The Eternity Project

22

CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE, 1ST AVENUE, NEW YORK CITY



‘I hate these places.’

Ethan led Lopez into the uninvitingly blocky building on the corner of 1st Avenue, and headed for the reception desk. Flanked by two large flags and a mural on the wall reading, SCIENCE SERVING JUSTICE, the foyer had a hushed atmosphere that belied the gruesome goings-on within.

‘I’ve seen a few, too, remember?’ Ethan replied to her. ‘Deep breaths, and all that.’

They were directed into the building to one of several autopsy rooms, where the bodies of people who had died in suspicious circumstances or without clear cause were brought to be dissected and the mystery of their deaths ascertained.


The medical examiner was a cheerful-looking man in his forties with a bushy moustache and bright twinkling blue eyes that belied the rigours of his job.

‘Doctor Michael Freeman,’ he introduced himself, with a vigorous handshake, as Ethan and Lopez walked into his office. ‘You’re here for the Hell Gate bodies, right?’

‘Got anything you can tell us about them?’ Ethan asked.

Freeman chuckled as he nodded. ‘I’ll say.’

Ethan and Lopez exchanged a glance as they followed Freeman out of his office and through to the autopsy room itself, a windowless and clinical crucible of stainless steel and polished white tiles. Two gurneys stood in the center of the room, each bearing a glossy black bag that obviously contained a body.

‘You were the investigating officers on the scene?’ Freeman asked as he closed the door behind them.

‘We were,’ Lopez replied. ‘NYPD had the case initially, but it got passed onto us shortly afterward.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Freeman admitted as he unzipped the two body bags to expose the remains within, ‘because these two are a real mystery.’

Ethan looked down and saw the two bodies from Hell Gate.

One, clearly Wesley Hicks, looked like he could almost still be alive but for the enormous blotchy purple bruise that covered his entire chest, stark against his pale skin. Connor Reece, however, was a mess of torn flesh beneath his torso. His legs and pelvis were laid out roughly where they should be, but the hideous damage remained obvious.

‘You say you found these two in the warehouse, with nothing but a line of footprints leading to them?’ Freeman asked.

‘That’s about the size of it,’ Ethan admitted. ‘Somebody walks into that warehouse, or so it appears, then kills these two and walks out again.’

Freeman humphed thoughtfully and then shook his head.

‘Well, if somebody did this, then all I can say for sure is that they’ve committed the perfect murder.’

‘How so?’ Lopez asked him.

Freeman gestured to the corpses.

‘For a start, there is no evidence of power tools, fingerprints or lesions, other than those that are obvious. Both of these victims essentially died instantly from their injuries, but neither shows any indication of blunt-force trauma, use of blades or gunshot wounds.’

‘So how did they die?’ Ethan asked. ‘Somebody must have done this.’

Freeman shook his head. ‘These two guys are in a warehouse, somebody arrives and kills them, then leaves. That’s all you’ve got, right? No forensics?’

‘Nothing,’ Lopez confirmed. ‘The site was clean apart from the footprints of the victims in the dust and those of the first officer on the scene.’

Freeman removed his spectacles and looked at them both.

‘I hate to say this, given the scene that you found, but, in my professional opinion, there is absolutely no way that a human being could have killed these two victims.’

Ethan frowned. ‘They’re dead, aren’t they?’

Freeman chuckled. ‘Indeed they are, but they didn’t die the way you think that they did.’

‘Cut to the chase, Doc,’ Lopez urged him. ‘What happened to them?’

Freeman popped his glasses back on and gestured to Wesley Hicks.

‘This man looks as though he has suffered an enormous blunt-force trauma to the chest, doesn’t he? Something’s slammed into him with enough force to turn his insides to mush.’

‘So far, so normal,’ Ethan agreed.

‘Except that he has no broken bones,’ Freeman continued, ‘his skin was not damaged or even broken and none of his internal organs were damaged except one.’

‘Which one?’ Lopez asked.

‘His heart,’ Freeman replied. ‘When I opened his chest to examine him, his heart had been crushed into nothing, a mess of tissue. The bruising you see on his chest isn’t bruising at all in the classical sense: it’s the result of massive internal blood loss. I scooped six pints of it out of his chest cavity.’

Lopez frowned as she looked down at the man’s remains and the large ‘Y’ incision made by the ME on his chest.

‘But he wasn’t cut open,’ she said.

‘Exactly,’ Freeman agreed. ‘So how the hell does something crush a man’s heart in his chest without even touching him? There was no evidence of an attack on this man at all, no defense wounds, no cuts or abrasions. All I found was trace residue from gunshots on his right hand and wrist.’

‘He fired five shots,’ Ethan confirmed.

‘So something was there,’ Freeman pointed out. ‘Surely, he must have been close to his assailant for this kind of injury to have been sustained, so how come he missed with a gun?’

‘He fired straight up into the air,’ Lopez said, ‘at the ceiling. It was thirty feet above him.’

Freeman looked down at the body and shrugged. ‘Okay, well, maybe this guy was an extraordinarily bad shot, but it doesn’t explain how he could have gotten this injury.’

‘What about sound?’ Ethan speculated. ‘Could that produce injuries like this? Some kind of directed acoustic wave. That would account for the lack of forensic evidence.’

‘Perhaps,’ Freeman replied, ‘but it’s hard to explain the lack of damage to the rest of the tissue around the heart. And it certainly doesn’t explain the other guy.’

Freeman turned to Connor Reece’s body and gestured to the remains. ‘So you found this guy’s body lying next to the other one, but his legs were where?’

‘Twenty yards away,’ Lopez replied. ‘Blood splatter indicates he was killed at the same spot, but, for some reason, the killer threw his legs across the warehouse.’

Freeman shook his head slowly as he stared at the corpse.

‘Again, same problem with this guy: no evidence of use of tools, bite marks or anything to indicate how he was killed. He obviously died from massive trauma and blood loss, but I have no idea how it was done.’

‘Something must have ripped him apart,’ Ethan said. ‘That must take immense force, right?’

‘Tremendous,’ Freeman agreed, ‘but this man was not ripped apart.’

‘What?’ Ethan stared at the ME in amazement. ‘He’s in three pieces!’

Freeman nodded as he looked at Ethan.

‘Yes, he is, but it’s not because he was ripped apart. I looked at segments of his body tissue under a microscope and analyzed the tears. This man was forced apart from within.’

Lopez baulked slightly. ‘You mean like an explosion?’

Freeman shook his head.

‘Like a physical force,’ he replied. ‘That’s what I mean when I say that no human being could have done this. I’ve seen some gruesome slayings in my time but this beats them all. Something took hold of this man, grabbed his insides and then forced them apart with enough energy to rip his legs off. Whatever is responsible, it’s not a man.’