The Anatomy of Deception - Lawrence Goldstone [100]
I wondered in what state the body would appear, how much decomposition would have occurred, even in cool weather. Other than identifying the body, would I be able to learn anything at all? A feeling of horrible ghoulishness passed through me that I was eager to lift off the lid. I reached down, took a deep breath, and used the end of the shovel to pry it up.
Eakins gasped. “My God, what is that?” he exclaimed although his voice barely rose above a whisper.
Inside the coffin, rather than the remains of a slender, light-haired young woman, there lay a large, dark, shriveled object. The stench was overpowering and immense insects were everywhere. A moment later, a rat scurried from under the body out a hole it had gnawed in the coffin’s soft pine. Eakins turned away to keep from retching. As I had predicted, witnessing surgery had not prepared him for this. I hastily closed the top.
“What is that?” he repeated, his voice wavering.
“It is a Negro who died of alcohol poisoning,” I replied. “We autopsied him the same day as I saw the girl.”
“Then where is she?” he asked, averting his eyes from the coffin as if it contained a spirit.
“Perhaps I counted wrong.” I lifted myself out of the hole, and checked the row again. Holding the lantern closer to the ground, I saw that I had missed a grave and therefore we had dug one too far. When I told Eakins of my error, he could barely restrain his fury, but there was little time for recrimination. We fixed the top of the Negro’s casket, filled in the hole, and dug another, one site over. By this time, my shoulders were quivering with fatigue and my palms burned.
When I pried open the top of this second coffin, we faced another decomposing corpse, this time of a young girl with fair hair, wrapped in a brown shroud. The skin on her face had shrunken taut. Vermin had been at the eyes. As I moved the thin fabric aside, I heard Eakins emit a series of soft sobs. With one quick cut of the scalpel, I cut through her paper-dry skin, down to the ribs, and exposed the telltale nodules. There could be no doubt now: We had found Rebecca Lachtmann.
But I was not yet finished. I barked at Eakins to hold the light over her abdomen. In the slanted light from the lantern he looked as ashen as a cadaver himself.
My main objective was to determine if an abortion had been performed or begun, and to that end my first task was to determine if any fetal evidence remained in the uterus. From there, I was hoping to discover some indication as to the cause of death, but there was a quite severe limit to the information I might hope to extract from Rebecca Lachtmann’s corpse. Drug residue was undetectable and, in any case, it is unlikely that anesthetic would have been used in such a procedure. Ordinarily, the most likely cause of death from abortion would have been internal bleeding—all but impossible to detect, particularly in a cadaver at this stage of decomposition. In this case, however, I suspected another immediate cause of death if the operation had been botched.
I made a vertical cut through the desiccated skin of the girl’s abdomen from breastbone to pubis, then transverse cuts on top and bottom. The skin peeled back easily. The intestines and uterus were almost gone, but what was left was sufficient to tell me what I needed to know.
I looked up at Eakins. He was struggling to hold the lantern steady, a look of frozen horror on his face.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll be on our way in moments. Our time wasn’t wasted. I found what I came for.”
“Thank God for that anyway,” he replied in a raspy whisper.
“And when you fine gentlemen tell me, we’ll all know,” said a voice from the shadows.
Eakins and I lifted our heads. A man in a bowler hat was moving forward toward the grave site. He sported a handlebar mustache and had a revolver leveled directly at us.
CHAPTER 22
JONAS LACHTMANN LIVED ON DELANCEY Place, a few streets south of Rittenhouse Square. His town house was not as large or opulent as