to bed, curious onlookers had ruined the corpse’s immediate surroundings, nobody there knew the dead man.
IML experts carry out the on-site inspection of the body, take it to the morgue, gather whatever evidence is on it, perform the autopsy, and assist in the identification process of unknown persons, so the LCC people just eyed the corpse from a distance before looking around for impressions, taking photographs, and measuring distances.
The white Mercedes Benz meat wagon reached its destination at 7.49. Three men and a woman in white smocks, olive-green trousers, and lace-up black boots got out, shook hands with the cops, exchanged a few words. Captain Trujillo seemed especially delighted to see Dr Bárbara Valverde, an attractive, thirty-three-year-old, dark-skinned black pathologist. She learned from him the few known facts, then pulled out an aluminium scene case from the back of the van, opened it, passed around latex gloves and plasticized paper booties to her assistants, slipped a pair of gloves on, donned a surgical mask and booties. She closed and lifted the scene case, approached the corpse, swatted away the flies, put the case down, and crouched by it. The body lay prone, face supported on the left cheek, both arms at the sides, legs slightly bent to the right. Down the street, senior citizens gaping behind the police line frowned and murmured in confusion. A woman examining a dead man? She a necrophiliac or what? Young and middle-aged voyeurs pooh-poohed them into silence.
The first thing the pathologist noticed was the lump at the base of the neck. She ran her index and middle fingers over it, feeling the dislocated vertebrae. Then she spotted the laceration on the right temple and her fingers detected comminuted fractures of the temporal bone. There were low-velocity stains of blood on the sidewalk, under the left corner of the mouth, probably coming from split lips and teeth loosened when the head hit the cement.
‘Let’s turn him over,’ Dr Valverde said.
Rigor mortis was almost complete. She held the head in her hands while her assistants turned the body. Bills folded in half fell from a pants pocket. One of the assistants whistled. The pathologist reopened the scene case and reached for a pair of tweezers, which she used to pick up the bills and drop them into a transparent plastic evidence bag.
Dr Valverde frowned when she noticed the curvilinear bite-marks on the neck. She studied them for a while under a magnifying glass.
‘Osvaldo, get on the radio and ask Graciela to call the odontologist and tell him to come to the Institute. There are indentations to cast here.’
The tallest assistant marched to the van. The other was measuring temperature and humidity.
She inspected the lacerated temple under the magnifying glass before swabbing nostrils, mouth, and ears, and depositing each swab into evidence bags which she labelled with a marker. She swabbed the blood on the sidewalk as well, then palpated the top of the head, the rib cage, thighs, legs, and ankles before closing the scene case and rising to her feet.
‘What have we got here, Dr Valverde?’ Captain Trujillo asked. He stood a few feet from her, legs spread apart, right elbow resting on his holster, a lighted cigarette held between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The pathologist suspected he had catnapped in his uniform: his light grey, long-sleeved shirt and blue pants showed dozens of creases and wrinkles. She admitted to herself that he was attractive in an unprepossessing, rather virile way. He tried to establish a non-professional rapport every time they worked together, but Félix was too young for her – and married, on top of everything. She lifted the case and, followed by the captain, took it back to the van, then yanked her gloves off.
‘What we’ve got here is a broken neck, a severe blow to the right temple, lacerated lips and chin, loose teeth, bite marks on the neck.’
‘Time estimate?’
‘Preliminary. Between four and eight hours.’
‘You planning on doing the autopsy immediately?’
‘Yeah. I’m on the six-to-two shift.’
‘Then I’ll drop by, or send someone later on, to collect his things and take them to the LCC. If the identity card is missing, will you have a ten-print card ready for me?’
‘Lift him up, comrades,’ Dr Valverde told her assistants. The two men slid a stretcher out from the van. She followed them with her eyes.
‘Doctor?’ said Trujillo, realizing that she hadn’t been listening.
‘Sorry, Félix.’
‘Will you have a ten-print card ready for me if the stiff wasn’t carrying his identity card?’
‘Sure.’ After a pause she added, ‘Dollar bills fell from his pocket.’
‘So I noticed.’
‘The one on top looked like a fifty.’
‘Is that so?’
‘But when I palpated him I didn’t feel a wallet. And his left wrist has a pale band, like a watch strap, but there’s no watch.’
Captain Trujillo had a crush on Dr Valverde because she had a perfect body and her face was out of this world. But she was competent and bright too, and he liked that. ‘So, your reasoning is whoever kills for a watch, a wallet, and a pair of shoes searches all the pockets.’
‘Right.’
The captain took a puff on his cigarette and mulled this over as the stretcher was slid into the van. The driver turned the ignition, the attendants stripped off their gloves.
‘I’m thinking sex, sodomy maybe,’ the pathologist added. ‘That might explain the bites. I’ll check for evidence of intercourse. But if he didn’t have sex in the last twelve hours, you’ll have a tough nut to crack: a killer who bites without sexual motivation and steals valuables but leaves cash behind. Pretty weird, don’t you think?’
‘Yeah, I guess so. See you in a while, Doc.’
‘Not before noon, Félix. Not before noon.’
The Institute of Legal Medicine, on Boyeros between Cal-zada del Cerro and 26th Street, is a two-storey prefab building hidden from view by a psychiatric clinic and big laurel trees. Before its experts located, exhumed, and identified the remains of Ché Guevara and his men in Bolivia, it claimed the dubious distinction of being the least known of Havana’s public institutions.
Back at her place of work, Dr Valverde had a buttered bun and a glass of orange juice for breakfast, followed by a cup of espresso. Next she smoked a cigarette in the hallway, standing by one of several ugly aluminium ashtrays. She dropped the butt in it before marching to the locker room to step into a gown, don sleeve protectors, shoe covers, a surgical cap, a face shield, and three pairs of latex gloves.
The autopsy suite had four tables, an efficient air-conditioning and ventilation system, and the standard paraphernalia of Stryker saws, a source lamp with a fibre-optic attachment, multiband ultraviolet lamps, surgical and magnifying lamps, pans, clamps, forceps, scalpels, sinks, hoses, and buckets. On the tiled walls, cabinets and cupboards of all sizes, plus light boxes for X-rays. A steelworker would define it as a stainless steel palace, a chemist as the kingdom of formaldehyde, a pathologist as a place to make a living. This last definition is a troubling one for most people.
The body was on a gurney to the right side of table number three. Dr Valverde’s two assistants sat on the autopsy table, legs dangling, face shields lifted to avoid fogging them up while commenting on last night’s baseball game at the Latin American Stadium. On table number one, another team was doing a twenty-five-year-old woman who had died at home, possibly from a heart attack. Osvaldo handed Dr Valverde a mike which she clipped to her gown. René pressed the record button.
The assistants lifted the body on to the autopsy table as the pathologist steadied the gurney; next they broke the rigor mortis in the arms and legs. Hair and substances under the fingernails were collected first. The cadaver was then undressed and the pockets searched. Four cocaine fixes, a key ring with five keys, a half-full packet of cigarettes, a lighter, a handkerchief, and nine coins, were