Amerikan Eagle

In the basement of the Portsmouth City Hospital, seven blocks south of the police station on Junkins Avenue, the Rockingham County medical examiner had a small office and work area next to the morgue. The walls were brick and cement block painted a dull green. The lights flickered as Sam opened the door. The medical examiner sat behind a desk covered with papers and folders, the usual debris of an overworked and underpaid county employee. On the walls hung framed photographic prints of the White Mountains, photos taken by the doctor, a hobby he was proud to show off.

“It’s about time you got here,” William Saunders said. The doctor’s voice was raspy—an old throat wound from his time on the Western Front during the last world war.

“Couldn’t be helped,” Sam replied. “Yesterday both my boss and the mayor had to have a piece of my butt.”

“Hell of a thing, to be so popular,” the medical examiner said. He was tall and thin, with a thick thatch of gray hair, and as he stepped up from his chair, he remained stooped, as though working in the basement of the hospital had permanently weighed him down. “But I won’t give you any more grief, Inspector. You’ve given me a delight this fine morning.”

From a rack he pulled down a black rubber chest-high apron, which he tossed over his head and tied behind him. Sam followed him.

The examination room, like the office, was cluttered. On the far wall were three heavy refrigerator doors. Three metal tables stood centered on the tile floor, the middle one occupied by a sheet-covered lump. Saunders picked up a clipboard and started flipping through the sheets of paper. Sam imagined bits of bone, flesh, and brain tissue stuck in the cracks and grooves of the tiles and metal equipment.

“Why is it a delight?” Sam asked.

“You know what my customers are like day in, day out? A hobo from one of the encampments with a knife wound. A drunk pulled from a car crash. Or some wretched fisherman who fell into the harbor and was found a month later. Do you know how much a body in the water swells and decomposes after a month?”

“I have a hunch,” Sam said. “You still haven’t told me why this body is a delight.”

“Because the bodies I usually get are boring. They’re traditional. They’re easy. Lucky for me, no corpses have come by with their hands tied behind them and two bullets in their skull.” Saunders tapped the clipboard on the feet of the body on the metal table. “This John Doe, this one is a mystery. I’ve been with this good man for hours now, and I’ve only come up with a few crumbs of information.”

“So tell me what your crumbs are.”

“Ah, the crumbs.” Saunders tugged the sheet down. The dead man looked ghastly in the yellow basement light, the Y-shaped incision ugly on the pale skin of his sunken chest. “What we have here is a malnourished white male, approximately fifty to fifty-five years in age. There was no identification in his clothing, and his clothing had no store tags, no laundry marks.”

“Yeah, I know. I noticed that when I first examined him.”

“Something, isn’t it, Inspector? It was like someone—either him or somebody else—wanted to make sure that identifying him would be impossible. Which is probably true. But you see, this poor dead man has one distinct advantage.”

Sam really wanted Saunders to pull the sheet back over the body, but he didn’t want to show a weakness. “And what’s that?”

“He ended up in my county and faced me, that’s what. Any other county in this state, he’d be in a potter’s field. But here, not quite yet. First of all, I believe the man is European.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons. One, the clothing. The stitching is different, the quality of the cloth. Second, his dental work. There’s a difference in American and European dental work—the amount of gold and how it’s used, for example.”

“Can you be more specific? French? English? German?”

“They’re all German now, aren’t they? Sorry, no way to tell which occupied land this man is from.”

“You said he’s malnourished. What do you mean by that?”

“There’s a scale you use when you have a male subject of a certain height and certain age. This gentleman should have weighed between one hundred sixty pounds and one hundred seventy pounds. He actually weighs one hundred twenty. Almost skeletal.”

“Did he have cancer or TB?”

Saunders shook his head. “Internal organs were distressed from being underweight, but there was no obvious sign of disease. I sent his blood out for analysis, but it seems to me, odd as it sounds, that your friend here hadn’t eaten a good meal in a very long time. Some of the hoboes I’ve examined over the years have been underweight, but nothing like this man. It was like he was deliberately starved. However, just to advise you, his lack of eating didn’t kill him.”

Sam felt frustrated, like he was being lectured to. “So you don’t know what killed him. Good for you. Then what was the cause of death?”

The medical examiner stepped up to the dead man’s head. “His neck was snapped.”

“Broken neck. All right, accident or homicide?”