Free Critical by Robin Cook Page B

cabinets, the contents of which looked like something that should have been in a house of horrors. Next to them were backlit x-ray view boxes. The whole scene was awash in a stark blue-white light coming from banks of ceiling-mounted fluorescent fixtures. The illumination appeared to suck the color out of everything in the room, especially the ghostly pale corpse on the nearest table.
    While Vinnie continued the preparations by getting out instruments, specimen bottles, preservatives, labels, syringes, and evidence custody tags, Jack and Lou went to the view box to look at the whole-body X-rays that Vinnie had put up. One was anterior-posterior; the other was lateral.
    After checking the accession number, Jack gazed at the films. Then he said, "I think you are right."
    "Right about what?" Lou asked.
    "It being small-caliber," Jack said. He pointed to a cylindrical, half-centimeter-long translucent defect within the lower part of the skull's image. Composed of metal, bullets totally absorb X-rays, and since X-rays are viewed as negatives, the image appears in the color of the background illumination.
    "Twenty-two-caliber would be my guess," Lou said, moving his face close to the film.
    "I think you're also right about it being execution-style," Jack said. "From its position in the films, it's undoubtedly lodged in the brain stem, where a professional killer would aim. Let's take a look at the entrance wound."
    With Vinnie's help, Jack rolled the corpse on its side. First, Jack took a digital photo. Then, with his gloved hand, he separated the hair covering the point where the bullet entered the victim's head. Since the victim had bobbed around in the Hudson River, most of the blood had been washed away.
    "It's a near-contact wound," Jack said. "But certainly not contact, since it's a circular, not a stellate defect." He took another photo.
    "How far away?" Lou questioned.
    Jack shrugged. "By the looks of the stippling, I'd say somewhere around twelve inches. Noticing the position of the entrance wound in relation to the bullet's position on the X-ray, I'd guess the perpetrator was behind and above the victim, maybe with the victim seated. That's seemingly confirmed by slightly more stippling below the entrance wound than above."
    "More weight to it being execution-style."
    "I'd have to agree."
    Jack took some measurements of the position of the wound, and another photo with a ruler in close proximity. Then, with a scalpel, he dislodged some of the embedded soot from within points of stippling. He put the material in a specimen tube. Finally, he took additional photos before motioning for Vinnie to allow the body to roll back into a supine position.
    "What do you make of these deep slices across the thigh?" Lou asked, pointing to two parallel sharp cuts in the anterior aspect of the right thigh.
    Jack took a photo before inspecting the wounds and palpating them. "They were certainly made by a sharp object," he said, looking at the clean edges. "There's no skin bridges. I'd guess they are propeller injuries, and I'd be willing to bet they were postmortem. I don't see any extravasated blood within the tissues."
    "Do you think the victim could have been run over after being thrown from a boat?"
    Jack nodded, but something more subtle caught his attention. Moving down to the ankles, he pointed out some oddly shaped abrasions.
    "What is it?" Lou asked.
    "I'm not sure," Jack said. He went over to the counter and hefted a dissecting microscope detached from its base. Bracing his elbows on the edge of the table, he studied the subtle abrasions.
    "Well?" Lou questioned.
    "I'm going out on a limb," Jack admitted, "but it looks as if his legs might have been tied with chains. There's not only abrasions but also suspiciously shaped indentations."
    "Occurring after he was dead or before?"
    "Whatever it was, it was after he was dead. I don't see any blood in the tissues here, either."
    "It could have been he was chained to a weight and