ticket on his record.”

“Mr. Esposito was suing the company,” Syd said quietly.

The detective shook his head. “Vargas was on the phone in the main shack over there when the lift came down. He was talking to one of the architects. We can check the phone records and interview the architect. But Vargas is clean. I feel it.”

“Instinct?” asked Dar, curious, as always, about how cops deduced things. He almost believed in their sixth sense.

Hernandez squinted at Dar as if he'd read sarcasm in the remark. He said nothing.

Syd broke the silence. “Where did the ME send the body?”

“City morgue,” said Hernandez, still looking at Dar with cold, dark eyes. Finally he moved his gaze to Syd. “You thinking of going there?”

“I might.”

Hernandez shrugged. “Esposito wasn't a pretty sight when we got here…I doubt if he's any prettier in the morgue. But hey…it's your Sunday.”

Dar had noticed in recent years that in the movies, morgues were always filled with naked, beautiful young female bodies and the medical examiners tended to be written and played as fat, insensitive pigs. But the ME of San Diego County, Dr. Abraham Epstein, was a small, meticulously dressed and tailored man in his early sixties, who spoke so softly and seriously that one was reminded of a funeral director, but with more sincerity. Nor did Dar and Syd have to walk past bodies to see Esposito's corpse. The procedure now was to sit in a small, comfortable room while a video of the deceased was shown on a high-resolution thirty-two-inch TV monitor.

As soon as Esposito's face appeared, Dar cringed. He could feel Syd recoiling next to him.

“In medical terminology,” Dr. Epstein said quietly, “this is called the Face of Frozen Horror. An antiquated term, but still quite appropriate.”

“Dear God,” said Syd. “I've seen many dead bodies, many resulting from violent death, but never…”

“An expression such as this,” finished the medical examiner. “Yes, very rare. Usually the phenomenon of death, even violent death, eliminates most or all expression from the face—at least until rigor mortis sets in. But this occurs in rare cases involving massive and almost instantaneous trauma to the brain—such as one might find on a battlefield—”

“Or in the closing struts of a scissors lift,” said Dar.

“Yes,” said Dr. Epstein. “And as you can see, the top of the skull was not only cut open and peeled back—‘capped' is what convicts call it, as if in an autopsy—but the skull itself was squeezed quite violently. Much of the brain matter was expelled, and that which remained lost contact with the deceased's central nervous system in less time than it takes for the nerve impulses to travel to the body.”

They sat in silence for a moment—silence broken only by the soft sound of Dar tapping in numbers on his pocket calculator—and Jorgé Murphy Esposito's expression stared at them from the monitor. His eyes were rolled upward as if watching a guillotine descending, his mouth opened impossibly wide in a scream that would never end, the muscles of his face and neck distorted almost to the point of cartoon absurdity—all under the peeled-back skull, the remaining bit of bone and hair looking like a cheap toupee that had blown half off.

“Dr. Epstein,” said Dar, “my calculations suggest that if the platform were at its maximum height…which is what the construction foreman and the few other workers on the job today said in interviews…a loss of hydraulic fluid would mean that the platform would reach near-terminal velocity almost immediately. The platform would have struck Mr. Esposito in less than two seconds.”

Dr. Epstein nodded slowly. “This is consistent with the studies done on the so-called Face of Frozen Horror. The brain must be…disconnected…from the nervous system in one point eight seconds or less for the facial expression to remain fixed in such a manner.”

Dar looked at Syd. “And how far do you think Esposito's body was from the column where the screw was opened to spill the hydraulic fluid?”

“The platform is twelve and a half feet wide,” said Syd. “Esposito was on the side opposite the column with the released screw, and his head was protruding from the scissors' struts by several inches, as if he were trying to throw himself out through the closing X of metal.”

“Do you think he could have turned that bolt, removed that long screw, and jumped across that space in less than two seconds?” asked Dar.

“No,” said Syd. “And if, as his expression suggests, Esposito
saw
the platform falling, his instinct—anyone's instinct—would have been to jump forward, out from under it. Not run deeper under and try to escape near the wall.”

Dar put his calculator away.

“There is something else,” said Dr. Epstein. He led them into a medical work and storage area between the waiting room and the actual morgue lockers. There were various bags on shelves, most labeled with the international symbol for toxic bio-waste. Epstein pulled a box from a drawer, pulled on disposable surgical gloves of the type used by paramedics since the AIDS epidemic began, and handed a pair to both Dar and Syd. He lifted down one of the clear bags. The tag on it said
ESPOSITO, M. JORGÉ
and had the current date and case number on it.

“This has all been photographed and videographed by the police, of course,” said Dr. Epstein, “but you should see the actual thing.” He opened the bag and laid Esposito's clothes out on a stainless steel table with blood gutters.

The pinstripe suit had been a cheap one, Dar could see, and the blood and brain matter on it did not make it look any more attractive. The white shirt was almost completely red. Esposito had been wearing a bold, yellow tie, now stained mostly crimson.

The medical examiner lifted the sleeves of the suit jacket and then the sleeves of the shirt. “You see,” he said.

Syd nodded immediately. “Blood…human tissue…but no hydraulic fluid.”

“Exactly,” said Dr. Epstein, in his modulated, mournful tones. “Nor was there any hydraulic fluid on the body's hands, face, or upper body. But here…”

He lifted the trouser legs. Dar put his gloved hand on them to turn them better into the overhead light. The right trouser leg was black and oily from hydraulic fluid. Epstein removed worn, black Florsheim shoes with a reinforced heel from the bottom of the bag. Both shoes had blood on them, but only one, the right one, had been soaked in hydraulic liquid. And even the sole of the shoe stank of the fluid.

“The spray trail we saw must have spurted out of the pipe about eight feet,” said Syd. “For some reason, Esposito was under the lift—probably near the middle of the area or closer to the wall—and couldn't run for the opening. He turned and jumped for the gap between the cross struts just as the scissors closed. The hydraulic fluid caught just his pant legs and his right shoe as he jumped.”

“What could keep someone from running the shortest distance to safety with two tons of platform dropping toward him?” asked Dar.

“Or
who?
” added Syd.

Dr. Epstein put the clothing back in the evidence bag. He peeled off his now bloody gloves, dropped them in the toxic bio-waste bin, and scrubbed his hands at the sink. Syd and Dar followed suit.

In the waiting room again, the monitor now mercifully blank, they both thanked the medical examiner.

Dr. Epstein smiled, but his eyes remained sad. “I know about Attorney Esposito,” he said so quietly that Dar had to lean closer to hear him. “Ambulance chaser. Almost certainly an accident capper. But it was a terrible death. And…even though Detective Hernandez and others do not seem interested…it must be reported as a wrongful death.”