Grave Situation (34 page)

Allan sat and began reading through
the various reports.

When he finished he realized John
Baker’s murder had special problems. To begin with, the body was
found outside in a remote part of the county. That not only
minimized the chances of finding physical evidence and witnesses,
but it also destroyed the relationship between the victim and
assailant with the scene itself. Secondly, Baker had no relatives
or friends who could draw a useful chronology of his movements
prior to death.

Groundskeepers for the Acresville
Public Park reported seeing Baker at different times throughout the
day of May 12th, the last being at quitting time—5 p.m. He was
alone, either sitting on a park bench or panhandling passers-by.
The groundskeepers never saw him since then and they thought it odd
because Baker was such a fixture at the park.

After a request for information was
issued to the public, a couple came forward, claiming they saw the
homeless man at the park while out walking their dog around 7:30
p.m., May 12th.

Allan’s chair creaked as he sat
back with a weary yawn. He ran a hand hard over his face, stretched
his arms over his head and clasped his fingers behind his
neck.

Tired
, he thought.
I’m just too damned tired.

He paused for a moment to look out
at the light traffic on Preston. Then he removed the photos from
the envelopes and laid them out in a collage over top of the desk.
One after another, he studied them.

He held up a straight-on shot of
the body. The photo showed John Baker lying on his side, feet in a
brook, one arm partly extended. Allan felt a weird tingle in his
stomach as he stared at the limb that ended at a maggot-encrusted
stump.

Eyes and hands. Why does he want
them? Is he from here or a transient?

There were a lot of questions, but
few answers.

Allan wanted the autopsy results.
He left everything there and went back to David’s
office.

“Fitzgerald will be at the morgue
all afternoon,” David told him. “He said we could stop over
anytime.”

“I’m ready when you are,” Allan
said.

David smiled. “I like your
eagerness, Lieutenant. Let’s go.”

The morgue was located in the
basement of the Acresville Regional Hospital. The two men found
Doctor Fitzgerald in the autopsy room.

Two things hit Allan the moment he
stepped through the door—the pungent smell of formaldehyde and the
body of an elderly woman lying on the stainless steel dissection
table with her head propped up on a metal block. Her skullcap was
removed, exposing the convoluted surface of the brain. Under the
low-hanging fluorescent lights, the meninges glistened.

“Gentlemen!” Fitzgerald turned
from a sink on the far side of the room, wiping his hands on a
towel. “You’re here to see the body.”

David opened his mouth to speak,
but his voice was lost in a hard swallow. With wide eyes, he stared
at the blood smears on the front of the coroner’s apron. David had
a weak stomach and it showed.

At last with some effort, he
managed, “Our new boy wants to have a look.” He gestured at Allan,
who stood beside him with his hands stuffed into his
pockets.

“Sure, Chief.” Fitzgerald removed
his apron and dropped it into the sink. He grabbed a green smock
from the back of a chair and shrugged it on.

Walking toward them, Fitzgerald
held out his hand to Allan. “Paul Fitzgerald.”

“Allan Stanton.”

Fitzgerald smiled. “Let’s go have a
look.”

Allan and David followed him
through the anteroom and into the cold storage room, where
Fitzgerald walked over to a wall of refrigerated drawers. He
flipped over a tag that was attached to the handle of drawer #3 and
gave the handle a gentle tug. Quietly, the drawer rolled out on its
casters.

A body lay draped in a white
sheet.

“Our victim is, John Baker.”
Fitzgerald removed the sheet. “Fifty-eight year old Caucasian
male.”

All at once, Allan’s gaze settled
on the handless wrists. He felt that weird tingle in his stomach
again.

“Were the hands cut off before or
after the victim died?” he asked.

“After,” Fitzgerald said. “I found
no sign of vital reaction in the wounds.”

Scratching a temple, Allan examined
the right wrist. “What instrument do you think was used in the
dismemberment?”

“A saw. The multi-stroke marks on
the bones of the proximal row have the class characteristics of
one. I made silicone rubber casts of the impressions on the bones
and sent them off to the forensics lab in Halifax. Once they
analyze the striations on the kerf wall, they should be able to
narrow it down to a particular saw.”

Allan shot David a questioning
look. “And nothing at all was found at the scene?”

David stood three feet away with
his back toward the body and a stricken face bowed to the
floor.

“Chief?
”

At length, David cleared his throat
and answered weakly. “No, nothing was found. No hands. No saw. No
weapon.” He turned around, keeping his gaze averted from the body.
“The next morning after the body’s discovery, we searched the
entire area right up until nightfall.”

“Why do you think the killer took
the hands?” Fitzgerald asked Allan.

“I’m not sure. A memento
perhaps.”

“Like Jeffery Dahmer?”

Allan looked at him. “I’m not a
psychiatrist. Some killers take personal belongings from their
vic…” He stopped in mid-sentence.

A noise came from the room—the
light brushing sound of a door closing and then the fading scuffs
of retreating footsteps. David had walked out.

“He knew the victim,” Fitzgerald
explained. “Plus, I don’t think he likes morgues.”

Allan continued to stare at the
doorway for a moment longer.

“I’m not a big fan myself,” he
said. “Can you tell me about the injuries on the victim’s
face?”

“Those slight abrasions on the
eyelids and lips were caused by insects. There’s no accompanying
bruising. Maggots were discovered on the body and as you can see,
they were doing a good job on the wrists and forearms. You’d be
surprised at how fast they can clean away a human body.

“I remember this elderly man who
went missing a couple years ago. He suffered from
Alzheimer’s.

“A massive ground search turned up
his body in a dense wooded area half a mile from his home. The body
had baked in the July heat for over four days, but it looked like
it’d been there for weeks. Big time decomp. There must’ve been
thousands upon thousands of maggots all over him…”

Allan interrupted Fitzgerald’s
story with a gesture of his hand.

“I get the idea, Doctor,” he
said.

Opposite him, Fitzgerald raised his
eyes from the body, a crooked grin lifting his cheeks. “A little
squeamish are we?”

Allan regarded him with an
impassive expression. “Just a little,” he answered. “I’ve had my
own such experiences and would rather forget them. Have you
determined a rough time of death?”

“I’d say four to six days,”
Fitzgerald told him. “I factored in many variables—the temperature,
the victim’s body type, the poor health he was in and that he was
clothed.

“As you can see, the skin over a
large portion of the abdomen is of a greenish color. This is due to
the formation of sulph-hemoglobin. It would take about four to six
days for a body to reach this stage of putrefaction.”

Allan thought that over.

Last seen on May 12th. Found on the
16th.

Four days seemed about right to
him.

“The entomology report won’t be in
for awhile,” Fitzgerald added. “I didn’t find any pupae in the soil
around where the body was, leading me to believe that the maggots
were from the first generation.”

“Was the victim moved after
death?” Allan asked.

“No. The heavy lividity is
consistent with the way he laid. Furthermore, the compression marks
in the skin matched the texture of the surface of the ground
beneath the body. Rock imprints that had been trapped under the
body were clearly visible.

“Like the lividity, the initial
compression marks never disappear. If the body was taken from one
location and then dumped at the Timbre Road location, there
would’ve been second set of marks in the skin.”

Allan considered this.

How’d the killer get him out there?
Con approach?

“Tell me about the more serious
injuries,” he said.

“The victim was stabbed three
times. Once in the umbilical region of the abdomen. Twice in the
epigastric region. I numbered the wounds based on their depth.
Shortest to longest.

“The first one in the umbilical
region is eleven and a half centimeters deep. Eleven o’clock to
five o’clock. Blunt margin superior, tapered margin inferior. This
injury wasn’t life threatening.

“The two stabbings in the
epigastric region caused grave damage to the stomach, pancreas and
left lobe of the liver. The aorta was also damaged. The second
wound is roughly fourteen and a half centimeters deep. Twelve
o’clock to six o’clock. As with the first one, the blunt margin is
superior, the tapered margin inferior.

“The third wound is eighteen and a
half centimeters deep. But you must remember the wound tract can be
longer than the actual blade because the abdominal wall compresses,
carrying the point of the blade much deeper than its actual length.
With enough force, even short-bladed knives can perforate the
abdomen by ten to fifteen centimeters. In many regards, a knife’s
lethality is superior to firearms.

“As you can see by the V-shape of
this particular wound, the blade was either twisted or the victim
moved when the blade was withdrawn. If you look closely, there’s
slight bruising in the inferior margin. The guard of the knife
caused this. And being in the inferior margin tells me the blade
entered the body at an upward angle.

“I found one and a half liters of
blood in the peritoneal cavity. I attributed death to
exsanguination.”

Allan studied the three injuries.
“Do the cuts in the victim’s clothing correlate with the stab
wounds?”

“Yes.”

“Is the blade
straight?”

“Yes, it is.”

“How long do you think it
is?”

“About six inches.”

That gave Allan pause.

Same length as the one used in the
Hawkins’ murder.

“Do you think the killer is right
or left-handed?”

“Right.”

Quiet a moment, Allan nodded to
himself.

Yes.

“Anything else of importance?” he
asked.

“Nothing really pertinent to your
investigation. The victim hadn’t eaten anything for several hours
before his death. The stomach was completely empty. He wasn’t in
the best of health either.”

“Was he sick?”

Fitzgerald nodded. “Very sick. The
Chief told me the man was an alcoholic. I found signs of this
during the internal examination. The spleen was enlarged; the liver
was fatty and cirrhotic; and there was an ulcer in the
stomach.”

“Okay. Thank you for your time,
Doctor,” Allan said and walked toward the door. “If I have any
further questions, I’ll be in touch.”

“Thank
you
,” replied
Fitzgerald. “You probably hope we don’t meet
again.”

Allan paused, glanced back over his
shoulder and smirked at the smiling coroner. “No offense, but I do
hope we don’t.”

He found David in the hallway
outside the anteroom. In profile, he seemed thoughtful, sad
somehow. As Allan approached him, he saw the whiteness of his
face.

“You all right?” he
asked.

David turned to him. “Yes, I just
couldn’t stay in there.” He became still for a brief moment, as if
his mind cradled some memory. “I knew the victim.”

They began walking.

“Was he a friend?”

David shook his head. “More of an
acquaintance. Many years ago.”

They rode the elevator to the first
floor. In the gift shop by the front entrance, Allan purchased a
bottle of aspirin, popped two tablets into his mouth and washed
them down at a nearby fountain. He followed David out into the late
afternoon sun.

Next on Allan’s agenda was to visit
the crime scene. By the time they reached it, his headache had
dissipated.

As he got out Allan realized just
how remote the location was. From here, the trees seemed to stretch
for miles. Everything that told a murder had occurred here were
gone—the wooden stakes, the barricade tape, the evidence
markers.

He walked to the edge of the road,
looking at the bent vegetation and impact marks that drew the path
of John Baker’s tumble down the embankment. At the bottom, Allan
could just see the footprints in the bank of the creek, signifying
the recent activity.