Occam's Razor by Archer Mayor Read Free Book Online Page A

him and glanced at the illegible signature at the bottom. “Hillstrom didn’t do it?” I asked, slightly disappointed.
    “She’s on a teaching sabbatical for the year. That’s Bernie Short.”
    “Okay. Thanks.”
    Bernard Short was Beverly Hillstrom’s relatively new deputy. A nice guy and a good pathologist, he hadn’t yet instilled in me the trust I had for his boss. Hillstrom and I went back a long way, and we fed each other’s mania for scratching at the details, regardless of protocols, cost overruns, or time allotments. From what I’d been told, it wasn’t a relationship she shared with many others, which made me all the more grateful for the attention.
    I scanned the preliminary report with limited expectations and was therefore doubly surprised by its contents. I reached for the phone and dialed the ME’s office in Burlington.
    “Hey, Bernie, how’re you holding up?” I asked him, once Short had been put on the line.
    His answer was disarmingly honest. “Nervous as hell. I’m sweating bullets I’ll mess something up. Good thing the office folks here know how everything runs.”
    “Well,” I reassured him, “if the prelim you just sent me on that John Doe is any indication, you’re doing all right. You wrote you found evidence of chloracne in the genital area, indicating a possible exposure to harsh, chlorine-based chemicals. Could you expand on that a little? I’ve got something cooking down here where that might make sense.”
    “Oh, sure. Actually, it kind of surprised me. It’s not something you see a lot. The only other case I’ve ever handled was when I was doing my residency. A factory worker checked into the hospital after splashing himself with a liquid dioxin—some kind of oil. He wiped it off at the time and didn’t think anything more about it, but less than a week later, he came down with severe chloracne—rash, oozing sores, skin discoloration, epidermal hardening. It was pretty nasty.”
    “And that’s what this John Doe had?”
    Bernie Short equivocated a little. “He had chloracne. I don’t know how he got it. I did look at his sebaceous glands under the microscope. They were hardened, which fits the scenario, and his liver showed signs of degeneration. I’ve ordered a special tox scan, so we should know for sure in a few weeks.”
    I quickly reread the report in my hand. “You also mention telltale bruising in the left scapular area. What’s that about?”
    His enthusiasm picked up immediately. “That was pretty neat. I’m looking forward to showing it to Dr. Hillstrom when she gets back. When I rolled him over, I noticed a very mild discoloration just below the left shoulder blade. Usually, you just note something like that—get it in the record. But I wanted to try something Dr. Hillstrom had mentioned. Bruising is bleeding under the skin, of course, but if the blow’s perimortem—around the time of death—the blood doesn’t have time to spread out and make that characteristic blue-black appearance. So I cut around what little bruising I could see and peeled the outer layer of skin back. There I found a near-perfect footprint. I took a picture of it—it’ll be in the full report.”
    “Nice work, Bernie,” I said with genuine warmth. “I hope Dr. Hillstrom gives you a gold star. By the way, were you able to pinpoint cause of death? I have witnesses who make it sound like he might’ve been dead before the train hit him.”
    The hesitation on the other end told me I’d pushed him too hard, which I regretted, given what he’d just delivered.
    “Those are actually two questions in one,” he answered gamely, though his disappointment was obvious. “And I’m afraid you won’t be able to do much by either one of them.
Cause
of death might have been anything from a baseball bat to the train, to a shotgun blast to the head—impossible to tell…Well,” he suddenly paused, “probably not a shotgun—at least not one firing pellets. I checked the