Hollaran walked down the corridor and went to a bank of telephones. He picked up the receiver of one that had a small sign beside it that read LOCAL CALLS. He looked at his cell phone. He scrolled down its phone book list until he found PAYNE MATT HOME, then PAYNE MATT CELL. He punched a key to show the number, then he punched the number into the landline phone’s keypad.
“Matt,” Hollaran said when Payne answered. “Frank Hollaran. Commissioner Coughlin would like you and your guest to join us at the Union League. How soon can you get here?”
“We just left the ME’s office,” Payne said.
“Anything new?”
“Yeah. And it doesn’t look good. I think we can be there directly. ‘We’ being Jim Byrth and Tony Harris.”
Harris? Hollaran thought. He’s a damned good cop.
But he’d be out of his league here in, well, the League. Would that make him uncomfortable? “I have no problem with Tony, Matt. But would he be comfortable?”
“A helluva lot more comfortable than where we just were and witnessed.”
Hollaran heard a strange tone in Payne’s voice. Anger maybe? “Okay,” he said. “I leave the decision in your capable hands, Sergeant. See you shortly.”
Forty-five minutes earlier, Philadelphia Homicide Detective Tony Harris and Philadelphia Homicide Sergeant Matt Payne and Texas Rangers Sergeant Jim Byrth had walked out of Liberties feeling no pain. The questions had arisen as to where they were going to have dinner and where Byrth was going to rent a room for the duration of his stay in the City of Brotherly Love.
Payne had said, “I’d offer you the guest room in my apartment-”
“Thanks, but no way could I accept your offer,” Byrth had interrupted.
“And you’re exactly correct,” Payne had replied. “Because I’m not.”
Byrth turned to him with a look that said, Then why the hell did you offer it?
Tony Harris explained, “It’s because he doesn’t have one. His apartment is tiny.”
Payne’s stomach growled.
“Excuse me. Obviously, I am in need of sustenance,” he said. Then he added, “Jim, that was what’s known as a hypothetical statement. Because if I did have one, it’d be all yours. That’s where I was going with that train of thought.”
Byrth smiled, then shook his head. The Hat on top accentuated the motion.
Harris added, “You’re welcome to stay at my house. I do have a guest room.”
“Thank you, Tony. But, really, I couldn’t impose. Besides, I’m not spending my money.”
Then Harris’s phone had started ringing. That reminded Payne he’d turned his off, and he pushed the 0/1 button till his screen lit up. He cleared out the MISSED CALLS list-all from Chad Nesbitt, who within a twenty-minute period had called a dozen times, then had gotten the message and given up.
I told you, ol’ buddy, I’ll deal with that later.
Harris answered his phone.
After a moment, he said, “Okay, thanks.” And ended the call.
“Dr. Mitchell’s finishing up with the girl they fished out of the river,” Harris said. “I asked him to call me when he did. I wanted to swing by. You guys don’t need to go.”
“Am I allowed to ask, ‘Who’s Dr. Mitchell’?”
Payne said, “Sure. Feel free to ask anything. He’s the medical examiner.”
“As strange as it might sound, I’d like to go,” Byrth said. “You always learn something. Even if it’s only a little thing that triggers a thought later.”
“The Black Buddha calls that ‘Looking under the rock under the rock,’ ” Payne said. “I’m in, too, Tony. I figure I’ve got enough liquid encouragement in me to get through it.”
“Won’t take but a moment,” Harris said.
Harris had been wrong. It had taken longer than he had thought. They’d had more to discuss than just the young Hispanic woman.
The Medical Examiner’s Office, just across the Schuylkill River, was next door to the University of Pennsylvania and, somewhat appropriately, just up University Avenue from Woodlands Cemetery.
The medical examiner’s job was to investigate all “non-natural and unattended natural deaths.”
The Medical Examiner’s Office was open round-the-clock. In a city like Philly, that was an absolute necessity. Its investigators handled some six thousand cases each year-which averaged out to be a staggering sixteen a day. They worked long hours to determine what caused a person’s violent or suspicious death, particularly all homicides and suicides and any deaths that were drug-related.
And they were good at it. They more or less quickly determined the manner of death in about half of the cases; the remainder required an autopsy. The ME’s office then wrote up a report of the autopsy for use in the criminal justice system, and the ME himself often appeared in court and provided expert testimony.
Philadelphia Medical Examiner Howard H. Mitchell was board-certified in forensic pathology, and the balding, rumpled man could usually be found in a well-worn suit and tie. When Payne, Harris, and Byrth found him, however, he wore tan hospital scrubs and surgical gloves. The scrubs and gloves had more than a little blood on them.
Dr. Mitchell was in the room marked PORTMORTEM EXAMINATION. The autopsy room was brightly lit, almost harshly, and its temperature a chilly sixty degrees Fahrenheit. The walls and floor were covered with shiny ceramic tiling, gray ones on the floor and white ones on the walls. There were three stainless-steel operating tables, each with a four-inch-diameter stainless-steel drain in the tiled floor directly beneath them. Two of the stainless-steel operating tables were empty and gleaming.
Dr. Mitchell stood at the third table. He was neatly suturing up the flesh over the chest cavity of a brown-skinned female body without a head.
He looked over his shoulder as the three came into the room.
“ ’Evening, gentlemen,” Dr. Mitchell said.
“Thanks for calling, Doc,” Tony Harris said. “Doc, this is Sergeant Jim Byrth of the Texas Rangers. Jim, Dr. Howard Mitchell, our distinguished ME.”
“Good to meet you, Doctor,” Byrth said.
“Same,” Dr. Mitchell replied. “I’d offer my hand, but…”
“I appreciate that,” Byrth said.
“Jim’s here in Philly hunting a guy who likes to lop off heads.”
Dr. Mitchell nodded as he kept stitching. “What a coincidence, eh?”
“Good to see you, Doc,” Payne said.
Dr. Mitchell didn’t take his eyes off his stitching. “Likewise, Matt.”
Payne had seen the crude sewing of other doctors on post-autopsy bodies. He knew that Dr. Mitchell’s neat suturing was done as a gesture of respect for the deceased, as well as for their families, who may or may not have to view the body for a positive identification.
Payne glanced at the female victim’s hands and feet.
He said, “Looks like the usual washerwoman effect.”
Now Dr. Mitchell did turn his head toward him. He had a look of mock surprise.
He said, “So you do pay attention to what I say! My day is now complete!”
Payne smiled and shook his head.
Dr. Mitchell and his eight full-time investigators held weekly meetings with police detectives. They updated the policemen on cases, reviewing new information and reminding them which bodies remained unidentified and held at the morgue. One such recent case had been the bullet-riddled body of a black male. The victim had been pulled from the Delaware River at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge that connected Philly to Camden, New Jersey.
Dr. Mitchell had explained to Payne the “washerwoman effect”-the term in modern society of course being the complete opposite of politically correct. But “washerperson” just didn’t seem to carry the same descriptive impact.
The ME had said that the wrinkles on the body were caused by its having been immersed in water for an extended period of time. They were particularly pronounced on the flesh of the feet and, of course, of the hands. The condition was consistent with that of a woman who spent a lot of time washing with her hands. Thus, its name.
Harris then said, “Anything unusual jump out at you, Doc?”
Mitchell shook his head. “You mean, except for not being able to do a cranial exam? Not that I’m complaining; that saved me a good half hour off the usual two-hour process.”
“Yeah.”
“Define ‘unusual’ in this business, Detective,” he said dryly. He then added, “Nothing beyond the grass particles embedded in the bone of the spinal column.”
“Tell us about that,” Payne said.
“Well, it’s clear that whatever was used to cut through the flesh and bone had previously been used in someone’s yard.”
Kerry Rapier told us in the command center that Javier Iglesia had mentioned he’d seen the grass embedded on the body.
“Like a pair of those long-handled shears?” Payne said.
Mitchell shook his head. “No, these weren’t leaf particles. These were fibers of grass. I could show you in the microscope, but that’s not necessary. It’s pretty clear to the naked eye. Here, look.”
He waved them over to the end of the table where the neck wound remained open. He pointed.
“Jesus!” Payne said when he saw the hacked bone and flesh. “She was whacked at-look at all those chunks taken out. Shears would have made a cleaner cut. I mean, cuts. From two sides.”
“Are those also metal fragments?” Byrth said.
“Good eyes,” Mitchell said. “Blade fragments, I’d say. I believe the severing was caused by either a very sharp blade from, say, a lawn mower or, more likely, a more brittle blade, such as a machete.”
“Well, now, that’s good news!” Payne said, the sarcasm evident in his tone. “There can only be-what?-ten, twenty thousand machetes out there? Or one particular one rusting on the bottom of the Schuylkill.”
Byrth raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, but it’s consistent with what happened to the two in Texas.”
Payne and Harris turned and looked at Byrth.
“They used machetes?” Payne said.
Byrth nodded. “It’s a common tool used by the Latino lawn-mowing crews in Texas. You’ll see them pruning bushes and tree limbs with them. Apparently they use them on tall grass, too. If you think about it, it’s a pretty efficient bush tool. By ‘bush’ I mean jungle. They used it wherever they came from in Central America; why not here?”
The three stood in a shocked silence as they watched the ME go back to suturing the body of the young Hispanic female.
Payne had a mental image of some Latino towering over young girls and flailing with the long-bladed machete, just hacking away at their necks.
What sort of animal does that? he thought.
Certainly a godless one…
Harris finally broke their silence.
“What happens next, Doc?” he said. “We got nothing back from the FBI on her fingerprints. No records, nothing.”
“The examiners will make the usual calls, trying to see if she’s a runaway or similar. But unless someone comes forward, I guess she’ll just go on the list with the other two.”
He nodded at a clipboard hanging on a hook by the door.
Dr. Mitchell explained: “We went ahead and wrote up the two Hispanic males from the motel explosion.”
The ME’s office had a Forensic Investigative Unit. Among other tasks, the FIU worked to identify human remains. Then, if successful, it contacted the next of kin.
Most unidentified bodies brought to the ME were identified within a matter of hours. This was accomplished by matching fingerprints to FBI database records. Folks who died violent deaths of a suspicious nature tended to have an arrest record, which of course included a full set of fingerprints. For those who didn’t have a rap sheet the size of a phone book, the identification sometimes was made using dental records or DNA matching, both of which tended to be more difficult than matches by prints. But, like the prints, these matches were indisputable.
There were those victims, however, who just could not be so matched. Decomposition and charring of the body topped the list of reasons why no records could be found on a John or Jane Doe. And so the ME’s office published a list of these non-name victims available for public review.
Payne walked over and collected the clipboard. He read the top sheet:
City of Philadelphia
Medical Examiner’s Office
Forensic Investigative Unit
Howard H. Mitchell, MD
Medical Examiner To date, using current methods, the Forensic Investigative Unit of the Medical Examiner?s Office has been unable to identify the following persons. It is hoped that this listing of unknown individuals and their description being made public will aid in our identifying them.
Anyone having any information that may help the FIU identify these person or persons is asked to contract the Forensic Services Manager at 215-685-7445.