Cave ab homine unius libri-Beware the man of one book.
FBI Crime Lab, Quantico, Virginia September 21, 2000
When Dr. Jessica Coran first heard of the body in the Chesterfield, New Jersey, junkyard she'd had no idea that it would hold so much fascination for her and her team. Nor did she anticipate the red tape and confusion in shipping the body that would delay its arrival for ten days. But here it lay now on her cutting slab, the most intriguing and colorful body she had ever cut into. Even after the rents and tears, even in death, and even after freezing-the body had been shipped in a refrigerated truck along with an array of needed supplies and chemicals-even after all this, she found the complete, head-to-toe tattoo artwork covering the murder victim mesmerizing.
Indeed, this utter fascination with the intricate detail and artistic lines depicting a myriad of symbols, animals, plants, and teeming insect life, as well as bizarre, alien life-forms, all went toward Jessica's dilemma. She hated destroying the artwork that was this “body electric” any further than it had already been obliterated by some hundred-plus gaping wounds, dog bites. The vicious dogs, long since destroyed by local New Jersey police, had torn away whole patches of the masterwork. One of the man's arms had been completely chewed off, the limb having been packed in the ice-coffin that John Doe traveled in.
Initially the dice-up work had been fast and easy because the body remained bricklike, and a frozen cadaver made for easier sectioning for microscopic analysis, be it the brain or any other major organ.
Jessica and John Thorpe-J. T. to his friends-both found it difficult to hold back, to allow their two young assistants, Kenneth Holbrook and Yon Chen to do the precision work with the new laser technology that allowed for efficient sections to be cut from the major organs. Both Holbrook and Chen eagerly passed the laser-connected to the latest computer-imaging software available-between them. Each assistant took separate organ cuts with mouths agape, both learning as the laser dissected John Doe's internal organs.
They soon finished the laser work, and J. T. instantly quizzed the neophytes, asking, “All right, now that you have sections of every major organ, Holbrook, Chen, what's next?” J. T. held the laser in his hand now, gently returning the wand back to its cradle attachment on the computer monitor.
Almost in tandem, like cartoon characters, Holbrook stammered an “I think… I think…” while Chen immediately said, “Blood and seminal fluid workup, I think.”
“Excellent, but none of that I think stuff. Every time anyone says those two words, it means they don't really know what they think. It's both a qualifying of your answer and a stalling tactic. It also makes you sound stupid. 'I think,' 'in my opinion,' 'it is my feeling.' Forget it. Simply state your facts without all the introductory stammering. Right, Holbrook?” replied J. T.
“I think so.”
“Damnit,” muttered J. T. as Jessica helplessly laughed behind her mask.
J. T. frowned, recalling how he'd earlier had the same discussion with Jessica because he'd seen and heard the president of the United States sounding silly by prefacing every damned remark at a news conference on NATO with I think. Jessica, for the benefit of the tape recording, loudly ordered a complete fluid workup, from semen to sweat, along with blood toxicology, all dissection and section work on the rack of organs called the viscera having been completed. Holbrook had logged in weight and appearance of each viscus as it had been surgically removed. Now with every laser cut, each slice coming off like a thin, large portion of salami, Chen bagged and labeled John Doe's specimens, using the number given her by the computer:
case # 348-119-2000.
As they worked and time ticked by, day turning to night, Jessica and J. T. discussed the recent frozen body of a prison inmate who had wanted to give something back to society, and so he had left his body to science-to the science of forensic medicine in particular. Out of this had come phenomenal new computer software, already proving invaluable to physicians everywhere.
The young interns had also heard the news, but they had no idea that the computer-imaging software they'd just used was the result of that unselfish act on the part of one lone prison inmate, a man named Albert Lawrence Kurlandinsky. Kurlandinsky had made headlines initially by one day walking calmly into his place of work-a JCPenney distribution warehouse-with a high-powered rifle. He opened fire on fellow employees and bosses, a spree murderer with sixteen maimed and seven deaths on his head.
“The software was created when Kurlandinsky's body experienced postmortem freezing in a cryogenics chamber. Frozen rock-hard solid in order that every inch of his body- from crown to toe-could be cut into cross sections,” explained Jessica. “Then each section was scanned into the computer.”
“The entire body?” young, petite Chen chirped, birdlike.
“Like a stack of large, oddly shaped poker chips,” supplied J. T.
Flashing on their ill-fated trip to Las Vegas a few years back, Jessica thought it just like J. T. to use a gambling metaphor. She continued saying, “Now that each section of an entire human body is filmed and on computer, scientists and autopsiests, such as we, benefit by seeing, for the first time in history, the human organs in three-dimensional form from top to bottom in successive sections.”
“All in 'living' color,” J. T. happily added, “so now you can call up any organ, and the computer will give you a full three-dimensional look at it.”
Today's John Doe autopsy benefited from the inmate's generosity, and certainly Jessica did, as the new imaging software saved hours in the lab. A simple, straightforward autopsy could be completed in an hour, but one faced untold complications whenever opening a cadaver and rummaging about in the cranium and below the breastplate. With the new technology, she didn't have to cut so many sections; she could use the templates created by the software to see if the victim's organs proved oversized, overweight, distended, ballooned up, too small, shriveled or lacking in proper color, texture, diseased or healthy. If an organ checked out against the software, then there was no need to cut any sections, because the computer wand had just told the computer brain that the measurements figured accurately. But whenever an organ didn't fit the profile as determined by the computer, a cute little Daffy Duck who-who laugh sounded an alarm. The alarm notified the people doing the autopsy that sections of a given organ absolutely had to be taken.
In John Doe's case, the Daffy Duck alarm had gone off repeatedly, signaling a hard life, despite his relatively young age.
Jessica had fought long and hard to finally persuade Quantico that the new technology must be had for their labs and teaching theaters here in Virginia, if the FBI wished to stay current with new advances in medical procedures. And she'd been absolutely right. Today alone, six hours of guesswork and searching about the body, rooting around in the “rack”- as the professionals called the organs below the rib cagehad been saved due to the new imaging wonder. And now she tried to imagine how they had ever gotten by without it.
But now a new mystery presented itself-today's cadaver. The strange case of Mr. John Doe-Horace, J. T. had taken to calling him because he “looked like a Horace”-whose body had gone unclaimed, whose identity remained a mystery, and whose unruly hair, from ponytail to thickly bearded chin, kept falling out and clogging the drain below the slab. The man's wild hair, black with streaks of gray throughout, gave him the appearance of a modern-day mountain man; his clothing marked him as both a biker and a gang member. But the gang jacket emblem, The Flesheaters, didn't exist according to the FBI's extensive records on outlaw biker gangs. They surmised that Horace had begun his own new club, and perhaps some rival had killed him for his trouble. It was all rank speculation.
All the same, someone with extreme patience had set this Tattoo Man up for murder. Someone with access to a rabid animal and time enough to infect five other canines and thus had introduced that unfortunate to six mad dogs. Someone had set those killing dogs in motion. The evidence pointed to a strong hand or two working the strings.
“Think of the sheer amount of planning that had to go into this killing.” Jessica clenched her teeth. “G'damnit. “
“It'd take months to set up, maybe a year,” agreed J. T.
Young Holbrook, one of her protdgfs, stared openmouthed at Jessica, having never heard her swear before. The Chinese intern, Chen, her nose dimpled and curled, offered an agreeing frown.
Jessica half-smiled to lighten the moment as much as possible and said, “The skin-art and hairiness of the victim presents you interns with a good lesson. We're not in the business of prejudging the victim from the evidence of the way he led his life. We don't write a body off just because of the chosen lifestyle, which often dictates the deathstyle, if you follow me.” Jessica half-joked, but it remained a serious point. The foul-of-the-earth issue raged as hot debate among medical people in the U.S. and elsewhere. Whom to serve first and foremost, those who live a clean life, or those who live a foul life? Jessica saw that while Holbrook accepted the notion on its face, that Yon Chen appeared to mentally grapple with it. Good, Jessica thought.
She decided to go on. “Well, it represents only one of a multiple set of problems surrounding Horace. This stone-cold John Doe represents a mystery. He's died with absolutely No distinguishing or identifying marks or papers on him, no wallet, no cards, very few teeth-the assumption already having been made that his killer took his dental plates to retard identification efforts. Somebody somewhere went to a great deal of trouble to confuse any efforts we make to identify Tattoo Man.”
J. T. had returned from the intercom where he'd shouted at maintenance, as he believed the temperature, and thus the odors in the room, was on the rise. He returned just in time to dovetail on Jessica's words for the benefit of the interning students. “No explanations as to who Horace had been in life, save the largest calling card Dr. Coran and I have ever seen on a body-the full-body tattoos that he accumulated over a lifetime of what one might assume-”
“Assume at one's own risk,” Jessica cautioned.
“-to be the result of hard and fast living, a lifestyle which may well have contributed to his untimely death.”
“The body's age, according to bone structure and what few teeth he has in his head, puts him at between fifty-five and sixty years of age,” Jessica estimated. “I'd take the conservative path, guess the lower end of the scale more accurate.”
“Whatever his age, he's lived the life of a hard-bitten, crusty old salt,” J. T. put in.
Jessica immediately replied, “And the man appears to have had a 'hard-bitten' death as well.”
Only young Chen remained silent as the other three laughed aloud. “Hard-bitten?” she asked.
“Later,” Holbrook assured her. “I'll explain it to you later.”
Still, Jessica hated the typical cop mentality that the deceased had probably brought on himself. In some ways, maybe so, but Jessica knew only a handful of men-serial killers she had hunted down-whom she honestly felt deserved a death as heinous as that which Horace had met, to be mauled to death by animals starved and made rabid by someone Horace knew.
“Horace's murder, and indeed it is murder,” Jessica said for the record and the interns, “represents a particularly brutal one.
Jessica's sense of awe at the flamboyant needle etchings and delightful, multicolored designs covering Horace's form only grew as she worked. She had to keep reminding herself to focus on the autopsy and to stop “reading” the illustrated man lying like an open book before her, but this proved impossible.
One set of images spiraled into a depiction of hell, while another displayed a rose garden that looked as peaceful and virginal as any heaven. Overall, Horace the Tattoo Man preferred dark and sinister themes in his body art, even incestuous scenes of twisted family life and child abuse. She wondered if such scenes meant a graduation from skeletons swallowing snakes and women whole, and eyeballs with all manner of terrible instruments plunged through them. Chains and peculiarly designed machines held people in limbo all about Horace's body. Torture all mixed up with sex appeared his main theme.
She wondered if his choice of artwork reflected anything of the man himself, or if the raw artwork with its undisguised themes of hatred toward women and lust for sexual power over them and children amounted to simple affectations taken on to make the man appear more sinister than he actually was. Either way, the artwork itself proved, by anyone's standard, superb. The artist was a master at his craft, likely at the apex of his career when he did John Doe's body. What year would that have been?
“We need to get an ink expert down here to make some estimation of how old the tattoos are,” she said to J. T., who nodded appreciatively.
“Sure, it would tell us a lot to know when the most recent tattoo was applied.”
“Exactly. Maybe after the when, we can begin to hone in on the where and the who.”
“The artist, sure.”
“Maybe he'll have a record or at least a recollection of the client. Either that or perhaps someone in the know about tattoos might recognize the artist's work. Lead us to the artist, and perhaps we're in Horace's neighborhood.”
The body, gone rotting and decomposing over a weekend and discovered under a harsh sun, had been discovered in a New Jersey junkyard by a couple who had come in search of some used auto part.
Having learned of the dead man's much mutilated and torn body, Chesterfield police proceeded to the scene, only to find six hungry and nasty pit bulls in various, eerily posed stances on and around the body-white, foaming slaver dripping from each muzzle. The animals, standing guard about the body, protective of their kill, had prompted the elderly couple to call 911 immediately. Each of the starved and rabid dogs continued to take additional strips of meat from the carcass from time to time until the arrival of the infamous Pet Patrol police. They came armed with their dart guns. Six of the dogs by this time, lying over the body, were in the throes of paralysis, the rabies overtaking them completely. They were easily put down, one shot after the next, but the seventh-only recently infected and in the first stages of the disease-proved more difficult to target, hiding in the recesses of the yard. The seventh dog belonged to the junkyard owner, who professed no knowledge of the other dogs or Horace.
The junk dealer, it was reported, had been more upset about the loss of his dog than the fact a man had died on his premises.
The police could not identify the dead man. He remained a person the junkyard dealer claimed not to know, or to ever have done business with in the past.
Business had been bad, the junk man told police, so he had shut down for a couple of weeks and had taken a long-needed vacation. He claimed not to know how six additional pit bulls and a dead guy wound up inside his fence without any apparent break-in. Somebody lied somewhere, somehow, to someone. Either that or the killer knew not only how to make rabid dogs but how to pick expensive locks and subdue a junkyard dog on hand.
Regardless, Jessica Coran, having dissected hundreds of corpses, hadn't been so amazed by a body in years. J. T., her male counterpart in the lab and her most trusted friend, pointed out that she really ought to at least attempt to contain her amazement over Horace. J. T. had jokingly told her, “I fear that the young and impressionable interns might get the wrong idea-that maybe you like seeing unknown victims of brutal attacks by vicious pit bulls come rolling through the door.”
“Short of a bear attack or an attack by a wolf pack,” Jessica retorted, “I imagine Horace's end to be the worst way to go out of this world, the pain absolutely excruciating.”
J. T. nodded, bit on his lower lip, and replied, “I can't imagine a worse way to die.”
“Maybe one,” she countered. “Did you read that horrible story in the Post about the woman's body discovered in a park someplace in London in which the victim had been staked to some sort of cross and actually crucified?”
“Oh, yeah… how awful. Suffocation, slow and painful. Still, I think the rabid dog attack even worse.”
“You really think so?” Jessica had her doubts.
“Oh, absolutely. I mean these dogs were hungry, mad, and vicious.”
The dogs, all but the junkyard dog, had been rabid. They'd not only killed John Doe, aka Horace, their mindless attack had filled his body with the rabies virus. The neurological toxin commonly referred to as rabies did not kill Horace, as it had not the time to incubate in his wounds as yet. Given the number of bites and tears to his flesh, and the fact he'd been attacked by not one but six rabid animals who had ripped at one another as well, meant that the level of neurotoxin in his system would begin to work in half the normal three days to three months.
In time, the poison would have reached its full deadly power. His killers, banking on getting away, meant to leave him with a little something extra.
“Someone desperately wanted Horace dead.”
Their eyes had met over the autopsy a hundred times, matching the number of punctures to the body. Each realizing that Horace could not have lived long even had he somehow miraculously been able to find an escape route from the gang of starved and rabid animals that'd repeatedly bitten and torn away at him. In fact, Horace's corpse remained riddled with the rabies virus, frozen in place. Perhaps his killers believed it a fitting gift to leave him with in the hereafter, a kind of forged chain for his ghost to rattle for eternity.
J. T. said, “Police in Chesterfield, New Jersey, tell us by all indications that Horace had put up a hell of a fight. He broke some doggy legs and bit off a couple of ears during the struggle.”
This made Holbrook and Chen gulp in unison.
Jessica continued the assault on the young interns by saying, “They also surmise from cigarette butts, chewing tobacco wrappers, and a woman's cosmetic case dropped at the gate where Horace's final moments of agony ended, that his killers had had a front-row party, applauding the man's death even as he must have begged their mercy.”
“Still,” cautioned J. T., “all the speculation remains circumstantial with the consistency of candlewick smoke, nothing that can hold a DA's attention. The most interesting element about the case, aside from the full-body tattoos, so far as Jessica and I are concerned, is the total lack of identification save the tattoos. Perhaps our only hope of ever IDing this brutalized man is here in his skin-art.” J. T. punctuated by jabbing his ballpoint at Horace.
Jessica felt a great pang of remorse for the unidentified man, telling the others in the room that “Horace, here, suffered a death as no one should, in a trap from which he could not survive even if he had managed to somehow claw his way free of the dog attack. Given the remoteness of the area and the time of death, which the New Jersey coroner placed at between two and three in the a.m., what hope did he have for survival? His blood loss alone was massive.”
J. T. fielded the question with a question, replying, “Short of stumbling over a ten-foot-high fence and then stumbling on a medical team, what chance did poor Horace have?”
“He… he had no hope whatsoever,” replied young Holbrook, who then bit back his lower lip.
“What kind of devious mind could concoct so heinous a murder and so pitiable a death?” Jessica now asked, as much to herself as her two interns. “Six dogs, each one infected, the dogs themselves at the slavering stage of the rabid animal. All timed perfectly. The dogs had to've belonged to some one-or to more than someone; they had to have had a sales history, a past of their own.”
“Needle marks screamed out, located after the hair on each dog carcass had been shaved and the skin microscopically examined, revealing the puncture wounds where the rabies had been introduced to the dogs,” explained J. T., who lifted a set of photos from a nearby table, adding, “We have photos of the dog autopsies. If we solve this case, believe me, it will be one for the books.”
Jessica continued, using her scalpel like an index finger and saying, “Whoever the killer or killers are, they knew about animal venoms, and how to handle them. The doctor in Jersey who examined the executed dogs knew her stuff as well. She was said to have once been a veterinarian before becoming an autopsy specialist. This helped tremendously. Any other well-meaning autopsiest might not have taken as much time and care with the executed animals.”
“Meanwhile,” added J. T., “local authorities scoured every pet shop and animal shelter and anyone with a license to raise dogs, and anyone with a history of killing or brutalizing animals. For the dogs, too, are victims in this crime.”
The two young people stood dumbfounded at such intentional brutality. Jessica feared for both that the first case involving them, even peripherally, could prove their last if their stomachs gave out. Still, Jessica believed in throwing the young who dared enter the field of death investigation into the deep end of the cesspool.
When neither student had anything to add, and it became painfully obvious that this was so, Jessica nearly shouted at her young Asian intern, Yon Chen, “Get a lot of photos, rolls and rolls of photos. And I want close-ups of every tattoo remaining intact.”
“You mean? Effery wound, jes?“ That, too, but I want clear and large shots of the tattoos, understand? And I want them blown up to eight by tens, got it?”
“Got it?” Yon Chen bit back another question, letting it slide. “No, Yon… Don't ask me if I've got it, do you got-have it? Do you know what 1 want?”
“Jes, got it.”
Jessica gnashed her teeth, hoping nothing was lost in the translation, and went on. “Then we're finished here, Yon, except for those photos. See to it they're on my desk by tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, Doctor. First thing 'morrow on your desk.”
Jessica looked dubiously at the girl whose big, innocent, black marble eyes seemed to mark her as entirely wrong for this profession, yet she'd never had a more enthusiastic intern. Despite her frail refugee appearance, she possessed an enormous capacity to learn. She seemed to feed on knowledge, reminding Jessica of herself at that age.
Jessica asked, “J. T., will you please oversee our two young interns from here alone.”
“Sure, sure, Jess. Get out of here for a while.”
Jessica stripped off her blood-smeared gloves and lab coat, preparing to exit the room. Glancing at her watch, she saw that 5:40 p.m. had crept up on them. She shouted over her shoulder at J. T. and the others, 'Time to get a life, people. Have a nice night. What's left of it…”