Harvest (17 page)

"Take a look, Slug," he said to Katzka. The nickname had nothing to do with Katzka's appearance, which was average in every way. Rather, it was a reflection of Katzka's unflappable nature. Among his fellow cops, the running joke was that if you shot Bernard Katzka on a Monday, he might react by Friday. But only if he was pissed.

Katzka leaned forward to peer inside the chest cavity, his expression every bit as flat as Rowbotham's. "I don't see anything unusual."

"Exactly. Maybe a little pleural congestion. Probably due to capillary leakage from hypoxia. But it's all consistent with asphyxiation."

"So I guess we're out of here, huh?" said Lundquist. Already he was sidling away from the table, away from the smell, impatient to get on to other things. He was like all the other young bucks, eager to cut to the chase. Any chase. Suicide by hanging was not something he wanted to waste his time on.

Katzka did not move from the table.

"We really need to watch the rest of this, Slug?" asked Lundquist. "They're just starting."

"It's a suicide."

"This one feels different to me."

"The findings are classic. You just heard it."

"He got out of bed in the middle of the night. He got up, got dressed, and climbed in his car. Think about it. Getting out of your nice warm bed to go hang yourself on the top floor of a hospital."

Lundquist glanced at the body, then looked away again.

By now Rowbotham and his assistant had severed the trachea and the great vessels and were removing the heart and lungs in one floppy bundle. Rowbotham dropped them into a hanging scale. The steel cradle bounced a few times, squeaking with the weight of the organs.

"It's your only chance to view it," said Rowbotham, his scalpel now at work on the spleen. "We finish up here, and it goes straight to burial. Family request."

"Any particular reason?" asked Lundquist.

"Jewish. You know, quick interment. All the organs have to be returned to the body." Rowbotham dropped the spleen in the scale and watched as the indicator needle quivered, then came to a rest.

Lundquist yanked off his autopsy gown, revealing shoulders bulky with muscle. It was all those hours in the gym, pumping and sweating. He had restless energy and he was showing it now. Always on to bigger and better things, that was Lundquist. Katzka still had to work on him, and the lesson today ought to be the fallibility of first impressions - not an easy thing to get across to a young cop who had all that confidence, all those good looks. That and a full head of hair.

Rowbotham continued with the disembowelment. He cut free the intestines, pulling out what seemed like endless loops of bowel. The liver, pancreas, and stomach were removed in a single mass. Finally the kidneys and bladder were dissected out and dropped in that squeaky scale. Another weight was called out, recorded. A few more mutterings into the tape recorder. What was left was a gaping cavity.

Now Rowbotham circled around to the corpse's head. He made an incision behind one ear and cut straight across the back of the scalp. He peeled the scalp forward in one flap, doubling it over the face. Then he peeled the other flap back over the neck, exposing the base of the skull. He picked up the oscillating saw. His expression twisted into a grimace as the bone dust began to fly. No one was talking at this point. The saw was too noisy, and the procedure had turned sickening. Cutting into a chest and abdomen, though grotesque, was somehow impersonal. Like butchering a cow. But peeling a man's scalp over his face was mutilating the most human, the most personal aspect of a corpse.

Lundquist, looking a little green, suddenly sat down in a chair by the sink and dropped his head in his hands. Many a cop had made use of that particular chair.

Rowbotham put down the saw and removed the skull cap. Now he freed up the brain for removal. He cut the optic nerves and severed the blood vessels and spinal cord. Then, gingerly, he lifted the brain out in one quivering mass. "Nothing unusual," he said, and slid it into a pail of formalin.

"Now we get down to the nitty gritty. The neck."

Everything that had come before this was merely preliminary to this stage. The removal of viscera and brain had allowed drainage of fluids out the cranial and chest cavities. The neck dissection could proceed with a minimum of obscuring blood and fluids.

The belt ligature had been removed from the neck early in the autopsy. Rowbotham now examined the furrow left behind on the skin.

"Your classic inverted V shape," he noted aloud. "See here, Slug, you've got parallel ligature marks which match the edges of the belt. And at the back here, you see this?"

"Looks like a mark from the buckle."

"Right. No surprises so far." Rowbotham picked up his scalpel and began the neck dissection.

By now Lundquist had recovered and was back at the table, looking a little humble. Nausea, thought Katzka, was so satisfyingly democratic. It brought down even musclebound cops with full heads of hair.

Rowbotham's blade had already sliced through the skin of the anterior neck. He cut deeper, exposing the pearly white superior horns of the thyroid cartilage.

"No fractures. You've got some haemorrhage over here, in the strap muscles. But the thyroid and hyoid bones both seem intact." "Meaning?"

"Not a thing. Hanging doesn't necessarily cause much internal neck damage. Death results purely from interruption of the blood supply to the brain. All that's needed is compression of the carotid arteries. It's a relatively painless way to kill yourself."

"You seem pretty sure it's suicide."

"The only other possibility is accidental. Autoerotic asphyxiation. But you say there was no evidence of that."

Lundquist said, "His cock was still zipped up. Didn't look like he'd been jerking off."

"So we're talking suicide. Homicidal hanging is almost unheard of. If someone was strangled first, you'd see a different ligature pattern. Not this inverted V. And forcing a man's head in a noose, well, that would almost certainly leave other injuries. He'd fight back."

"There's that bruise on the upper arm."

Rowbotham shrugged. "He could have hurt himself in any number of ways."

"What if he was drugged and unconscious before he was hanged?"

"We'll do a tox screen, Slug, just to make you happy." Lundquist cut in with a laugh, "And we do have to keep Slug happy." He moved away from the table. "It's four o'clock. You coming, Slug?"

"I'd like to see the rest of the neck dissection."

"Whatever turns you on. I say we just call it a suicide and leave it."

"I would. Except for the lights."

"What lights?" said Rowbotham, his eyes finally registering interest behind the protective goggles.

"Slug's hung up on the lights in that room," said Lundquist. "Dr. Levi was found hanging in an unused patient room of the hospital," explained Katzka. "The workman who found the body was almost certain the lights were off."

"Go on," said Rowbotham.

"Well, your time-of-death finding correlates with what we think happened - that Dr. Levi died very early Saturday morning. Well before sunrise. Which means he either hung himself in the dark. Or someone else turned off the lights."

"Or the workman didn't remember what the fuck he saw," said Lundquist. "The guy was puking his guts into the toilet. You think he'd remember if the light switch was up or down?"

"It's just a detail that concerns me."

Lundquist laughed. "Doesn't bother me," he said, and tossed his gown into the laundry bag.

It was nearly six o'clock that evening when Katzka pulled his Volvo into a parking space at Bayside Hospital. He got out, walked into the lobby, and took the elevator to the thirteenth floor. That was as far as it would take him without a pass key. He had to leave the elevator and climb the emergency stairwell to reach the top level.

The first thing he noticed as he emerged from the stairwell was the silence. The sense of emptiness. For months, this area had been undergoing renovations. No construction workers had come in today, but their equipment was everywhere. The air smelled of sawdust and fresh paint . . . and something else. An odor he recognized from the autopsy room. Death. Decay. He walked past ladders and a Makita saw, and turned the corner.

Halfway down the next corridor, yellow police tape was plastered across one of the doorways. He ducked under the tape and pushed through the closed door.

In this room, the renovations had been completed. There was new wallpaper, custom cabinetry, and a floor-to-ceiling window with a view over the city. A penthouse hospital suite for that special patient with a bottomless wallet. He went into the bathroom and flicked on the wall switch. More luxury. A marble vanity, brass fixtures, a mirror with cosmetic lighting. A thronelike toilet. He turned off the lights and walked back out of the bathroom.

He went to the closet.

This is where Dr. Aaron Levi had been found hanging. One end of the leather belt had been tied to the closet dowel. The other end had been looped around Levi's neck. Apparently, he had simply let his legs go limp, causing the belt to tighten around his throat, cutting off carotid blood flow to the brain. If he had changed his mind at the last moment, all he had to do was set his feet back on the floor, stand up, and loosen the belt. But he had not done so. He had hung there for the five to ten seconds it had taken for consciousness to fade.

Thirty-six hours later, on a Sunday afternoon, one of the workmen had come into this room to finish grouting the bathtub. He had not planned on finding a dead body.

Katzka crossed to the window. There he stood looking over the city of Boston. Dr. Aaron Levi, he thought, what could've gone so wrong in your life?

A cardiologist. A wife, a nice home, a Lexus. Two kids, grown and in college. For one irrational moment, Katzka felt a flash of rage at Aaron Levi. What the hell had he known about despair and hopelessness? What possible reason did he have to end his life? Coward. Coward. Katzka turned away from the window, shaken by his own anger. By his disgust at anyone who chose such an end. And why this end?Why hang yourself in this lonely room where no one might find you for days?

There were other ways to commit suicide. Levi was a doctor. He had access to narcotics, barbiturates, any number of drugs that could be ingested in fatal doses. Katzka knew exactly how much phenobarb it took to end a life. He had made it his business to know. Once, he had counted out the right number of pills, calculated for his own body weight. He had laid them on his dining room table, had contemplated the freedom they represented. An end to grief, to despair. An easy but irreversible way out, once his affairs were in order. But the time had never been quite right. He had too many responsibilities to take care of first. Annie's funeral arrangements. Paying off her hospital bills. Then there'd been a trial that required his testimony, then a double homicide in Roxbury, and the last eight car payments to complete, and then a triple homicide in Brookline, and another trial requiring his testimony.

In the end, Slug Katzka had simply been too busy to kill himself. Now it was three years later and Annie was buried and those phenobarb pills had long since been disposed of. He never thought about suicide these days. Every so often, though, he'd think about the pills lying on his dining-room table, and he would wonder why he had ever been tempted. How he had ever come so close to surrender. He had no sympathy for the Slug of three years ago. Nor did he have sympathy for anyone else with a bottle of pills and a terminal case of self-pity.

And what was your reason, Dr. Levi?

He looked at that glowing view of Boston, and he thought about how it must have been in the last hour of Aaron Levi's life. He tried to imagine climbing out of bed at three in the morning. Driving to the hospital. Riding the elevator to the thirteenth floor and then climbing the last flight of steps to the fourteenth. Walking into this room. Tying the belt over the closet dowel and slipping your head into the loop.

Katzka frowned.

He crossed to the light switch and flipped it up. The lights came on. They worked just fine. So who had turned them off?. Aaron Levi? The workman who'd found the body?

Someone else?

Details, thought Katzka. It was the details that drove him craw.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"I can't believe it," Elaine kept saying. "I just can't believe it." She was not crying, had sat dry-eyed through the burial, a fact which greatly disturbed her mother-in-law Judith, who had wept loudly and unashamedly while the Kaddish was recited over the grave. Judith's pain was as public as the ceremonial slash in her blouse, a symbol of a heart cut by grief. Elaine had not slashed her blouse. Elaine had not shed tears. She now sat in a chair in her living room, a plate of canapes on her lap, and she said, again: '! can't believe he's gone."

"You didn't cover the mirrors," Judith said. "You should cover them. All the mirrors in your house."

"Do what you want," said Elaine.

Judith left the room in search of sheets for the mirrors. A moment later, all the guests gathered in the living room could hear Judith opening and closing closets upstairs.

"It must be a Jewish thing," whispered Marilee Archer as she passed another tray of finger sandwiches to Abby.

Abby took an olive sandwich and passed the tray along. It moved from hand to hand down a succession of guests. No one was really eating. A polite nibble, a sip of soda, was all that anyone seemed to have stomach for. Abby didn't feel much like eating either. Or talking. At least two dozen people were in the room, seated solemnly on couches and chairs or standing around in small groups, but no one was saying much.

Upstairs, a toilet flushed. Judith, of course. Elaine gave a little wince of embarrassment. Here and there, subdued smiles appeared among the guests. Behind the couch where Abby was seated, someone began to talk about how late autumn was this year. It was October already, and the leaves were just beginning to turn. The silence, at last, had been breached. Now new conversations stirred to life, murmurings about fall gardens and how do you like Dartmouth? and wasn't it warm for October? Elaine sat at the centre of it all, not conversing, but obviously relieved that others were.