Saints of New York by R.J. Ellory

Author:R.J. Ellory [ELLORY, R. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000; FIC050000; FIC031000; FIC031010; FIC022000
ISBN: 9781468310504
Publisher: ABRAMS, Inc. (Ignition)
Published: 2014-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

FORTY-SEVEN

What little remained of the victim from the trashcan was spread out on a steel operating table. Remnants of clothing and personal possessions sat on an adjacent trolley, and it was from these that Pagliaro extracted the purse – in it the cell phone, gum wrappers, eye drops, condom – and showed it to Parrish and Radick. It was Radick who held up the plastic baggie, within which was the student ID card.

The forensic pathologist, a genial, red-faced man in his mid-forties, introduced himself.

‘Andrew Kubrick,’ he said, and then added with a grin, ‘No relation to Stanley.’

‘So who do we have?’ Parrish asked, looking at the ID card. ‘Is this Melissa Schaeffer?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ Kubrick said, ‘but what I can tell you is that skull morphology and femoral bone dimensions give us a Caucasian female, approximately five-three in height, somewhere around one hundred to one hundred and ten pounds.’

Kubrick picked up the skull, already detached from the spinal column. ‘There’s a connective tissue joint between the frontal and parietal bones of the skull. As we get older that joint closes up. How far that suture is closed can give us approximate age. This young lady? I’d say somewhere between sixteen and nineteen.’

‘Any indication of COD?’ Radick asked.

‘Strangulation,’ Kubrick said, tone matter-of-fact.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Know what the hyoid bone is?’

‘In the throat?’

Kubrick pointed to a spot on his own neck. ‘Horseshoe-shaped bone, only one that isn’t articulated to any other bone in the human body. Sits between the chin and the thyroid cartilage. It’s a delicate little bone, and it’s fractured in about thirty percent of all strangulations. This young lady was strangled, no question. There’s no other broken bones, no indication of any damage to the skull.’

‘And how long has she been dead?’ Parrish asked.

‘I’d say two, maybe two and a half years. The trash can wasn’t airtight, that’s for sure. She just broke down in there, much as she would have done had she been buried. Clothes rotted, flesh decomposed. Water got in there, did its work.’

‘Can was found in an alleyway at the end of Bay Street,’ Pagliaro said. ‘Some bum pushed it over with a shopping cart and the lid came away. It had been wired, but the wire corroded. Soon as it went over the base of the can came away, and there she was.’

‘Is it realistic that a trash can like that could have been in an alleyway for two years with no-one any the wiser?’ Parrish asked.

Pagliaro answered with a ‘who knows’ expression; Kubrick shrugged, and said, ‘I have no idea. Can could have been there all this time, could have been there a week. The lid was wired shut, as your colleague says, but if it was down there with other trash cans and dumpsters I don’t think anyone would have necessarily identified the smell of decomposition. Wiring the lid down prevented rats getting in there, that’s for sure, but aside from that, well … hell, it could have been there all this time without anyone knowing about it.

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