Free Hell Gate by Linda Fairstein Page A

every occasion.
    Gurneys lined the wall of the long, narrow staging area, which led from the bay in which the bodies were received from morgue vans and hearses into the autopsy theaters.
    The first room, where Pomeroy usually worked, was empty. Someone had just mopped the tiled floor and wiped down the stainless steel table, ready to receive the next unfortunate voyager.
    “Good evening, Alex. Hey, Mike,” the doctor said as he came out of the locker room, wiping his hands on a towel before extending one of them to us.
    “How’d you do today?” Mike asked.
    “We’ve actually finished three autopsies. Not too much competition on the homicide front.”
    “What’s the news?”
    “We started with the two young women. Jerry also had time to help me with one of the men, so I could make the necessary comparisons,” Pomeroy said, leading us into the second theater, where a sheet appeared to be covering one of the bodies. “Two of them are most certainly accidental drownings.”
    “Most certainly?” I asked.
    “I’ve told you before, Alex, that drowning deaths can be difficult to call.”
    “What’s the mechanism?”
    “Well, submersion in water is usually followed by a struggle to reach the surface. Most often, it’s a panicky process.”
    Panic kills. Exactly what the guys had told me on the beach.
    “The energy reserves get exhausted,” Pomeroy continued. “People try to hold their breath, till the carbon dioxide accumulation builds up. Then they open their mouths and end up inhaling large amounts of water. Once they swallow the water—it’s pretty gruesome, Alex. You really want to understand this?”
    “I need to, of course.”
    “Then the gagging starts. Coughing, sometimes throwing up. The air escapes from the lungs and it’s replaced by water.”
    “So, it’s an asphyxial death?” I asked.
    “Rarely. Less than twelve percent of the time. Though more so in salt water, like these cases, than in fresh. The salt moves into the bloodstream to establish an osmotic balance, which makes it appear more like an asphyxial death.”
    I listened to Pomeroy but looked at the still form covered by sheeting.
    “Me and science weren’t a natural match, Doc,” Mike said. “What does that mean for these guys?”
    “The victims become unconscious. Often suffer convulsions. It’s anoxia that causes death—low oxygen as a result of the inhalation of large amounts of water.”
    “So the tests you do to say they drowned, those are all done?”
    “There are no reliable tests.”
    “Water in the lungs?” Mike asked. “Water in the stomach?”
    “No real significance to those facts. The water can easily reach those organs after death. In a situation like this with rough ocean movement,” Pomeroy said, “water, sand, seaweed, all get forced into the body.”
    “So what do you need?”
    “The key question is whether or not we have facts that establish whether the person was alive when he—or she—entered the water. All the background observers give to you, what the scene was actually like, what the condition of the deceased’s clothing is when we recover the body.”
    “I got a shipwreck in the middle of the night with a boatload of hysterical Ukrainians. So far nobody can tell us anything I understand. What next, Doc?”
    “For the moment, Mike, while you put the pieces together, I’m quite confident that the first two bodies autopsied—one male, one female—are accidental drowning,” Pomeroy said, stepping to the table and lifting the sheet to fold it down to the waist of the young woman we had seen earlier, at the temporary morgue. “This is Jane Doe Number One.”
    Her eyes were closed now. The auburn hair had been brushed neatly off her face in the postautopsy washing, revealing an uneven line of scrapes and cuts across her forehead.
    Pomeroy pointed his finger to the small bruise on her left chest. “That’s it.”
    “That’s what?” Mike asked.
    “This girl was stabbed to