Spiral (5 page)

Without being asked, Finn stepped forward with his camera and began photographing again. When he finished, Hull and Vanstraten turned the man over and Finn took more photographs. Then Hull and Finn lifted the grated tray holding the body and transferred it to a nearby gurney, which Hull rolled down the hall to radiology.

While they were waiting, Vanstraten said, "And when did you find this fellow, Stuart?" They moved to one side of the room near a desk, and Vanstraten lighted a Dunhill cigarette from a red box that lay on the desk. He offered one to Haydon, who shook his head. "Sorry. I forgot. You're sticking with it, huh?"

Haydon nodded. "I still smoke cigars, but only a few a day." Vanstraten regarded him with a slight smile. "Very good, Stuart." He held up his cigarette and looked at it. "So, when did you find him?"

"We got there about nine-twenty, nine-thirty. I understand he was found shortly after nine o'clock."

"And this ant business. What about that?"

"I don't have any idea."

Vanstraten snorted, wrinkling his forehead. "Can you imagine? This is truly innovative. What do you suppose? A warning? A signature?"

Haydon shook his head. "Simple human cruelty," he said.

"I think this will be a very strange one," Vanstraten mused, not disappointed at the prospect.

"They're all strange," Haydon said. "They're all routine and they're all strange."

"A little philosophy," Vanstraten said, grinning.

"Yes, exactly." Haydon looked at the pathologist.

Vanstraten laughed, and the doors to the X-ray room swung open as Hull and the radiologist wheeled the body back in place under the bright lights. Mooney and Finn came over from where they had been talking about Houston's high percentage of available office space, and the autopsy began.

Pressing the floor switch to the microphone, Vanstraten began a monotonous statistical recitation: date, autopsy number, John Doe number, and persons present at the autopsy. The data of his external examination: height, weight, skin condition, body development, fat distribution, color of eyes, hair, condition of ears, mouth, neck, genitalia, damage to the hands, discolored areas around the lower abdomen, below the left nipple, below either kidney, and on the genitalia.

With his scalpel, Vanstraten quickly made a large incision down the man's chest in the shape of a Y, the upper branches of which started at the front of each shoulder, crossed below the nipples, joined at the bottom of the sternum, and continued down the middle of the abdomen, and around the navel to the pubis.

Assisted by the docile Hull, Vanstraten cut the skin away from the ribs so that it could be folded back on either side, exposing not only the ribs themselves, but the abdominal cavity as well. With long-handled shears that looked like snub-nosed branch trimmers, Vanstraten began cutting the ribs, starting at the bottom and working upward in an outward curve to the clavicle. When this had been done on each side, he lifted out the entire section, including the breastbone, and set it aside, revealing the contents of the chest cavity. At this point the entire inner workings of the dead man, from throat to pubis, were ready for Vanstraten to examine.

"Now is the time to be philosophical, Stuart," Vanstraten said, smiling at Haydon. He gestured at the cadaver. "This is what we are. Rich and poor alike, we each possess this marvelously complex system that makes even the most sophisticated computer, with all its dazzling microchip capabilities, look like a child's toy. The human intellect is not capable of constructing so delicate a system . . . not in a million years."

It was true, Haydon thought, not in a million years. And yet, what man could not achieve by force of intellect, he could cause by simple brute passion. Any pair of grunting fools could play God. He looked steadily at the cadaver, hoping he could manage somehow to see it differently. But in the end, he thought, they
are
only playing. They have no idea ... no idea at all, what they really have done in those brief, greedy moments. It seemed quite absurd.

He watched as Vanstraten began what would become an exhaustive investigation. It occurred to him that in one sense, they would learn more about this man in the next hour than the man had ever known about himself. Like an ancient seer, Vanstraten would search the coils of the body as if he were reading the entrails of a sacrificial lamb, as if each organ had a voice, and each voice a tale, and the sum of their tales a confession. And yet, in another sense, they would remain forever ignorant. Of this man's true essence they would learn nothing, nor could they ever hope to. They would never see in his face the animating spirit, never hear the sound of his voice or his laughter, never sense in him the subtle changes of embarrassment or grief. That unscientific thing that is life had already escaped them.

The autopsy was a long one. Vanstraten knew that when Haydon requested his personal attention to a particular cadaver it was only because Haydon himself found it to be one of more than routine interest, and desired more than a routine explanation during the process. Therefore, the pathologist's narration was deliberate and detailed, with numerous parenthetical elaborations that would not appear in the formal report.

When the time came for Vanstraten to dissect the cranium and remove the brain, Haydon turned away and walked out of the room and into the hall. It was long and white and empty. The years of having to watch autopsies had disciplined him. He was seldom disturbed by them, only with children and some women. But during the past five or six months something had begun to happen during the cranials. He first noticed it as a vague uneasiness that he thought was a temporary quirky reaction to a routine he had gotten used to many years before. But it didn't go away. Instead he became increasingly agitated by this process to the point that he would perspire and his heart rate would skyrocket. Once he thought he was going to faint. Now he simply refused to watch them; they had become unbearable. It was not nausea that affected him, but something more. It was, he thought, something like fear, though he knew that made no sense. Still, it was something like that.

He could hear Vanstraten's narration through the door. When the pathologist began his instructions to the secretary who would be typing the report, Haydon knew he was through. He took a deep breath and went back into the room.

"That's it," Vanstraten said, looking at Haydon, who did not approach the autopsy table again but lingered near the door. "Let me wash up and I'll give you an overview. Come."

Haydon nodded, and followed Vanstraten toward his office. Behind them Hull had sealed the plastic bag of organs and placed them into the now empty body cavity. He began folding the body skin back over it in preparation for the final suturing, which he had already begun.

When Vanstraten returned to his office from an adjoining scrub room he was already lighting a Dunhill. He was meticulously dressed in one of his famous three-piece suits with their hint of an older European cut. French cuffs in place, with cobalt porcelain links. Vanstraten had dressed in exactly this manner and style since Haydon had first met him, never succumbing to the trendy whims of popular designers. He didn't own a blow dryer and his hair had never touched the top of his ears. Sometimes Haydon thought he looked as if he had stepped out of a time warp, the close-clipped and stiff-shirted days of prewar Germany. His hair was freshly combed.

"You'll have the typed report in a day or so," Vanstraten said, sitting down in his chair behind his desk. "He was beaten to smithereens, Stuart. It's that simple. He died instantly from the trauma to the heart. But he suffered a lot before that came along. Almost all of the other damage was antemortem. The heel to the sternum was the
coup de grace.
The nail was hammered in a good while after he had died, most likely."

"How long had he been dead?"

"Guessing, I'd say he died four or five hours before he was found. The rectal temperature at the scene was normal, and was just a few tenths off that when we began autopsy. Under normal conditions a person who dies will retain normal body temperature for the first four or five hours after death. Then it will begin to fall off at a fairly predictable rate. Under
normal
conditions."

Haydon looked out the window of Vanstraten's office. Mooney and Finn were nowhere around. Hull had finished the suturing, and was now sponging off the body.

"I think ... it seems to me that he was beaten by very experienced people, Stuart," Vanstraten added, putting out his cigarette. "In a street fight, a brawl, the head receives a huge amount of punishment. People like to kick their adversaries in the head, pound it on the pavement, against a wall. But aside from the nail, this man's head didn't have a mark on it. Also the marks on the epidermis were few, considering the kinds of injuries he received internally. Someone knew his business very well."

"And the hands?"

"Deliberate torture. I saw the X-rays while I was back there." Vanstraten held up his hands for illustration. "The first one or two digits on several fingers of each hand have been smashed to the texture of coffee grounds. His wrists are dislocated and deeply cut by ligatures. I would guess he was hanged by his wrists and beaten for part of his ordeal."

Haydon didn't say anything.

Outside, the autopsy room was empty except for the naked dead man on the shiny aluminum table.

Both Haydon and Vanstraten had chosen professions that turned upon riddles. They knew that method and detail and persistence were the instruments of their craft, but that often intuition was the key to discovery. Vanstraten had just employed the first three. Haydon eventually would come to rely upon the fourth.

Chapter 5

WHEN
Haydon came out of Vanstraten's office, Mooney and Finn were waiting by the reception desk talking about the best place to get barbecue.

"Jimbo's going over to Lockwood's for lunch," Mooney said, hitching up his pants. "Wanna grab a bite with him?" It was pretty clear Mooney had already answered that question for himself.

Haydon looked at his watch. "I'd like to go back to Chicon and talk to that barber first," Haydon said. The truth was, it would have been impossible for him to have swallowed anything at this point. To that extent, his loss of detachment was debilitating. "I can stop by there and pick you up on my way back."

Mooney glanced at Haydon out of the corner of his eye. "Naw, I'll go over there with you. We'll eat later."

"Hell, look, you guys," Finn said, clinching his new teeth with a death's-head grimace. "Let's just meet over there when you're through. We'll have a late lunch. I ain't starvin'. What time? An hour?"

Mooney looked at Haydon.

"That's good, Finn," Haydon said. He didn't care. "We'll see you at one o'clock."

Haydon drove as they pulled onto Old Spanish Trail and headed east in a sunlight so bright it made your eyes water. Mooney began taking off his suit coat, groaning, getting caught in his own sleeves, getting frustrated, jerking his arm out, and piling the wadded coat wrong side out on the seat beside him. Then he started fiddling with the air-conditioner levers, shoving them on high, jacking around with the vents on his side of the dash until they were all focused on his pink face, which always looked overheated.

"I shoulda been a Mountie," he said, slapping down his sun visor. "Work in cold country, ride a lazy horse, wear a red jacket to match my face. Sam Browne belt." He snorted. " 'Member that Mountie came down here, testified on that Cammarata business? All those wiretap tapes. Slick." A chuckle. "Thought our bail system was shit paper. Couldn't figure it. Let 'em all get away, he said. Arrest 'em, and let 'em go, he said. What's that? Said no wonder we got all this scum on the streets. Actually got hot about it." Mooney touched a vent to fine-tune it. "A damn good point."

Haydon didn't say anything, and they rode in silence for a while, passing MacGregor Park, crossing Brays Bayou, under the Gulf Freeway overpass. Haydon could tell Mooney wanted to say something, and finally he did.

"That autopsy get to you today?" He didn't look at Haydon, but fine-tuned another vent as if the question were of secondary interest, incidental. "I noticed you ducked out."

"I've seen enough autopsies," Haydon said. It seemed noncom-mital enough.

"I don't like it when they do the heads, either," Mooney said. This time he adjusted the sun visor.

Haydon was surprised. Mooney had noticed. He wondered how many cranials he had walked out on before Mooney first spotted what he was doing. Not many, he guessed; Mooney had been watching him for a good while.

"This been bothering you awhile, huh?"

Haydon didn't want to go any farther with it. "Not really," he

lied.

Even with Nina, Haydon wasn't the kind of man who allowed himself to be examined at close range. Mooney knew this, of course, and Haydon knew he knew it. That's why he was interested in Mooney's fumbling approach. Had his own behavior been so uncustomary that Mooney would go against the grain of things to draw him out?

"You see something enough, something outta the ordinary like that, it gets to you," Mooney said. "No matter who you are. Seems like people go through phases, or something." Mooney thought a minute. "We've known each other, what, twenty years, now?"