Chapter 86

Priority forensic autopsies for murder investigatons in Nova Scotia were done at RCMP Oxford Street headquarters in west end Halifax, homebase of H Division.
The cut-and-paste work, systematically removing and weighing organs and so on, took all night long and much of Sunday morning.
Sgt. Digby and Cpl. Agarwal drove down at noon Sunday to talk with H Division’s civilian forensic pathologist, Dr. Steven Jenks.
Digby had a depressing feeling gnawing in her stomach. Mostly from what was on the video she found in Jack Lee’s secret room.
Unbelievable.
But also, partly because now she had to go look at more cold white bodies in the morgue.
They walked down a long white hallway, tunneling into H Division headquarters via the back lab entrance.
Oxford Street had the only RCMP forensics laboratory east of Montreal.
Dead bodies, in and of themselves, didn’t bother Digby. Not even the rancid, iron smell of human blood; not crushed, deflated heads or wrecked and slippery purple organs.
The morgue itself rubbed her the wrong way. Something about the way the bodies were drained of blood, washed and wrapped in gossamer sheeting, and laid out stiffly on spotless steel gurneys, dripping fluid, like curing meat.
Everytime she set foot in the autopsy suite, she felt like she was stepping into a horror movie.
There was a black Lucite sign suspended from the ceiling, dangling above a set of double-wide beige doors: AUTOPSY SUITE, the sign said, in crisp white lettering.
Agarwal pressed the button on an intercom and leaned in toward the speaker. “Can Steve come out and pla-a-a-a-a-ay?” He said in a faggoty voice.
Digby punched him on the shoulder. “Stop it!”
Agarwal put up his dukes and laughed. “C’mon. Don’t make me get tough with you.”
The heavy doors unlocked, electronically.
They pushed through, revealing a large hallway inside, lined on the left with green metal shelving, covered with a denim curtain. The shelves often contained body parts, sections of liver, blood and tissue samples being sent out for lab testing.
Dr. Jenks stood in front of the autopsy suite entrance, wearing a medical gown. He was sprinkled with droplets of blood, right down to the stretchy blue disposable shoes pulled over his sneakers.
Cpl. Kevin Gordon, the exhibits officer, was standing beside the pathologist, where he had been all night, witnessing the autopsies.
He would take evidence recovered from the bodies back to New Minas Detachment, and would testify in any future court proceedings that a strict chain-of-custody had been maintained, from crime scene to courthouse.
Dr. Jenks pulled off a pair of blood-stained gold rubber gloves and threw them into a nearby trash bin. The garbage bag was made of incredibly thick plastic, like a raincoat, Digby noticed. It had to be so it could hold body parts and body fluids without leaking.
“Guys,” Jenks said, expecting them. “I’m just finished. Shesus, what a night.” He was smiling, but looked exhausted.
He approached Digby with his knobby white hand extended. There was blood all over his gown.
Digby shook his hand and tried not to act weirded out. She found the RCMP pathologist a little creepy.
He was a nice man, professional, but he definitely had a touch of the psycho in his eyes.
She imagined it was an unavoidable side-effect of having a job where he dissected his fellow man, over and over, year after year, like the souls of the dead he mutilated were slowly sucking his mind over to their side.
Red Rover, Red Rover...
“We appreciate your hard work, Steve. Working all night. Sometimes you don’t get a single autopsy for two days.”
“I know,” the pathologist shrugged, proudly. “I basically try to do all obvious homicide exams the same or next day. Who cares if I don’t sleep?”

“Where are the bodies?” Digby said, peeking into the autopsy suite beyond Dr. Jenks’ shoulder.
He pointed behind her toward a large open refrigerator about the size of a transport-trailer, aross the hall from the autopsy suite. The metal door was swung wide open, revealing a dark interior.
Digby looked and quickly turned away again, but it didn’t matter. Her mind snapped a perfect photograph of the mummy bodies inside.
The Lee’s were laid out on morgue stretchers equipped with six-foot stainless steel pans underneath to collect their deathly drippings.
The cooler was pitch-black inside but the bodies seemed to shine in their spooky white wrappings, which Dr. Jenks had expertly swirled around the curves of their shoulders, hips, knees, feet.
H Division had been battling Ottawa for many years for the funding to build a new morgue, one with steel drawers for more efficent body storage. It seemed there weren’t enough murders in Halifax to justify the upgrade.
Digby hated seeing bodies all jammed together in the cooler, on carts, with their white legs visible through the material of the sheet, like cow legs in a butcher’s window.
She felt a shiver run through her neck.
When she died, she wanted to be killed in the woods somewhere and never found. She wanted to return to dirt.
“Can we close the cooler now?” Digby said, rubbing her arms.
“I think so,” Jenks said. “Housekeeping’s just getting the garbage.” He turned toward the morgue locker room. “Shirley? Can I lock the cooler?”
A housekeeping lady came out of the locker room, scrubbing an orange mop across the floor. “Hold your pecker, I’m almost done.”
She walked briskly into the cooler and gave the gurney trays a fast wipe with a disinfectant rag. One of the bodies’ farted whinily next to her ear. Digby jolted at the eerie sound.
“Don’t mind me, bud, just let her go,” the housekeeping lady smirked, a big grin on her worn red face. Digby felt ill. She looked over at Agarwal. His cheeks were bright pink with mirth.
The housekeeping lady picked up a bag of autopsy garbage, being stored in the cooler so it didn’t rot, and then slammed the metal door and locked it with a large bronze padlock, sealing Jack and Tamara Lee into frigid darkness, forever- or at least until their bodies were released for burial.
The investigators retreated into the clean bright autopsy suite, next door. The housekeeper lady said she had to mop the floor in there still, but Dr. Jenks told her to come back later.
The pathologist stood at a steel set of counters on the right side of the room, and began sorting a pile of bloody knives and tools on a green towel next to a pair of sinks.
He filled one sink with hot water and added a reddish brown chemical from a plastic jug labelled ‘Enol,” then dumped a towel-load of bloody tools in to soak, like a bachelor doing his pots and pans. The Enol fumes tickled Digby’s throat and made her cough.
Cpl. Gordon sat at a desk at the back of the room to write reports.
Agarwal walked over and stood next to the massive, L-shaped stainless steel dissection table in the middle of the room, surrounded by scales and steel buckets on tall legs and castor-wheels.
The blood and gore of the autopsies had all been rinsed down the table’s enormous drain, Digby noticed, but the white floor was still sprinkled with bits of clotted blood that looked like red mucous, and bits of greasy red tissue spat out by Dr. Jenk’s electric Stryker saw.
The whole room reeked potently of iron-smelling human feces.
Digby could barely stand the stench and wanted to pinch her nose, but she thought that might be childish.

“Where do you want me to start?” Dr. Jenks said, stacking his tools in the other sink and scrubbing them with a series of medical brushes. “My tapes and the autopsy reports will be available as soon as I copy them over, which I’ll do tonight, hopefully, after I lay down for a bit. I know you guys are under the gun.” He gestured toward a stand-up dictation machine on legs and wheels in the corner, with three old-fashioned-looking foot pedals: Reverse, Record, Playback.
Digby nodded.
“Thanks.”
“So, this is exciting. He was a reporter?”
“Appreciate it, Steve,” Digby said. “Yeah, he was bureau chief in the Valley for the Gazette.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah.”
“They worked him and the woman over pretty good, that’s for sure. One thing I can tell you about your homo, he’s covered in blood. Nobody called in any sightings or anything like that?”
Digby shook her head. “It was kind of my hope as well, that someone would have seen a suspicious person with blood on their clothes, but so far no sightings. We’re a day or two behind, though, right? Did you figure out a time-of-death?”
“Well… They were sort of frozen solid, which messes up the timing for me. But it was yesterday, between say 5 a.m. and 5 p.m.”
Agarwal leaned over and peered closely at the dissection table’s stainless steel drain, as if intrigued by its design. “So, whoever our homo is, he got across the border before we put an alert up and he’s in Disney World by now…”
“I’ll start with the girl,” Dr. Jenks said, ignoring Agarwal’s pessimism. He settled down on a tall stool, ready to give a long dissertation if neccessary.
“-Was the girl sexually assaulted?” Digby asked, before Jenks could begin.
“No. No recent sex.”
“I only ask ‘cause she was a former sex trade worker. I want to just mentally rule out former clients, if I can.”
“… Okay… No, for the most part what you saw at the crime scene is what you got. The killer was probably right-handed. Probably male. He was strong enough to create deep avulsions in some of the tissue. The force of blows must have been incredible. Mr. Lee’s left pectoral, Blunt Force Injury # 4, was avulsed almost entirely off the sternum and manubrium. You nearly had to pick his chest muscle up off the ground out there, like a steak. Can you imagine?”
He looked at Digby, then at Agarwal, then back to Digby.
“Some of the bone fractures would have required tremendous power. Blunt Injury # 13 on the girl was a cervicotrochanteric hip fracture, basically the base of the femoral neck was broken right through. That’s not an easy bone to break in a young woman.”
“Hm.”
“And I might as well continue with the girl?”
“Yes. Do you know her cause-of-death?” Digby said.
“The most fatal injury for the girl was Injury # 2, a fracture along the left zygomatic arch, her temple, cheekbone. The fracture had severe deformations around the impact site; what we call concentric fractures. The skull buckled under impact, creating circular fractures emanating outward, like you hit a piece of asphalt with a sledge-hammer.”
Digby nodded. “Do you know what kind of weapon it was?”
“Well, we know she was hit with sticks and rocks, we read that in the newspaper this morning-“
Digby smiled, politely at his joke.
“-But I almost thought it was a gunshot that killed her. It was difficult. When you look at a shattered skull like that, blunt trauma can almost be indistinguishable from ballistics trauma. In this case, the pieces of her skull were beveled internally, which is consistant with blunt force trauma. I also recovered splinters, of wood. So the newspaper was right. Your murder weapon is a stick. Lord of the Flies.”
He pointed to some red debris on the white tile of the autopsy suite. “Those are splinters right there. I’ll collect those before I leave, so we can see what kind of wood.”
“…Shesus,” Agarwal whispered, shaking his head lightly. He hated to think about an attractive young woman being beaten to death. “So, how many injuries altogether?” he asked Jenks.
The pathologist picked up one of his finer medical brushes and gingerly scrubbed at some grime under one of his fingernails. “It was five for Jack and twenty-one for Tamara. Jack had two severe head traumas.”
“The head traumas were his cause-of-death?” Digby asked, making note of it before he answered.
“His occipital bone was advanced in three centimeters, crushed with what looks like a rock. C1, C2 obliterated.”
Digby tried to finish his sentence: “- which killed him?”
But Jenks gave a disappointing shrug. “Mr. Lee’s technical cause of death was intracerebral hemorrhage. Cerebral hemorrhage, death by hemmorhagic shock. But in his case, the factors which caused the hemorrhage are inconclusive. It could have been caused by another factor.”
Digby and Agarwal looked at eachother, strangely. “What other factor?” Digby said.
“I need to see my labs, before I answer that. What caused the cause of death, so to speak…”
“’What caused the cause of death?’” Agarwal repeated, marveling at the answer. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Agarwal stood up from the dissection table and set his notes down on the slightly raised circular drain, which was about the size of a small pizza. “You found a cerebral hemorrhage in a guy who’s head was beat like a busted placenta. And you’re telling me you don’t know the cause of death?”
“I do know the cause of death. I don’t know all the factors that caused the cause-of-death,” Jenks said, defensively. “And don’t lose your patience with me, Ross. Yes, I have to rule out another factor in the cause-of-death, something actually quite likely. It may seem neither here nor there to you, but when this gets to court sometime in the future, this will become very monumental, when suddenly a defense lawyer starts bringing up my autopsy report and saying Jack technically died of something different.”
“Like what?” Agarwal demanded, impatiently.
“He’s right,” Cpl. Gordon piped up from the back desk. “Think of the trial, Ross. Think of the trial.”
“Thank you,” Dr. Jenks said.
“-Thanks for the policeman lessons.”
“-You said ‘another factor,’” Digby said. “Can you explain what that is?”
“I’m not sure, not until I get my toxicology, histo and hemo results. I should know in three weeks.”
“Come on! Can’t we get a rush?” Agarwal spat. “This is a double homicide, for Christ sake.”
Jenks tucked his lips into his mouth and raised his eyebrows. “There’s nothing I can do.
It’s all relative, Ross. Some specialized tests will likely have to be sent to a private lab in Florida. Depending on how busy they are, it could take up to a year.”
Agarwal shot his head forward, in shock. “-A fucking year!”
“Those are mostly for trial purposes, you guys won’t need to wait that long to make a case, hopefully.”
“-What do you need to find out?” Digby stressed again, trying to get an explanation that would satisfy her Staff Sergeant. “What do you need the tests to tell? I need some explanation here, Steve?”
The pathologist put his hands on his hips. “I wish I’d kept Jack’s body out to show you. Basically, he was really fucked up, internally. Bleeding internally. Petechiae. Purpura in the toes. Blood in his bladder. Blood in the nose mucosa, blood on the gums, blood in the stomach mucosa. You name it.”
Agarwal walked over from the dissection table to the counter where Jenks and Digby were standing.
“Jenks. What do you mean exactly when you say ‘fucked up?’ Can you elabourate on that?” He was tuned up, like a predator on the scent of blood.
‘Fucked up’ was blood in his nostrils. When a homicide investigator found what was ‘fucked up,’ it meant he had his first clue. The more fucked-up the better.
“As soon as they wheeled him in, I knew I would find a GI bleed,” Jenks stammered. “I don’t know if you guys noticed, but Jack had an awful lot of feces on his pants, a tarry black deposit around the waistband. I could tell right away by the smell and colour. It was black as Toby’s ass... Or maybe you don’t pay as close attention to feces as I do?”
Digby smiled as the pathologist’s attempt at humour.
“Jack had a condition called ‘melena.’ Loose, black, unpleasant smelling stool, caused by an upper GI bleed.”
“Black as Toby’s ass?” Digby said, repeating the pathologist’s earlier phrasing. She remembered Jack had shit on his pants when they found him in the snow, but she hadn’t thought much of it at the time. Most of the dead bodies Digby dealt with on the job had shit themselves one way or the other. When people died, their bowels gave way and they shat themselves. It just went with the territory.
“What’s melena?” Agarwal said, writing the word down in his notepad. “How do you spell that? Why was Jack’s shit black as Toby’s ass?”
“M-E-L-E-N-A.” Dr. Jenks spoke slowly as the cops made their notes. “It’s caused by digested blood in the stool. It means the victim is bleeding internally, usually a bleeding ulcer located somewhere above the small intestine. The blood moves down and is digested, turning it black.” He traced his finger down his stomach. “In Jack’s case, what I found was not an ulcer, per se, but bleeding at the capillary level. Many, many tiny hemorrhages at the capillary level, where the blood was not clotting, including the stomach and esophagus. You need to understand: These hemorrhages, in particular, had to be caused by something other than the beating. That’s the other factor. The cerebral hemorrhage that killed Jack Lee may have been caused by the beating, but it may also have been caused by whatever caused this melena condition.”
“Ok,” Digby said slowly, looking up from her note pad. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“I mean, are you sure the melena wasn’t caused by the beating? It was a hell of a beating, Steve.”
The pathologist sighed. “The melena could not have been caused by the beating. It takes about 20 hours for food to move through the digestive system and come out the other end. Jack was beaten and died within one hour. There was simply no time for melena to develop from his injuries. See what I mean? The presence of melena proves he had internal bleeding before the beating occurred.”
Agarwal felt disappointment on hearing the explanation. “So, he had some kind of disease?”
“No.”
“Well, what the fuck? It sounds like your saying he had Ebola or something.”
“No,” Jenks laughed. “Well, that would certainly make things interesting. -No, I don’t think he had Ebola.”
The pathologist got up from his stool and turned to face Digby, the officer in charge. “I can’t say without the labs, but I was thinking more along the lines of an anticoagulant effect.”
He nodded towards the dissection table. “I saw the same thing a couple cases ago. Melena, hematuria, purpura, petechiae. In that case, it turned out, an elderly man was overdosing on his anticoagulant meds. Warfarin.”
Digby frowned. “Anticoagulant?”
“Warfarin was originally used as a rat poison. It’s something they prescribe to prevent embolism, certain kinds of stroke. It stops blood from clotting. Basically, if you take too much of it, especially over a period of time, it does what it used to do in rats: It causes internal hemorrhaging, and lots of it, and often times fatally. The old guy I had in here, his cause of death was massive pulmonary hemorrhage, but the underlying cause could be the same.”
“-Just a goddamn minute,” Agarwal was holding up the heel of his hand. “Did you say rat poison?” He was getting excited again. “Jack was poisoned?”
Jenks waved his hands back and forth in the air. “May have been poisoned. I said the old man I had before OD’d on warfarin and had similar symptoms, like Jack. That’s all. I can only make an educated guess how Jack came to be like that.”
Everybody went silent.
Digby could hear the hum of the giant Halogen Genie lights overhead.
“Not until I get a whole series of labs back,” Jenks said again. “Not just blood, but liver too.”