The Mark Of Cain 02

"One of the more thoughtful things about the Westland Pianist is that he would notify the police of the location of the crime immediately after he committed it." Albarino commented as he stood in front of the portable autopsy cart in the general autopsy room.

The autopsy room's exhaust system rumbled in the autopsy room and the recording equipment hummed. By the time the autopsy was finished, Albarino's secretary would have printed the spoken content of the autopsy report into an official one. Everyone in the room was fully protected, wearing protective suits, masks, shoe covers, headgear so on and so forth, wrapped tightly from head to toe, almost like a strange ritual scene. For Albarino, the smell of the room was nothing, but he was sweaty just by being covered by this outfit.

– The body dressed as a scarecrow figure was lying on the autopsy cart, waiting to be dissected and disemboweled.

And Albarino said the truth: the days every forensic pathologist in the corpse autopsy room spent were unpleasant to look back upon. They gained experience from the ghastly white bones under the soft, collapsing rotten skin, and the flowing corpse fluid, along with constant vomiting. No matter how strong the autopsy room exhaust system was, the corpse autopsy room would always be filled with a stench that could not be dispersed.

Bates stood behind Albarino. Although there was no expression on his face, obviously he also deeply felt his statement. Bates and Albarino had worked on a number of cases together and had seen too many white, tumbling maggots, corpses rotting into stained green color, and very unpleasant bloated cadavers. In that sense, the Westland Pianist's work, despite being bloody and fleshy, the smell was at least bearable.

The corpse in front of them showed no signs of decay other than the abdomen, which had begun to swell slightly. They had removed the body from the stake right at the crime scene with the help of the CSI, and the wood had all been taken back to the evidence lab by the CSI for testing. Yet the killer must have handled the victim's hands in some other way, since they were still open in a cross shape, like strange specimens or distinctly shaped crosses that had been nailed (onto something).

The victim's clothes were covered with lumps of blood, soaking the ugly scarecrow disguise into a deep black, and it didn't seem wise to break the stiffness of the victim's hands without knowing what the killer had used to secure them. Frowning, Albarino could only strip the clothing fabric from the body of the dead with a scalpel little by little. He cut some parts of the fabric before stripping all the clothes from the human body, so that Bates could put those pieces of cloth into the evidence bag.

This was simply a virtue of Bates: never give up hope. Albarino was pretty sure all of his colleagues were actually not holding out hope that any evidence could be examined from those clothes.

"It was about 3:30 a.m. when we entered the crime scene, and Bart said he opened that letter at around 2:00. And now – it's almost four o'clock." Albarino said while glancing at the wall clock in the autopsy room, then he showed the livor mortis spots to others there.

The man had lost too much blood before he died, and the spots were light in color and not easy to spot. They were mostly on his feet because of the position he had been impaled on the stake. They had already changed the posture of the body for a long time, but still no new spots appeared, which indicated that they had been formed for a long time. Albarino pressed the corpse's feet with latex gloved fingers. The spots were still slightly faded, which was an obvious sign that they had not yet entered the spreading stage – with these, you could roughly infer the time of death.

In fact, the body's body surface examination had already been done at the crime scene. These simple tasks were generally given to forensic field investigators without a forensic license to complete, and forensic pathologists mostly would not survey the scene personally; but the Westland Pianist's case was extremely important, so the chief forensic pathologist of the Forensic Bureau was directly invited to the scene.

Albarino had already seen the post-mortem body when he was at the scene, and now he planned to make some more autopsy sketches. Because of the special nature of this case, there would be additional autopsy photos – these sketches, photos and autopsy reports were piled up into a huge hill in the information room of the Forensic Bureau, all placed on the shelf labeled "Westland Pianist". The person in charge of this case from the police department had the hope that one day they would be able to show these evidence in court, but the longer it took to catch him, the more remote the chances felt.

Bates stood beside Albarino, like a calm statue. His presence was necessary, because if they needed to test DNA samples other than the deceased, they had to send them to the CSI forensic lab.

As for Olga, she was standing in the corner of the autopsy room, just to the right of the recording equipment in the corner. She was holding her own notebook in her other hand: she was quite familiar with Albarino, as she was often present during autospies, and more or less knew the whole process well.

Now, as her fingers roamed the top of the page, she looked up and asked, "What's the core temperature?"

Albarino had taken the body's liver temperature with a probe at the scene and quickly recalled the number: "24.1°C. It's only around a dozen degrees after nightfall this time of year, right?"

"So, the corpse has been dead for at least ten hours?" Olga asked.

It seemed like that the young woman had indeed accumulated a lot of knowledge in the long years of running to the autopsy room, but this answer was not accurate enough.

"Combined with the state of livor mortis and rigor mortis, it is estimated to be about twelve hours. In that case, he probably killed around ten o'clock last night. But to be frank, it varies between different people, and it is not uncommon for the actual time and the deduced one to differ by a few hours. If Bart's side can not find evidence such as surveillance videos, the autopsy results of the time of death can only be a rough reference." Albarino shrugged and circled back to the vicinity of the body's head. "Well, let's look at his wounds."

The manual labor part of a typical autopsy – sawing through the hard skull, breaking open the body's ribs with a chest opener, so on and so forth – was usually done by a forensic assistant under the direction of the forensic pathologist, who was primarily responsible for sketching the autopsy and dictating the autopsy notes. But Albarino was very cautious for the Pianist's cases. On the other hand, he was also very interested in each other's "work", so in this case he preferred to do it himself.

Officer Hardy had thundered off to organize the investigation, so the results of the autopsy could only be shown to him when it was complete. But Albarino suspected that he did not care much about the autopsy results: autopsies can only determine how the victim was killed most of the time. Hardy probably did not care how the Pianist killed; he just wanted to catch the Pianist with it.

Everyone's faces looked unusually pale under the astral lighting of the autopsy room as the other two watched the chief forensic pathologist methodically examine the body starting from the head.

He dissected with care and patience. As he dipped his head slightly, his brown curls piled softly on his forehead, a tiny edge of it peeking out from under the sterile fabric of his head cap, looking just like the way the young women in the police department would be fond of. Others wondered if he was self-conscious about it or not, or if he was just putting on a flirty and pleasant attitude since he was well aware of it.

He used a scalpel to skilfully shave off the victim's hair and examine his skull for heavy blows; he picked at the stitches on the victim's mouth and eyelids to make sure the Pianist hadn't stuffed anything in his eyes or mouth – something he had done before, which left a huge mental impact on the fragile forensic pathologist in charge at the time, and since then the autopsy for the Pianist's cases was responsible by the chief forensic pathologist – and then cut open the neck of the deceased to examine the strangulation marks on his neck.

The deceased had a bit of conjunctival hemorrhage, and his lips and fingernails showed a pale blue-purple color; all obvious signs of mechanical asphyxiation. As Albarino expected, although the deceased was extremely weak at the time due to blood loss, strictly speaking this victim was indeed strangled to death.

"Strangulation is an action with symbolic meaning for the Pianist," Olga drawled, her voice sounding slurred under the mask. "Some of my colleagues ... ah, former colleagues, feel that this killing technique is a clear manifestation of his paraphilia. But I think it comes from his childhood experiences."

For some reason, she always had a slight mocking tone in her voice when she talked about her experience working at the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Division. Of course, a lot of people couldn't handle the mental stress of working in the BAU, which was a dumping ground for the dirty trash-like minds of all the worst murderers. Many people had left for that reason, but the person who was now excitedly watching the autopsy most likely did not leave the BAU for that reason.

"The murderer threaded wire into the arms of the victim, in through the wrists of him and out through the shoulders. This is what the Pianist used to fix the shape of the arms of the deceased ... quite a meticulous job." Albarino suddenly said. He was looking down, separating the muscles from the body's arms with a scalpel. Dead people no longer could bleed anything, so when cutting into this corpse, it only felt like you were cutting a piece of meat. "Look at these subcutaneous bleeding and swelling. This step was also done when the deceased was alive, and it may even have been done in the first step."

"Ha, impaling." Olga said with great interest, "An action with quite the sexual connotation, isn't it?"

Albarino also let out a short laugh along with her. Bates looked at them both, not understanding at all what they could laugh at a dead body for.

There was another long line of stitches on the dead body, from his chest to his abdomen, the crossed stitches rough and obvious. The stitches had been deformed by the rotten gas in the corpse's intestines, and Albarino did not even want to imagine what the hell his abdominal cavity looked like now.

He frowned and used the tip of his knife to sharply pick apart the threads and open the abdominal cavity along the cut left by the killer. There was a muffled bang as the rough threads disintegrated and a putrid smell gushed out.

"Uh-oh!" Olga yelped, taking an exaggerated step back, so dramatic that one wondered whether she really found the smell unbearable or simply loved to act.

Albarino frowned slightly as well, but not because of the smell. He saw a bit of a strange glint inside the huge wound in the man's body – so he unhesitantly stuck his hand in.

He found that the dead man's ribs had already been broken once unsurprisingly; if they weren't broken then it was difficult to reach for the organs under the protection of the ribs. The killer's work obviously spared him from using the rib spreader.

Even with latex gloves on, a person burying his hand all into a dead body's wound was quite the scene. Bates, who had seen far too many very decayed bodies at the crime scene, looked at him with an unchanging face and asked with concern, "Did you find anything?"

"Yes," Albarino squinted his eyes as if he had won the lottery, looking surprisingly smug. If he was not sticking his hand into the chest of the dead body, then his smile might have seemed quite nice, "Poor Big Norman's heart is missing. The Pianist put something else in the place of his heart. "

Bates frowned, "Big Norman?"

"The head of the mob consisted of two brothers, right? Or are you really going to remember both of their full names? Big Norman, Little Norman – I see that would be very convenient." Albarino pointed out, beaming. Judging by the extent Bates frowned, he probably didn't approve of this careless way of naming.

And by this time Albarino had pulled that thing out, wrapping and sliding his latex-gloved fingers across the smooth surface: slippery, sticky, soaked between a pile of accumulated blood and the fluid in the pneumothorax, the object the Westland Pianist had used in place of the man's heart – an apple.

That apple was also the size of a fist, about the same size as a human heart. Albarino held the fruit in his hand, which had not yet begun to rot, and thought about the place where the body was found was an apple orchard. Strangely, he felt taken aback[1]... This must also be the Pianist's design, he thought; the Pianist would like this sort of thing, It was like foreshadowing: not too subtle, yet fascinating.

[1]哭笑不得, idiom, lit. not knowing whether to laugh or cry, meaning didn't know how to react, bewildered

Liquid dripped from the surface of the fruit, soaking through his fingers as if it were a real heart.

Indeed, he had seen this scene before. Some of his works required the removal of the corpse's heart, as if squeezing paint out of a tube, as an inevitable part of the creative process... Albarino thought, when he was holding these hearts, someone might be watching him, just like how he could imagine the Westland Pianist holding this apple in his hand.

Bates asked, attempting to be helpful, "The victim was still alive when he opened his chest, wasn't he?"

"Apparently so, from the vital reaction at the wound, although I'm pretty sure he was dead thoroughly after the Pianist yanked his heart out with his bare hands." Albarino surveyed the layer of sticky, mottled blood on his hands, and placed the apple on the autopsy cart.

A layer of pale pink liquid quickly accumulated under the fruit.

Olga, obviously more interested in the apple used to replace the dead's heart than the level of violence used, stood two meters away and peered over, her eyes literally sparkling: "Fascinating."

Bates clearly couldn't agree with her; his brow furrowed even more. The poor guy could never understand why there were such crazy people in this world. His voice sharpened slightly, "... Yanked it out?"

"Yes, you can see this messy condition inside his chest cavity, surely it can't be cut out. He can be quite the violent person." Albarino lamented while smiling. He took a step back and looked at the other two, "These are the only wounds visible on the surface of the body, but it's not hard to deduce what happened to the deceased."

"Do tell." Olga looked very interested, as if watching a movie.

"Yes, at your service, lovely young lady." Albarino feigned a bow, just short of pressing his blood-soaked hand into his chest. "This is probably what happened. The killer approached Big Norman somewhere and attacked him – probably injected him with some kind of drug; you could see a needle had punctured in his right forearm. Later, I'll take a bit of his blood and send it to the forensic laboratory to do a toxicology test. "

Bates nodded, and Albarino continued.

"Then he took Big Norman to the apple orchard; that place left enough blood that the CSI analysts could easily simulate how the murder happened. Besides, there was a lot of dirt and leaves on his clothes and in the body's hair, so I guess he got those onto him there. That was the primary crime scene." Albarino, with the scalpel still in hand, pointed at the cold body on top of the autopsy car. "He should have first fixed the arms of Big Norman, so that his hands were forced to be in an open position, and then changed his clothes. Of course, this is just speculation, but using blood analysis, it should be possible to see which of these two acts came first."

Olga humed appreciatively and began to write in her own notebook.

Albarino continued to gesture in the air as he made a piercing motion with his hand: "Then the Pianist pierced the dead man on a stake – he had a lot of strength – and then opened his chest and abdomen with a sharp object. You see the strange curve of the knife mark extending the abdomen? It's because the victim was hung up; the bad angle caused the deviation of the killer's force. By this time, the deceased's blood was almost drained."

Albarino could imagine that scene. He himself did not like to inflict torture on the victim, because they were tools, like paper and paint. Tools just needed to be usable; there was no need to put in so much effort before the work had been formed... but he had seen too many murders. He could imagine that scene vividly, as if he had committed it with his own hands.

The warm touch of cutting open the victim's chest, the heart beating in close proximity. Was it tempting to reach out your hands and rip the victim's heart out at that point? In any case, the Pianist didn't do that.

"He opened the chest cavity, then strangled the deceased, and then removed the heart." Albarino muttered. It sounded a little off ... the sequence was odd.

"I understand that for the Pianist, strangulation must be the last step of the murder," apparently, Olga had also found the problem. "So why cut open the dead first, then strangle him? If there are any missteps, won't the victim die of blood loss first? He can indeed get pleasure by torturing the victim, but is the pleasure is important enough for there to be a chance to destroy his fixed killing process?"

"Unless," Albarino stared at emptiness in front of him, as if hoping to see the bloody face of the other killer. "He opened the victim's chest and belly early in order to... oh!"

The other two people didn't understand what he was exclaiming about. Albarino quickly rushed back to the autopsy cart and once again buried his hand in the dead man's abdomen. They could all hear the sound of sticky, dark red blood squishing against his fingers, which sent chills down one's spine.

"He put something else in there, definitely while the victim was still alive." Albarino said quickly, "it should have fallen between the victim's organs. I just didn't think about this perspective; certainly I hadn't touched it..."

The other two looked at him with wide eyes, Albarino's hand groped around in the abdomen of the victim for a while, like a hungry man trying to grope for hidden treasures. A moment later he pulled out a handful of something: "These – just in the abdominal cavity — fell to the back of the stomach. I didn't notice it just now."

The other two people came closer, and Albarino's bloodied hands held some darkened granular objects that were completely soaked in blood. His hands could feel their slippery, hard touch through his gloves. He knew what this was, so much so that he already knew why the Westland Pianist had designed the crime scene this way.

It was fascinating, he agreed with Olga in his mind, that this madman had hidden such twisted, layered metaphors in his scene. Unfortunately perhaps the police would never be able to perceive what the Pianist was trying to portray, which was definitely a shame.

(Though there was a small corner of his mind gloating[2] ; after all, the bastard had robbed him of his chosen victim.)

[2] 幸灾乐祸, lit. taking joy in calamity and happiness in disaster, idiom, meaning rejoicing in the misfortune of others.

– but in any case, he finally took some interest in the other serial killer.

"What's this?" Bates asked, looking eager to get this thing back to the lab for testing no matter what. It wasn't easy to find eagerness on the steady guy's face.

Albarino stared at his bloody hand, which held a handful of grain, with a bit of warmth still left from the abdominal cavity of the dead body. About twelve hours earlier, the Pianist had shoved the same thing into the stomach of Big Norman. The most important aspect of the entire piece, declaring the entire theme.

"Wheat." He replied in a low voice.