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Detective Emert had asked if Miranda and I would be willing to take the clothing off the corpse and hang it up in the morgue. “I need it to be dry so I can go over it with evidence tape,” he said, though I already knew that was the reason.
“Sure,” I said. “No point your making a trip just for that.” It wasn’t easy to undress the frozen body, but we managed it. As we removed the pants, I noticed that the underpants were soiled. The man appeared to have had diarrhea, and it looked reddish brown, possibly bloody. I made a note to point it out to Garcia the next day, when he did the autopsy.
As Miranda and I were driving back to the Anthropology Department, I called Emert. “Hello, Detective, it’s Dr. Brockton.”
“Hi, Doc,” he said. “Call me Jim, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind. The clothing’s off and should be dry by tomorrow. Your man’s still half frozen, though. Reminds me of Thanksgiving dinner.”
Emert laughed. “How so?”
“Well, my wife — my late wife; she died several years ago — she always bought frozen turkeys, and she never seemed to remember that it takes a couple of days in the fridge to thaw one of those. So every Thanksgiving morning, she’d panic when she realized the turkey was still frozen solid. Every year I’d end up putting the damn thing in the bathtub in warm water to thaw it.”
“Hmm,” said Emert. “And you never remembered to put it in the fridge ahead of time, either?”
“Truth is,” I laughed, “I kinda got a kick out of it. After the first couple of times, it seemed like part of the tradition. For all I know, Kathleen might have been pretending to forget, just to amuse me. Or just to make me feel useful.”
“Some women are smart that way,” he said. “My wife has me cooking the turkeys at Thanksgiving and Christmas now. I deep-fry ’em. You ever done that?”
“No, but I’ve heard it’s good. True?”
“Once you’ve done it, you’ll never go back to baked turkey.”
“But it’s not like fried chicken, is it? You’re not dipping it in batter?”
“No, no,” he said. “You inject it with a marinade — my favorite’s a Cajun marinade, which has some kick to it — and when you put it down in the oil, the oil browns the skin really fast, seals in all the juices. Makes an oven-roasted turkey seem dry as shoe leather.”
“Sounds tasty,” I said. “Wish it weren’t ten months till Thanksgiving.”
“Tell you what,” he offered. “When we close this case, I’ll do a turkey-fry to celebrate.”
“Deal,” I said. “Dr. Garcia scheduled the autopsy for one o’clock tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”
“This is the only homicide I’m working,” he said. “Of course it’s okay. How about if I show up at twelve-thirty, so I can go over the clothing?”
“I’ll meet you at the loading dock behind the hospital,” I said.
* * *
Hey,” I called as he opened the trunk of the white Crown Victoria the next day. “You got my chainsaw in there?”
“Sorry,” he said, removing an evidence kit and closing the lid. “We haven’t been able to empty the pool yet. Drainpipe’s frozen solid; so is the valve mechanism. We’ll need a few days above freezing to thaw it out enough to drain.”
“Can’t you just put in a sump pump and pump it out from the top?”
“We could, but then there’s that thick layer of frozen ice hanging up near the top of the pool. If we pump all the water out from underneath, a ton of ice could come crashing down on your chainsaw and bust it up. You don’t want that, do you?”
“Busted or rusted,” I sighed. “Not sure which is the greater of two evils.”
“I don’t think it’s actually rusting while it’s submerged,” he said. “I think the rust starts to form only after it comes out of the water — takes moisture plus air to oxidize the steel.”
Now that he said it, it made sense. I’d seen a gruesome version of that phenomenon affect decomposing bodies. Soft tissue that decayed in moist environments, such as basements and caves, was transformed into a waxy or soapy substance called adipocere. A few years before, in fact, I’d had a case in the mountains of Cooke County in which a young woman’s body — hidden in a cave for decades — turned into a remarkable adipocere mummy. In the absence of oxygen, though, completely submerged bodies did not turn to adipocere.
“So when we do get the saw out,” Emert continued, “we’ll put it in a trash can filled with water, so it stays submerged till you can take it to a shop and get it taken apart and drie
d out.”
In one corner of the loading dock I noticed an empty plastic trash can lying on its side. I picked it up and handed it to Emert. “Take good care of my baby,” I said. He laughed as he put it in the trunk.
Emert patted down the clothing thoroughly with evidence tape. The tape’s sticky side would pick up hair and fibers, much like the lint roller I had at home. I’d seen evidence tape used many times, but Emert’s variety had a plastic backing I hadn’t seen before. “This is a fairly new kind,” he said. “The plastic’s water-soluble. Once I’m through, I put it in warm water to dissolve the backing. That leaves the hair and fibers in the water. Pour the water through a coffee filter, and voilà—everything’s together in one nice, neat place.”
Once Emert was satisfied that he’d gone over the clothing thoroughly, he began checking the pockets of the pants. Easing a gloved hand into each of the front pockets, he extracted a set of keys and a few coins. Then he felt the seat of the pants — left, then right — to check the rear pockets. The left hip pocket was empty, but I saw him smile when he felt the right pocket. Un-buttoning the closure carefully, he slipped a hand into the pocket and fished out a worn leather wallet. He laid it on an absorbent pad and unfolded it gently.
His eyes widened. Looking down to see what he’d seen, I made out the familiar markings of a Tennessee driver’s license through a clear plastic window in one side of the wallet. “Wow,” Emert said. “No wonder he looked familiar.”
“Who is it?” Instead of answering, Emert held the wallet up so I could take a close look. LEONARD M. NOVAK, the small print on the license read. “Novak,” I said. “Rings a bell, but only vaguely.”
