The Experiment Page 5

  He stepped outside onto the cinder block that was the front stoop and onto the packed brown earth. The screen door closed behind him with a loud thwack. He looked up at the morning sky—overcast, with some bite to the wind. They were at the beginning of the hurricane season. He remembered how the great storms used to excite him—how the wind would bend the branches and the moss would come alive, large hunks detaching themselves and flying through the air twisting like a nest of snakes.

  But this storm would blow over quickly. He had spotted a small window of blue high in the sky over to the west.

  The screen door banged, and the other Jimminies traipsed out of the barracks and joined him. They all washed their faces in the fresh, clear water in the battered white metal basin sunk in the concrete. It was so cold they gasped. From time to time, one of them would stand up to give the pump handle three or four plunges and the water would poke reluctantly out of the rusted spout and slosh into the basin. It was a routine performed without thought every morning.

  But today might be different, Skyler thought—he felt it in his bones.

  As they walked to the Meal House, Benny fell in beside him. "You all right?" he asked in his slow drawl.

  "I've been better," replied Skyler.

  Benny was the only other member of the age group whom Skyler trusted enough to share some of his secrets. He had told him about the expedition to the Records Room and how Julia and he had discovered Patrick's body. Benny's face had turned ashen; he clearly hadn't known what to make of it.

  "He must have been very sick," he had said. "Otherwise, it just doesn't make sense."

  By way of reply, Skyler had shrugged.

  Benny said he was worried that Skyler was going to get into trouble—"big trouble, serious trouble."

  "You remember how Raisin was getting—before he died. You're getting like that now, a little bit," he had said haltingly, looking at the ground.

  Now he was silent as they walked past the Big House.

  Skyler looked at the decaying mansion. The sight of the place filled him with dread. Cracks ran through the faded pink walls, which were darkened by stains. The four tall columns at the rear entrance were peeling, the paint hanging off in flower petal strips. The bottom of the swimming pool, which had not been filled once in their lifetimes, had buckled. It was rent by foot-high weeds sprouting out of miniature cones of dirt. The ancient marble statues around the pool were blemished and green-black with mold in the crevices of their elbows and joined thighs.

  His eye was drawn to the basement door, which was closed—inscrutable.

  Farther on they came to the Meal House, raised two feet off the ground on wooden stilts set in concrete. It was screened on three sides and attached to a jerry-built kitchen that contained a wood-burning stove, a refrigerator and a bookcase used as a pantry. As always, the young men fixed their own breakfast, scooping out granular cereal from wooden barrels and searching through the bins for fruit that was not bruised or overripe. The milk, straight from the cows, was warm.

  They ate mostly in silence, which was unusual. Everyone's still upset because of Patrick, thought Skyler.

  They barely had time to swallow their food before an Orderly banged on the door with the side of his fist—it was time for calisthenics. The sun was behind his darkened silhouette, so it was impossible at first to know which one it was, since they could best be distinguished one from the other by the location of the white streaks in their hair. It turned out to be Timothy, their least favorite.

  Timothy marched them to the familiar worn ground of the Parade Field, and they fell into formation. He unfolded a wooden chair, sat upon it and barked out the commands. Their grunts filled the morning air. Skyler held back, performing the exercises at half strength and going full out only when the Orderly was looking. But he rapidly worked up a sweat in the humidity.

  At last came the moment Skyler was waiting for.

  "Push-ups!" yelled the Orderly. The group swiveled to the left and fell to the ground, a position that allowed Skyler to keep one eye on the women's barracks. He watched and waited, and eventually they came out, all in a group, walking toward the Meal House. They were chatting, moving in and out of his view as they passed behind trees and bushes.

  He felt panic rising in the back of this throat, but then at last he spotted Julia. A wave of relief swept through him at the sight of her familiar figure, the long dark hair trailing down her back as she moved gracefully along the path.

  In an instant Timothy stood up, clapped his hands, and calisthenics was over. Skyler and the others walked across the Campus, and by a miracle of timing, they arrived at an intersection of paths just as the women did. For several seconds the two groups mingled. Skyler walked behind Julia, so close that he could have leaned over and kissed her. Then, as he was about to step away, she turned around, leaned toward him and whispered. "I think I know it. I think I know the password."

  He was so surprised, he was speechless. He watched the women walk off down the path. Then he looked out over the marshes, now touched by sun, and watched the last of the morning mist rising. The wind was picking up and the leaves were showing their pale green undersides. It looked like a storm was brewing after all.

  Chapter 4

  Cruising down Main Street, Jude had no trouble finding the Tylerville police station, a squat red-brick building at the center of town, like dozens of others he had seen in decaying towns around New York. He parked in the grease-stained vanilla-colored macadam lot in the rear, under a narrow window that he took to belong to a jail cell, and walked around the building to enter by the front door. Cops got funny if they saw you taking shortcuts on their turf.

  The desk officer showed him typical respect, as he read a People magazine without lifting his eyes from the page. Jude knew the article, and the author of the article, and he toyed briefly with the idea of informing the officer that about forty percent of it was true. Instead he placed one hand on the desk, within the range of the man's peripheral vision. The cop acknowledged his presence with a grunt and finally looked up. Jude pulled out his wallet to identify himself, flashed the laminated bright pink New York City press card with a practiced flip of the wrist, and stated his business.

  "You'll have to talk to Sergeant Kiley."

  Not a good sign. Public relations officers were usually sergeants.

  "Who?"

  "Kiley. He's in charge of public relations."

  The deskman resumed his reading.

  "Who's heading the investigation?"

  "You'll have to talk to Sergeant Kiley."

  Jude was about to enter a grim-looking waiting room, when he saw a reporter he knew from the Daily News seated with his back to him. He ducked outside and walked to the corner. He fished in his pocket for a quarter, dialed the local paper and asked for the night editor. This was a calculated gamble: some local papers liked having a big city reporter in town and felt flattered by the sudden collegiality; others viewed him as competition and froze him out. Jude struck it lucky. He dropped a name or two and was connected to the reporter working the story, a woman called Gloria, who told him she was about to visit the medical examiner, and invited him along.

  Ten minutes later, he was standing next to Gloria, a young woman about his age with a pleasing, open face, on a porch outside the office of Norman McNichol, M.D., medical examiner for Ulster Country. The office was in a white clapboard house on Broad Street, an elm-lined avenue where the overgrown lawns sloped down to a sidewalk whose slabs tilted wildly because of the irrepressible roots underground.

  Idyllic small-town America, thought Jude, looking up and down the street. Gloria raised a finger with pale green nail polish and pressed a round white pearl button. They heard the muffled singsong of a bell within. Below the button was a discreet brass sign: MCNICHOL FUNERAL PARLOR.

  "So the M.E. moonlights as a funeral director," said Jude. "He can funnel business to himself—there's more than a whiff of conflict of interest in that."

  "Oh,
he's okay. He's a character. Buried everyone around here. Parents, children—you name it. He just keeps going on."

  McNichol, a tall, slender man of indeterminate age, with a trimmed gray beard, opened the door and gave Gloria a peck on both cheeks, European-style. He pumped Jude's hand vigorously. Jude felt she was right: he was okay.

  "We've got to go to Poughkeepsie," he said. "That's where our boy is waiting for us."

  He disappeared inside and reemerged, carrying an old-fashioned black leather doctor's satchel.

  "Hop in your car," he said, bounding down the steps. "You can follow me."

  McNichol drove like a maniac—typical, thought Jude, of someone who treats death like a work buddy. In no time they pulled up to an imposing brick building with a circular drive, in the center of which stood a thick metal sign with embossed letters: POUGHKEEPSIE PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL.

  They followed in McNichol's wake, past the reception desk, where he breezed by and sent papers fluttering, to a staircase at the rear. It led to the autopsy suite in the basement of the maternity wing. A large red sign in block letters—RESTRICTED—was plastered on the main door. They entered through a side office, walked past a rabbit warren of cubicles with gray metal desks for the residents, and entered the scrub room. The walls were lined with lockers, hampers and two deep sinks. In a cupboard were stacks of faded green gowns, thick white aprons, masks and white slip-over shoe covers. On a table were two dispensers of cream-colored latex gloves.

  "Suit up," ordered McNichol.

  Jude hung up his jacket, switched his wallet to his back pants pocket and put his arms through the sleeves of a backward-facing gown, trying to suppress a look of amazement. He had never attended an autopsy before. He approached the sink basin and looked up questioningly.

  "Go ahead." McNichol was chuckling. "This scrubbing's for him. To protect him from you and all the little microscopic critters you're carrying. You'll want to scrub thoroughly on your way out—that one's for you. To protect you from him. I'd say it's more important."

  He disappeared through swinging double doors.

  Jude turned to Gloria, who had tied her smock tightly around her waist with a neat bow.

  "I don't get it," he said. "He's going to allow us in?"

  "Oh, he does it all the time. Like I said, he's a character. And we don't get that many homicides, so he likes to show off."

  They pushed through the swinging doors and found themselves in an anteroom. McNichol was waiting for them. It was cool and damp, like a walk-in meat locker. There were two doors ahead. On one was a printed sign that read: Please indicate No Head if the brain is restricted. Thank you.

  "That's the isolation room," said McNichol. "Quarantine. It's for bodies with communicable conditions. By that I mean seriously communicable. Self-evidently, virtually any disease can be passed from one individual to another. In there we put tuberculosis, certain fevers, Creutzfeldt-Jakob... that's mad cow disease. We've never had one of those, knock wood"—he reached over to knuckle-rap the arm of a chair.

  He saw Jude look at the No Head sign. "That's to prevent disposal—in these kinds of cases—without safeguards."

  They took the other door, which led to the autopsy room.

  The first thing that hit Jude was the smell, a combination of antiseptic and something else that gripped his stomach and made him want to retch. That would be formalin, a fixative, explained McNichol. They were in a room with chipped yellow paint, green tiles that rose three-quarters of the way up the walls, and large fluorescent ceiling lights. Glass cases lined two walls, filled with bottles and sterilized implements and various floating objects that Jude did not care to inspect too closely. Along a third wall were large sinks giving way to stainless steel counters, upon which stood five huge plastic containers of chemicals.

  McNichol handed Jude a blue jar of Vaseline and told him to dab some in his nose. "Trick of the trade," he explained. "Overwhelms the olfactory sense. I don't require it. I lost my smell of death many years ago." He somehow made it sound like a deprivation.

  Gloria passed up the blue jar. Jude was impressed; how many dead bodies had she seen?

  In the center of the room were two L-shaped stainless steel tables, their long sides running parallel to one another. The long portions of the tables had a perforated surface, which, Jude theorized, would allow liquids to flow to tiny sinks at the angles of the L. The short sides were lined with various tools, small Tupperware containers that McNichol said were to hold tissue samples. Nearby were metal boxes, called "coffins," for eviscerated organs. Both were filled with formalin.

  McNichol moved to the rear of the room, where large white drawers were set in the wall. He pushed a metal gurney alongside one, opened it full length, dropped a railing and moved to the other side so that he could hold the gurney in place with his hip.

  "We don't have a single diener on duty today," he said. "They're the ones who are supposed to transport the body to and from the morgue. Technically, I shouldn't be doing this."

  He leaned across and reached for a black body bag.

  "The dieners are charged with 'running the gut.' It's a particularly heinous piece of work—you slit the gastrointestinal tract along its length and check the walls of the gut, as well as its contents. But the dieners like to do it—would you believe they actually choose for the honor?"

  He grunted, and with a single smooth motion, pulled the top of the bundle onto the gurney. Then two more movements—one to hoist the hips, the other to center the feet—and the body was centered on board. It was all done quickly, as if he had done it hundreds of time, which Jude figured he probably had.

  "Now, if you wouldn't mind lending a hand—"

  McNichol gestured with his head toward the glove dispenser. Jude was surprised—surely asking a bystander to assist in an autopsy was a breach of medical protocol. But Gloria was already at the counter, dusting her hands with talcum powder and rolling the thin gloves up the fingers like an expert, and so Jude joined her, trying to act casual.

  They helped McNichol place the bag upon the L-shaped table. He unzipped it and removed white sheets that were inside. Then they helped to shed the corpse of its plastic cocoon and laid it gently to rest upon the cold metal surface. Jude was horrified and thought he might be sick. The body was white-bluish in color. The man's face had been shredded, so that it was a mass of caked blood and bone and reddish muscle. The eyes were missing, as if they had been stabbed or poked out; even the ears were ripped off. Only the dark cavity of the mouth was recognizable. Inside it, the tongue was swollen and seemed to be floating on a sea of reddish fluid.

  "My God!" exclaimed Gloria.

  McNichol was silent, busying himself with the micro-details of the routine of the external examination. He made frequent notes with a ballpoint pen on the autopsy sheet and kept a running commentary: "Caucasian male, approx. twenty-two to twenty-six years. Weight one hundred seventy-five pounds. Height five-ten." He inspected every inch of the body, turning it this way and that, looking for marks, scars and wounds. Then he measured the circumference of the head and chest, and the length and circumference of the arm and leg.

  He took skin samples. He scraped under the fingernails, swabbed the wounds, weighed specimens and put them into tiny bottles. Finally, he stepped back and took a broader view.

  "Well," he said contemplatively, "I certainly can't inspect the eyeballs."

  For the first time, he seemed to take in the entire corpse, and the grotesque nature of its wounds.

  "I've seen this kind of thing once or twice before," he said in a portentous tone. "But this one's a bit different."

  "How do you mean?" asked Jude, thankful that his voice sounded normal.

  "Well, customarily disfigurement is a sign of rage. The victim is hated by the murderer—passionately hated. So much so that the murderer attacks him and mutilates him and sometimes carries on mutilating him even after he's dead. It's almost as if he's trying to eradicate him, to wipe him off the face of the earth
. Then there's another scenario, closely linked to that. In this case, the murderer is suddenly struck by remorse and attacks the dead body—almost as if he is trying to erase his crime, as it were—to blot out all traces of what he has done. Either way, there's passion involved, a lot of emotion. Which usually points to an intimate relationship between victim and perpetrator. And that makes the police's job a lot easier. A husband, a lover, a stalker. The odds are overwhelming that it'll be solved within forty-eight hours, and the perpetrator will be led into the station house in handcuffs, break down and confess to the horrible deed in tears."

  He fell quiet.

  "And this one?" prompted Jude.

  "This was clearly done to thwart identification."

  "How do you know?"

  "For one thing, it was done methodically."

  McNichol touched the skull at the dome of the forehead, where there was only bone. "Incisions were made here and the skin was pulled away like bacon strips. Look how neatly it was done. Painstakingly, patiently. The killer—assuming for the moment that it was the killer who also did this—took his sweet time. And then there are the hands."

  McNichol raised the dead man's arms and twisted them roughly so that they fell back palms up. Jude leaned over, losing his squeamishness now that he was engrossed. The tips of the fingers and thumbs were blistery and black.

  "Burned off," McNichol continued. "No chance of any prints here, except maybe a partial print of this one." He grasped the ring finger of the left hand and held it up. "Looks like our fellow had a whole bag of tricks. Not to mention the strangest of all."

  McNichol waited. He wanted to be asked, and Jude accommodated him.

  "And what's that?"

  "Take a look at this." McNichol moved to the bottom of the gurney, lifted the corpse's right foot and twisted it slightly, so that the cadaver's swollen genitals were thrust up and the pink inside of his right thigh was clearly visible. In the center was a deep cut, almost perfectly circular, the size of a silver dollar.