“I won’t say the prison techs do it on purpose, but it happens. Well, it’s probably on purpose. Just like some of them chill the cocktail, making
sure the dirtbag feels it hit, the ice-cold hand of death,” Marino says for Anne’s benefit, because she is passionately anti-capital punishment. His
way of flirting is to offend her whenever he can.
“That’s disgusting,” she says.
“Hey. It’s not like they cared about the people they whacked, right? Like they cared if they suffered, right? What goes around comes around.
Who hid the damn label maker?”
“I did. I lie awake at night figuring out ways to get you back.”
“Oh, yeah? For what?”
“For just being you.”
Marino digs in another drawer, finds the label maker. “He looks a hell of a lot younger than what the EMTs said. Anybody notice that besides
me? Don’t you think he looks younger than his twenties?” Marino asks Anne. “Looks like a damn kid.”
“Barely pubescent,” she agrees. “But then, all college kids are starting to look like that to me. They look like babies.”
“We don’t know if he was a college student,” I remind everyone.
Marino peels the backing off a label printed with the date and case number, and sticks it on the plastic ruler. “I’ll canvas the area over there by
the common, see if any supers in apartment buildings recognize him, just do it my damn self to keep the rumor mill quiet. If he lives around there,
and it sure seems like it, based on what’s on the videos, someone’s got to remember him and his greyhound. Sock. What kind of name is that for a
dog?”
“Probably not his full name,” Anne says. “Race dogs have these rather elaborate registered kennel names, like Sock It to Me or Darned Sock
or Sock Hop.”
“I keep telling her she should go on Jeopardy,” Marino says.
“It’s possible his name might be in a registry,” I comment. “Something with Sock in it, assuming we have no luck with a microchip.”
“Assuming you find the damn dog,” Marino says.
“We’re running his prints, his DNA. Right away, I hope?” Benton stares intently at the body, as if he’s talking to it.
“I printed him this morning and no luck, nothing in IAFIS. Nothing in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. We’ll have his DNA
tomorrow and run it through CODIS.” Marino’s big gloved hands place the ruler under the man’s chin. “It’s kind of strange about the dog, though.
Someone’s got to have him. I’m thinking we should put out info for the media about a lost greyhound and a number people can call.”
“Nothing from us,” I reply. “Right now we’re staying away from the media.”
“Exactly,” Benton says. “We don’t want the bad guys knowing we’re even aware of the dog, much less looking for it.”
“‘Bad guys’?” Anne says.
“What else?” I walk around the table, doing what Lucy calls a “high recon,” looking carefully at the body from head to toe.
Marino is taking photographs, and he says, “Before we put him back in the fridge this morning, I checked his hands for trace, collected
anything preliminarily, including personal effects.”
“You didn’t tell me about personal effects. Just that he didn’t seem to have any,” I reply.
“A ring with a crest on it, a steel Casio watch. A couple keys on a keychain. Let’s see what else. A twenty-dollar bill. A little wooden stash box,
empty, but I swabbed it for drugs. The stash box on the video clip. For a second you could see him holding it right after he got to Norton’s Woods.”
“Where was it recovered?” I ask.
“In his pocket. That’s where I found it.”
“So he took it out of his pocket at the park and then put it back in his pocket before his terminal event.” I remember what I watched on the iPad,
the small box held in the black glove.
“I’d say we should be looking for the snorting or smoking variety,” Marino says. “I’m betting weed. Don’t know if you noticed,” he says to me,
“but he had a glass pipe in an ashtray on his desk.”
“We’ll see what shows up on tox,” I reply. “We’ll do a STAT alcohol and expedite a drug screen. How backed up are they up there?”
“I’ll tell Joe to move it to the head of the line,” Anne refers to the chief toxicologist, who I brought with me from New York, rather shamelessly
stole him from the NYPD crime labs. “You’re the boss. All you’ve got to do is ask.” She meets my eyes. “Welcome back.”
“What kind of crest, and what does the keychain look like?” Benton asks Marino.
“A coat of arms, an open book with three crowns,” he says, and I can tell when he enjoys having Benton at a disadvantage. The CFC is
Marino’s turf. “No writing on it, no phrase in Latin, nothing like that. I don’t know what the crests for MIT and Harvard are.”
“Not what you described,” Benton answers. “Okay if I use this?” He indicates a computer on the counter.
“The keychain is one of those steel rings attached to a leather loop, like you’d snap around your belt,” Marino goes on. “And as we all know, no
wallet, not even a cell phone, and I think that’s unusual. Who walks around with no cell phone?”
“He was taking his dog out and listening to music. Maybe he wasn’t planning to be out very long and didn’t want to talk on the phone,” Benton
says as he types in search words.
I pull the body over on its right side and look at Marino. “You want to help me with this?”
“Three crowns and an open book,” Benton says. “City University of San Francisco.” He types some more. “An online university specializing in
health sciences. Would an online university have class rings?”
“And his personal effects are in which locker?” I ask Marino.
“Numero uno. I got the key if you want it.”
“I would. Anything the labs need to check?”
“Can’t see why.”
“Then we’ll keep his personal effects until they go to a funeral home or to his family, when we figure out who he is,” I reply.
“And then there’s Oxford,” Benton says next, still searching the Internet. “But if the ring he had on was Oxford, it would have Oxford University
on it, and you said it didn’t have any writing or motto.”
“It didn’t,” Marino replies. “But it looks like someone had it made, you know, plain gold and engraved with the crest, so maybe it wouldn’t be as
official as what you order from a school and wouldn’t have a motto or writing.”
“Maybe,” Benton says. “But if the ring was made, I have a hard time imagining it’s for Oxford University, would be more inclined to think if
someone went to an online college he might have a ring made because maybe there’s no other way to get one, assuming you want to tell the world
you’re an alum of an online college. This is the City University of San Francisco coat of arms.” Benton moves to one side so Marino can see what’s
on the computer screen, an elaborate crest with blue-and-gold mantling, and a gold owl on top with three gold fleur-de-lis, then below three gold
crowns, and in the middle an open book.
Marino is holding the body on its side, and he squints at the computer screen from where he’s standing and shrugs. “Maybe. If it was engraved,
you know, if the person had it made for him, maybe it wouldn’t be that detailed. That could be it.”
“I’ll look at the ring,” I promise as I examine the body externally and make notes on a clipboard.
“No reason to think he was in a struggle, and we might get a perp’s DNA or something off the watch or whatever. But you know me.” Marino
resumes what he was saying to me about processing the dead man’s personal effects. “I swabbed everything anyway. Nothing struck me as
unusual except that his watch had quit, one of those self-winding kind that Lucy likes, a chronograph.”
“What time did it stop?”
“I got it written down. Sometime after four a.m. About twelve hours after he died. So he’s got a nine-mil with eighteen rounds but no phone,” he
then says. “Okay. I guess so unless he didn’t leave it at home and in fact somebody took it. Maybe took the dog, too. That’s what I keep wondering.”
“There was a phone on a desk in the video clips I saw,” I remind him. “Plugged into a charger near one of the laptops, I believe. Near the glass
smoking pipe you mentioned.”
“We couldn’t see everything he did in there before he left. I figured he might have grabbed his phone on his way out,” Marino supposes. “Or he
might have more than one. Who the hell knows?”
“We’ll know when we find his apartment,” Benton says as he prints what he’s found on the Internet. “I’d like to see the scene photos.”
“You mean when I find the apartment.” Marino puts the camera down on a countertop. “Because it’s going to be me poking around. Cops
gossip worse than old women. I find where the guy lives, then I’ll ask for help.”
8
On a body diagram, I note that at eleven-fifteen p.m. the dead man is fully rigorous and refrigerated cold. He has a pattern of dark-red discoloration
and positional blanching that indicates he was flat on his back with his arms straight by his sides, palms down, fully clothed, and wearing a watch on
his left wrist and a ring on his left little finger for at least twelve hours after he died.
Postmortem hypostasis, better known as lividity or livor mortis, is one of my pet tattletales, although it is often misinterpreted even by those
who should know better. It can look like bruising due to trauma when in fact it is caused by the mundane physiological phenomenon of
noncirculating blood pooling into small vessels due to gravity. Lividity is a dusky red or can be purplish with lighter areas of blanching where areas
of the body rested against a firm surface, and no matter what I’m told about the circumstances of a death, the body itself doesn’t lie.
“No secondary livor pattern that might indicate the body moved while livor was still forming,” I observe. “Everything I’m seeing is consistent with
him being zipped up inside a pouch and placed on a body tray and not moving.” I attach a body diagram to a clipboard and sketch impressions
made by a waistband, a belt, jewelry, shoes and socks, pale areas on the skin that show the shape of elastic or a buckle or fabric or a weave
pattern.
“Certainly suggests he didn’t even move his arms, didn’t thrash around, so that’s good,” Anne decides.
“Exactly. If he’d come to, he would have at least moved his arms. So that’s real good,” Marino agrees, keys clicking as an image fills the
screen of the computer terminal on a countertop.
I make a note that the man has no body piercings or tattoos, and is clean, with neatly trimmed nails and the smooth skin of one who doesn’t do
manual labor or engage in any physical activity that might cause calluses on his hands or feet. I palpate his head, feeling for defects, such as
fractures or other injuries, and find nothing.
“Question is whether he was facedown when he fell.” Marino is looking at what Investigator Lester Law e-mailed to him. “Or is he on his back in
these pictures because the EMTs turned him over?”
“To do CPR they would have had to turn him faceup.” I move closer to look.
Marino clicks through several photos, all of them the same but from different perspectives: the man on his back, his dark-green jacket and
denim shirt open, his head turned to one side, eyes partly closed; a close-up of his face, debris clinging to his lips, what looks like particles of dead
leaves and grass and grit.
“Zoom in on that,” I tell Marino, and with a click of the mouse, the image is larger, the man’s boyish face filling the screen.
I return to the body behind me and check for injuries of his face and head, noting an abrasion on the underside of the chin. I pull down the lower
lip and find a small laceration, likely made by his lower teeth when he fell and hit his face on the gravel path.
“Couldn’t possibly account for all the blood I saw,” Anne says.
“No, it couldn’t,” I agree. “But it suggests he hit the ground face-first, which also suggests he dropped like a shot, didn’t even stumble or try to
break his fall. Where’s the pouch he came in?”
“I spread it out on a table in the autopsy room, figured you’d want to have a look,” Anne tells me. “And his clothes are air-drying in there. When I
undressed him, I put everything in the cabinet by your station. Station one.”
“Good. Thank you.”
“Maybe somebody punched him,” Marino offers. “Maybe distracted him by punching or elbowing him in the face, then stabbed him in the back.
Except that probably would have been recorded, would be on the video clips.”
“He would have more than just this laceration if someone punched him in the mouth. If you look at the debris on his face and the location of the
headphones”—I’m back at the computer, clicking on images to show them—”it appears he fell facedown. The headphones are way over here, what
looks like at least six feet away under a bench, indicating to me that he fell with sufficient force to knock them a fair distance and disconnect them
from the satellite radio, which I believe was in a pocket.”
“Unless someone moved the phones, perhaps kicked them out of the way,” Benton says.
“That was my other thought,” I reply.
“You mean like somebody who tried to help him,” Marino says. “People crowding around him and the headphones ended up under a bench.”
“Or someone did it deliberately.” There is something else I notice.
Clicking through the slideshow, I stop on a photograph of his left wrist. I zoom in on the steel tachymeter watch, move in close on its carbonfiber
face. The time stamp on the photograph is five-seventeen p.m., which is when the police officer took it, yet the time on the watch is tenfourteen,
five hours later than that.
“When you collected the watch this morning”—I direct this to Marino—”you said it appeared to have stopped. You sure it wasn’t simply that the
time was different than our local time?”
“Nope, it was stopped,” he says. “Like I said, one of those self-winding watches, and it quit at some point early in the morning, like around four
a.m.”
“Seems it might have been set five hours later than Eastern Standard Time.” I point out what I’m seeing in the photograph.
“Okay. Then it must have stopped around eleven p.m. our time,” Marino says. “So it was set wrong to begin with and then it quit.”
“Maybe he was on another time zone because he’d just flown in from overseas,” Benton suggests.
“Soon as we finish up here, I got to find his apartment,” Marino says.
I check the quality-control numbers in the quality-control log, making sure standard deviation is zero and the noise level of the system or
variation is within normal limits.
“We ready?” I say to everyone.
I’m eager to do the scan. I want to see what is inside this man.
“We’ll do a topogram, then collect the data set before going to three-D recon with at least fifty percent overlapping,” I tell Anne as she presses
