The Blackbird Papers (11 page)

16

T
he investigative team decided to conduct Professor Wilson Bledsoe's autopsy at the morgue of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, known to the locals as the Hitch. The hospital had been gracefully assembled on more than two hundred acres of rolling hills and green meadows, a colossal structure of white stone and glass two miles outside of Hanover in the town of Lebanon. The Hitch looked more like a hotel than a hospital. Its modern design and well-appointed decor were a refreshing break from the traditional dull brick and steel beams, and it had garnered numerous awards. Even the
New York Times Magazine
had run a small feature, calling it “the inevitable future of hospital construction.”

Most autopsies performed at the Hitch fell under the auspices of the chief pathologist and his lab assistants. In the majority of cases, the doctors already had a good idea of the cause of death but performed the inspection to either comply with insurance regulations or bring closure for a disbelieving family. The autopsy of Professor Wilson Bledsoe, however, was like none other ever performed at the Hitch. There were few murders in the region, and the racial nature of the crime and the profile of the victim mandated that the state's chief medical examiner and his team travel up from Concord to conduct the highly publicized autopsy.

Sterling was waiting outside the examining suite when Dr. Gerald Withcott entered with two young assistants trailing. Dr. Withcott walked fast, with his head slightly down and his hands planted deep inside his lab coat pockets. He was a wisp of a man, standing only five feet two, even when he straightened his curved spine. He looked to weigh all of a hundred and ten pounds after his biggest meal. Before moving on to the CME's office five years ago, he had been the longtime chief pathologist at Dartmouth's medical center.

The owner of the biggest and most successful organic farm in the Upper Valley, Withcott was something of a celebrity in the community. His fruits and vegetables were shipped throughout the region, and twice the White House had specially ordered crates of his plump, sweet melons to serve at state dinners. But while his neighbors most admired him for his prolific farm, his work as a pathologist had brought him national recognition. In the relatively short time since he had left the Hitch and taken his position with the state, he had made a name for himself handling some of the toughest cases. Withcott was a stickler for detail, and efficiency fell second only to accuracy on his list of priorities. Wasting time in his lab was a cardinal sin.

“Good morning, all,” Withcott said, not bothering to look up at those gathered. He remained focused on the body bag.

“Dr. Withcott, this is Agent Sterling Bledsoe,” Lieutenant Wiley said. Even Wiley spoke in a tone of deference. “He's also the brother of the deceased.”

Dr. Withcott lifted his head and nudged the large round glasses up the bridge of his narrow nose. “My condolences, sir, and my apologies,” he said. He spoke in a cadence that seemed like it was rehearsed, but this was how he always spoke. “I typically don't like the family of the deceased to be present while I work. But I have little choice since I've been told you're leading the FBI team. I've also heard that you share this line of work.”

Sterling nodded slowly.

“Well, as you know, no two autopsies are the same, nor are the techniques. I've been doing this for more than twenty years, but even I make mistakes and miss things.” He pointed his thumb at the two assistants. They had taken up positions on either side of the body. “That's why I always bring my help. Stephanie Elam and Patrick Riley. Both of them trained here at Dartmouth.”

The two offered friendly nods, but neither smiled.

“I've heard only good things about you, Dr. Withcott,” Sterling said. “In fact, I studied some of your cases when I was in basic training. Your case résumé is quite impressive.”

“Well, now that you've raised the stakes, let's hope that I don't disappoint,” he said. “Feel free to comment as we go along. Collaboration is always a good thing.”

Dr. Withcott motioned to his assistants. They unzipped the bag and removed the body. Patrick, tall and gangly, snapped open the autopsy kit while Stephanie, prettier than any lab assistant Sterling had ever seen work a cold body, wrapped the headlight around Withcott's tiny dome. He snapped on two pairs of gloves, then opened his hand for the measuring tape.

Dr. Withcott worked mostly in silence, and Sterling appreciated his well-orchestrated movements—nothing short of art. His assistants anticipated his needs, slapping the instruments into his palm without his looking up. Their sequence of inspection was standard, starting with the external examination, taking measurements of the body's length and using the specially designed table scale that calculated its weight.

Withcott turned on his headlight, and with a magnifying glass bigger than half his narrow face, he began to inspect the skin. His assistants worked on their own, clipping finger- and toenail samples, cutting small patches of hair from Wilson's head, from under his arm, and from his groin. Sterling watched quietly, admiring the fluidity of the autopsy and how well the three worked together, always seeming to know one another's next move.

Withcott remained emotionless, his expression never changing. Until he reached Wilson's chest. He paused for a moment and shook his head. His jaw tightened as he inspected the carved letters and pulled out jagged pieces of bone matted with clotted blood and hair. “Awful,” he groaned, carefully examining edges of the skin, relaying the wound measurements to his assistants, who dutifully recorded them. Then he stopped.

“Forceps and another light,” he instructed. It was the loudest he had spoken all evening. At the second G, something deep inside the chest cavity had caught his attention. Steadying the forceps in one hand and a hooked probe in the other, he worked his way in until he grasped something. He slowly pulled out a twisted metal object covered in blood. Everyone else in the room moved closer for a look.

“Exactly what I thought,” Dr. Withcott said to no one in particular, his magnifying glass covering the object. “The instrument used was some type of saw, maybe a portable jigsaw.”

Stephanie produced a small vial of clear liquid and handed it to Dr. Withcott. He dipped the twisted blade until it was free of the clotted blood. He picked it back up and looked at it. “Bingo,” he said. “Half of the blade is gone, but they left us the important part. The serial number is stamped across the bottom. AE4390-289.”

“Is there a make on it?” Sterling asked.

“Doesn't appear to be,” Withcott answered, still examining the blade. “But it still might be possible to make the match.” Withcott dropped the evidence in a bag, leaving Stephanie to seal and mark it. He continued with his external inspection, humming a tune that Sterling eventually recognized was from
Carmen
.

Withcott reached the neck and stopped. “More light here,” he commanded. “And get me a block.” Stephanie adjusted the overhead light while Patrick brought over a wooden block with a semicircle carved into one side. Patrick lifted Wilson's head and carefully slid the block underneath, exposing more of Wilson's neck.

Withcott peeled off one pair of gloves, leaving the inner layer intact. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small camera no bigger than his hand. He snapped five pictures of the neck from different positions, then returned the camera to his pocket.

He looked at Sterling. “What do you think, Agent Bledsoe?”

Sterling moved closer and immediately noticed what had drawn Withcott's attention. Small disk-shaped bruises no more than a couple of centimeters around covered the middle of the neck. The area along the jaws had longer, irregular marks of the same discoloration. Sterling pointed to similar bruises along the sides of the neck and just above the clavicle. At first, the two men had a difficult time discerning the bruises on Professor Bledsoe's dark skin, but the overhead light made them more visible.

“Strangulation,” Sterling said. “Classic findings, especially the small circular bruises.”

“And it looks like he put up one hell of a fight,” Withcott said.

“No doubt,” Sterling agreed. “Look at the number of bruises and how they run up and down the neck. Long marks. The attackers must've lost their grip as he tried to fight them off.” Pops would have been proud of the way Wilson fought for his life. Sterling was proud of him too.

For the next two hours, Dr. Withcott and his assistants continued their meticulous inspection, extracting, weighing, and examining Wilson's internal organs, stopping to take photographs when something caught their attention. Sterling occasionally stepped out of the room when he found it too much to bear, returning only after he had regained control.

Another hour elapsed before Withcott called out. “There's something here. More light and the camera.”

Withcott had Wilson propped on his side, supported by two large sandbags. Withcott lowered his magnifying shield and swabbed a small area of skin just above the left hip. “It's an eagle,” he announced. “It's branded into his skin. The impression is clean and deep.”

Sterling stepped closer to the body. One of the assistants handed him a magnifying glass. He easily made out the eagle with its ruffled wings spread wide. The head had been drawn in profile with a perfect triangular eye.

“This is no coincidence,” Sterling said. “It's a signature. Someone knew we'd find this.”

“WLA,” Wiley announced from the back. He stepped closer to the body and everyone turned to face him. “White Liberation Army. A group of rednecks down in Claremont. Nothing but a bunch of beer-swigging rabble-rousers.”

“Where's Claremont?” Sterling asked.

“About twenty-five minutes or so down Route 120. Used to be a small farming town, but now they have commerce and transportation.”

“What does the WLA do?” Sterling asked.

“Not much of anything. But they talk a big game, how they hate everyone who's not white and born in America. I've read some of their flyers. Pure venom. But nobody really pays 'em much mind.”

Sterling thought about Wiley's words. It just seemed too damn convenient for Wilson's death to come at the hands of white supremacists. Content to drink and brawl, most of those groups never acted on their words. Why would they suddenly elevate their rhetoric to murder? And why would they decide to hit the highest-profile member of the Dartmouth faculty?

“How many are in this group?” Sterling asked.

“Not many,” Wiley said. “I don't have the exact number, but I'd be surprised if there were even a dozen.”

“Do you know them?”

“Not really, but the boys down in Claremont do. I'm sure they can help us round 'em up and bring 'em in for questioning.”

“If they can still be found.”

“Oh, don't worry. If they're still in Claremont, we'll find 'em. Not many places to hide down there.”

Withcott continued his methodical autopsy, saying very little, rarely lifting his head from the body. He had settled into what pathologists, like athletes, call “the zone,” something familiar to Sterling from his own hours of examining lifeless bodies in cold, sterile rooms, the smell of alcohol and preservatives keeping his mind alert. Dissecting a cadaver requires detailed knowledge of the tissues and organs and their relation to one another, but it also requires immense concentration, especially when one is looking for subtle abnormalities. There's a point when the dissector has reached a state of ultimate detachment—the cadaver no longer has a name or face or history. Even for Sterling, the body on the table, once a vibrant person—once his brother—had become nothing more than an elegant network of failed organ systems holding tiny clues to the cause of death.

“Down here,” Patrick called. He held Professor Bledsoe's stiff right ankle above the table. “There's something written here.”

The others quickly gathered around and Dr. Withcott flashed his light on the block letters:

CHOGAN

It could have easily been mistaken for a tattoo. They took turns pronouncing the strange word that no one recognized. Then Sterling took a closer look at the letters—neat, but definitely rushed. He had never seen the word before, but he recognized the writing style. He thought hard, searching his memory. It had been in his childhood, somewhere around the house. Then it hit him. Wilson had written the word in his own hand. It was exactly the style he used for all of those letters and postcards he sent home to their mother. Sterling thought about the postcards stacked on the television set. Wilson only wrote that way for her, because her eyesight had gone bad after years of poorly controlled diabetes. Her vision had faltered so much in her later years that even her glasses failed to help her make out most of what she read. So when Wilson wrote home, he'd write it just like this—neat block letters—so perfect you'd think they had been written by machine. These letters weren't as neat, understandable given the situation, but that was his
G
with the unmistakable tail hanging down. His trademark. Sterling started to share this with the others, but quickly decided against it. He figured Wilson must've written it this way for a reason. Wilson was clever. Maybe he counted on Sterling seeing this and only wanted him to know that it was his hand. Wilson's last message before he died—maybe the key to finding his killers.

Withcott took the final measurements and consulted briefly with his assistants. Then he turned to the others and announced his preliminary conclusion. Professor Wilson Bledsoe died from manual strangulation after a blunt trauma to the side of his skull. The word “nigger” had been carved into his chest by some type of electric saw, but only after he had already expired.

17

S
terling drove out of town with no particular destination in mind. He opened up the engine and challenged the car's engineering, making it prove why it should be called a sports car. He took in the beauty of the land, as the winding roads brought him to the peaks of mountains, his tires spinning only feet from the edges of cliffs. The strong sun and racing wind felt good as he sang along with Bob Marley's “I Shot the Sheriff.” For the next hour, he allowed nature's freedom to take him away from all that had troubled him the last couple of days.

He climbed another mountain and pulled over to the side of the road in an area that, according to the sign, offered the best scenic viewing. The Mustang's engine kicked a few extra revs, then sighed to rest. Sterling walked to the front of the car, pleased by the smell of burned rubber and hot oil. He thought about his Porsche back home. It was good for a sports car to get a thorough cleansing every once in a while, especially when it spent most of its time leisurely traveling the streets of a small country town.

Sterling stretched his eyes across the valley. He was only a few hundred miles from New York City, but still in another world. He thought about how invigorating a trip to the great outdoors would be for so many of his fellow New Yorkers who fought the inevitable hassles of the fast life, cramming onto packed subway cars, holding on for dear life as the trains screeched and careened down the dark tracks, or else waiting endlessly in the back of boiling cabs stuck on gridlocked streets.

Wilson's death had been an immeasurable blow, but the surrounding irony gave it the sting. When Wilson had told his family and friends that he wanted to settle down in a small mountain town, they laughed. Had it not been for Dartmouth, Hanover wouldn't have even registered on the map, and it certainly didn't figure in the consciousness of black America. His friends had teased Wilson that he better not get caught out late at night because people in the mountains would mistake him for a predator and shoot him dead. As a going-away gift, they had given him a bright orange vest emblazoned with the words
DON
'
T SHOOT, I
'
M HUMAN.

Now those playful taunts took on an ominous resonance. Wilson had been murdered in the very place that he'd equated with his freedom. A place where front doors were left unlocked and gas stations didn't ask customers to pay before pumping. Students had their professors' home numbers, calling at any hour they needed help.

A cooing sound disturbed the silence. Sterling looked up as a crow appeared overhead, floating effortlessly on the invisible gusts of wind. It flew lazy circles in the sky, flapping its wings only when necessary, slowly descending out of sight into the valley below. If Wilson had been alive, he would have loved to be sitting right here where Sterling was—alone and observing the open space only wildlife claimed as home. For the first time since his brother's body had been discovered, Sterling Bledsoe didn't just tear up, he cried. Big sloppy tears. He hated himself for hating his brother and hated whoever had taken Wilson away before he had the chance to apologize.