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"Their basic function is the same, yes," answered Thornburg.
"But that's like comparing a propeller aircraft to a supersonic jet.
The CAT scanner takes several seconds to display a single cross section of the body. The SAP will deliver twenty-five thousand in less time. The findings are then automatically fed into the computer, which analyzes the cause of death. I've oversimplified the process, of course, but that's a nuts-and-bolts description."
"I assume your data banks hold nutritional and metabolic disorders associated with all known poisons and infectious diseases?"
Emmett asked: "The same information as our computer records at the Bureau?"
Thornburg nodded. "Except that our data are more extensive because we occasionally deal with living tissue."
"In a pathology lab?" asked Lucas.
"We also examine the living. Quite often we receive field agents from our intelligence agencies-and from our allies too-who have been injected by a poisonous material or artificially infected by a contagious disease and are still alive. With SAP we can analyze the cause and come up with an antinote. We've saved a few, but most arrive too late."
"You can do an entire analysis and determine a cause in a few seconds?" General Metcalf asked incredulously.
"Actually in microseconds," Thornburg corrected him. "Instead of gutting the corpse and going through an elaborate series of tests, we can now do it in the wink of an eye with one elaborate piece of equipment, which, I might and, cost the taxpayer something in the neighborhood of thirty million dollars."
"What did you find on the bodies from the river?"
As if cued, Thornburg smiled and patted the shoulder of a technician who was sitting at a massive panel of lights and buttons.
"I'll show you."
All eyes instinctively turned to the naked body lying on the tray.
Slowly it began moving toward the turbine and disappeared into the center cylinder. Then the turbine began to revolve at sixty revolutions a minute. The X-ray guns encircling the corpse fired in sequence as a battery of cameras received the images from a fluorescent screen, enhanced them and fed the results into the computer bank.
Before any of the men in the lab control room turned around, the cause of the corpse's demise flashed out in green letters across the center of a display screen. Most of the wording was in anatomical terminology, giving description of the internal organs, the amount of toxicity present and its chemical code. At the bottom were the words "Conium maculatum."
"What in hell is Conium maculatum?" wondered Lucas out loud.
"A member of the parsley family," said Thornburg, "more commonly known as hemlock."
"Rather an old-fashioned means of execution," Metcalf remarked.
"Yes, hemlock was very popular during classical times. Best remembered as the drink given to Socrates. Seldom used these days, but still easy to come by and quite lethal. A large enough dose will paralyze the respiratory organs."
"How was it administered?" Sam Emmett inquired.
"According to SAP, the poison was ingested by this particular victim along with peppermint ice cream."
"Death for dessert," Mercier muttered philosophically.
"Of the Coast Guard crewmen we identified," Thornburg continued, "eight took the hemlock with the ice cream, four with coffee, and one with a diet soft drink."
"SAP could tell all that from bodies immersed in water for five days?" asked Lucas.
"Decay starts immediately at death," explained Thornburg, "and travels outward from the intestines and other organs containing body bacteria. The process, develops rapidly in the presence of air.
But when the body is underwater, where
the oxygen content is low, decay proceeds very slowly. The preservation factor that worked in our favor was the confinement of the bodies. A drowning victim, for example, will float to the surface after a few days as the decomposition gases begin to expand, thereby hastening decay from air exposure. The bodies you brought in, however, had been totally submerged until an hour before we began the autopsies."
"The chef was a busy man," noted Metcalf.
Lucas shook his head. "Not the chef, but the dining-room steward.
