The Drowned Man (20 page)

Dr. Robert Ehrlich worked inside a large bureaucratic onion. Surrounded by a Marine Corps base in Virginia, the Bureau coexisted happily with the military. The
FBI
kept laboratories here but Quantico was perhaps most noted for its training facility. As Peter Cammon and Henry Pastern moved through the layers of security to the morgue, they met dozens of earnest young men and women. “High policing,” the shaping of broad policy to protect the nation, might be the preoccupation of the executive cadre at the Hoover edifice downtown but Quantico was the place that excited every recruit and stayed in the memory of every graduating field agent.

A smartly dressed young trainee called the medical examiner out to the reception room to meet Cammon and Pastern. Owen Rizeman had been lucky to get them an appointment in Ehrlich's crammed teaching schedule. Ehrlich was short, about Peter's height, and with a bald pate, though not as smooth as Henry's landing-strip skull. He sported gold-rimmed glasses and a fresh Brooks Brothers shirt and silk tie, and his manner was Old-World gracious. Peter knew that this formality was his way of showing respect for the dead. Lowndes was a bit like that, too.

If the pathologist seldom made eye contact, it was not because he was shy; rather he was used to explaining his work while looking down at a body. Rusty blood stained his lab coat. Ehrlich introduced himself but did not shake hands. He didn't appear to find the detectives an odd pair, the tall Mormon and the shorter Brit.

“Thank you for receiving us on short notice,” Pastern said.

“I want to thank
you
, Special Agent, Chief Inspector,” Ehrlich responded. “Finally, someone has taken an interest. This is the damnedest autopsy. I'm on my fourth straight day. Actually, three evening sessions and today.”

“Is there a particular problem with this one?” Peter said. His tone was sympathetic; he wanted Ehrlich to know that he had seen many an autopsy table.

“Come with me,” Ehrlich said, and led them through a short passageway. Cold air and the odour of formalin flooded from the doorway as they entered the examination room. Three steel tables stood in parallel in the centre of the room, only one occupied and it covered by a plastic sheet. He led them over to the draped body and paused to allow Henry Pastern — he wasn't worried about Peter — to compose himself for the unveiling.

“Gentlemen,” Ehrlich began, “I am saying that I've been having trouble with cause of death. That is not an easy admission to make.”

He drew the sheet back from feet to skull to reveal the remains of a woman who might or might not have been Alice Nahri. There wasn't a lot left to interpret.

Peter was surprised by the sweeping trauma to the body. He expected the head to be swollen and battered, but not like this. Much of the facial skin had been eaten away by fish or some caustic chemical, and the rest of the forehead and every feature not protected by the girl's black hair had turned dark purple. Peter bent over closer and noted a pearly sheen just beneath the remaining purple skin on the chin and cheeks. He looked along the surface of the body, naked except for a sheet of muslin covering her excavated chest and stomach. This was a dark-skinned woman, African-American, he concluded from the less damaged surface of her upper thighs.

“How long in the water?” Peter said.

“Not more than four days,” Ehrlich said, exhaling loudly. “At first, I thought more than a week, but the pearlescence you see under the facial skin is not adiposia. That usually takes a month or more. The fatty layer of the body starts to turn to soap as it decays.”

“What accounts for that effect, then?” Peter said.

“A lot of things going on that accelerated the rot and putrefaction. There's evidence of strangulation. Her oesophagus was crushed pre-death, or at least damaged. That accounts for the unusual swelling of the face, and that was compounded by three or four days in filthy water. There are other problems in determining both cause of death and how long she was floating in the river. Take a look at her stomach. Prepare yourselves . . .”

He pulled back the square of muslin to reveal a gaping stomach wound. Peter understood that the opening was not entirely the result of Ehrlich's excavations. The remaining fat around the midriff had the pearly sheen, and odd puncture wounds had been stitched horizontally into the fat.

“How did
that
happen?” Peter said. “I've never seen that. Was this woman a drug addict?”

“That was my first thought. As it turns out, she was diabetic. The injection marks for insulin would be less conspicuous than smack injections, and if you take insulin daily then the stomach roll is a convenient spot. Nonetheless, the original puncture locations were wide enough to let in sea lice to feast, leading to coring out of the belly fat and the enlargement of the holes you see here.”

Henry threw up on the floor. Ehrlich raised an eyebrow and nodded to the perfectly good sink a few feet away. He went to a cupboard and took out a mop and rags.

The pause gave Peter a chance to scan the entire corpse. The body was a mess. It left so many questions. He quickly reached at least one conclusion: to pin down the woman's identity they would have to employ every available tool, from fingerprinting to dental impressions to
DNA
tests. For now, he returned to the fundamental riddle of how she died.

But it was Henry, having cleaned off his face with a towel, who asked the essential question. “Did she drown, Doctor?”

“No,” Ehrlich stated.

“Oh,” Henry said. He felt stupid, though the query wasn't.

Ehrlich was a tolerant man, no more so than when instructing students, and he hastened to say, “No, no. At first I wondered if she might have entered the water with a spark of life still in her. It is usually easy to tell. The drowning victim ingests water, possibly debris. But she was dead when she entered the river.”

The pathologist turned the head to one side. The area at the top of the spinal column was darker than the rest of the swollen head. He looked to his guests for comments.

Emboldened, Henry leaned in. “Skin is ruptured. Blunt force blow?”

“That blow in itself would have proved fatal, may have been, in fact,” Ehrlich said. He straightened the head and pointed to the throat. “But the crushing of the oesophagus is what fully dispatched her, in my view. It's a shredded mess now, but I can tell you that her throat was destroyed by massive pressure. It made it impossible for silt or other detritus to enter her stomach, even if she had been alive.”

“Done by someone in a frenzy?” Peter asked.

“Quite possibly, considering the ferocity of the other wounds. I'll show you her extremities.”

Peter walked to the end of the table and looked at the girl's scarred feet. Ehrlich meanwhile turned over both of her hands.

“Look at the hands. Fish and sea lice have been at the fingertips. They're so bad, I can't get prints from them. I may be able to draw images off them with fluoroscopic and chemical processes but I haven't succeeded yet. But what I did find was signs of scraping on all the finger pads. Often, if a person falls into the water still alive, she will claw desperately at anything solid, a bridge footing, for example, or a tree floating in the current. I did find some weedy material in one hand, but that was post mortem, a reflex.”

“But?” Peter prompted.

“I found the scraping on all the fingers, every one. Somebody tried to destroy the fingerprints. I can't see it being self-inflicted. And I think it was done after the girl expired. Just one more confusing element. Gentlemen, this was never a suicide.”

Peter considered the evidence. The girl could have died in any of three ways: the blow to the back of the head; the violent crushing of her breathing passage, from the front; or, a series of traumas to other parts of her body. Now there was the desecration of her fingerprints.

And he expected there was more to come.

Ehrlich had covered the stomach hole again out of consideration for Henry. Now he flipped back the cloth. “Her stomach exploded.”

“From what?” Henry said.

The
ME
looked up. “Methanol. Can you guess the form it was in?”

“Windscreen antifreeze,” Peter said. “What you call windshield washer fluid.”

Ehrlich, smiling, said, “Chief Inspector, how
ever
did you know that?”

“The girl was murdered. Probably finished off out near the spot where she entered — was dumped into — the river. The killer first knocked her out. Then he or she crushed the victim's breathing passage by pressing both hands straight down with considerable force. But the victim ingested the antifreeze before that moment. Likely she was strangled outside the car, where the vehicle was found. You can't put pressure straight down on someone sitting in a small car. Next, the scraping of the fingertips must have been done outside the car. It strikes me that it was inflicted at the last minute. We need to examine the ground. Most of the manic aggression occurred in the few minutes before the murderer dumped her. If all this was accomplished in the parking lot of the yacht facility, there was only one last-minute source of methanol.”

Henry Pastern was now sure that Cammon was the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes. Ehrlich let a minute go by. The girl's body, all three men were thinking, could not possibly seem any more gruesome.

The
ME
picked up the thread. “The Ford is parked out in the
FBI
compound. I found a plastic jug in the trunk contained several ounces of washer fluid. Methyl alcohol is highly toxic. In living people it attacks the optic nerve and causes blindness very quickly. It's one of the reasons they're moving to ethylene glycol. This was the old kind. The stomach was one of the things that initially drove me nuts. Literally
exploded
after only three or four days. I at first thought ethanol, which is the basis for booze, but no. Methanol metabolizes fast, causing metabolic acidosis. Too much acid built up in her bodily fluids. Combined with the leaching of blood from her system over the four days, the acidosis imbalance grew even faster, to the point where swelling of the stomach blew out the stomach wall. To make it even faster, the girl suffered from diabetes, and diabetic acidosis was already in progress.”

“You
are
saying the methanol was ingested before death?”

“Before she was strangled?” Ehrlich said. “Have to be, wouldn't it? At gunpoint, perhaps? It couldn't have been much before the point of death, since there was no optic-nerve damage, and it would be devilishly hard to open the throat cavity after death.”

Peter concluded that they might never have the answer. But now he understood that the girl might have been terminated a fourth way.

“Did you perform blood tests?” Peter said, already aware that serology tests were standard procedure.

“You're asking about race, Peter?” Ehrlich said.

The race of the victim would have been evident in most cases but Peter did not apologize for his question. The woman appeared to be African-American but her head, hands, and feet were so abraded and torn that he could not be sure. Her arms and legs showed lacerations that had swollen and discoloured the epidermis layer. He approached the racial issue delicately.

“We know that Alice Nahri was half-Indian with a white, English mother. We hope to get more pictures of Alice but I can't tell just from her passport how dark she was.”

Ehrlich went to a shelf by the wall and took an object from a cardboard box. He returned and, respecting Henry Pastern's status as lead investigator, handed Alice's passport to him.

“Neither can I,” the
ME
said. Henry looked from the passport photo to the mutilated face and back again. Did Peter see a tear in the corner of his eye?

Ehrlich launched back into his forensics. “Blood testing for race remains controversial. It may seem offensive to test for characteristics more common in blacks than whites, but we do it. Sickle-cell anaemia, for example, is more common in African-Americans. On the other hand, it is not a reliable differentiation and I seldom bother testing for it. Haemoglobin glycation is higher in black people than white, but we know the girl was diabetic, so glucose would already be heightened in her system. There is evidence of anaemia caused by destruction of her red blood cells.”

“Cause?” Peter said.

“Thalassemia. It's a blood disorder. But again we were unlucky, since thalassemia is inherited.”

Ehrlich stopped and both Henry and Peter waited for him to complete his account of the forensic tests.

“You're sure she's black?” Henry said.

“I'm sure.”

But Peter needed an ironclad conclusion. “And not Asian? Not from the Subcontinent?”

Ehrlich didn't hesitate. “No, she's not.”

Peter understood that Alice Nahri had attempted to obscure the race of the victim. She had succeeded to a degree, and now she had several days' head start on the authorities. But part of the delay in sorting out the racial issue had been due to Alice's luck. Even with the bloating of the corpse and the destruction of the soft tissues, the blackness of her skin in some areas would have been obvious in other circumstances. Peter looked at her exposed flesh. A cat-of-nine-tails had lashed the entire surface of the body. A web of marks, many of them infected, covered the skin. They resembled henna tattoos or baked-on lace and gave the body a perversely exotic look. Peter thought he knew the cause, not that he could quite believe it.

Dr. Ehrlich caught him looking. “Jellyfish stings. Accentuated by methyl mercury in the water. The Anacostia is a shallow river, and therefore warm in the summer. Some people think jellyfish only inhabit the South Pacific and Australia, but we get armadas of them in the Chesapeake and the Atlantic as far north as Cape Cod.”

“Lethal?” Peter said.