At ten fifteen the next morning, I walked through the front doors of the office of the Chief Medical Examiner on East 26th and First Avenue.
With its low ceiling and rows of stark blue metal tables, the autopsy room at the back of the first floor always reminded me of a pool hall—the least-fun game hall of all time.
The tables were thankfully empty this morning. Doing my best not to peek into the lab’s scales and buckets and glass-doored fridges, I crossed the white-tiled room to the office of Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Clarissa Linder.
Dr. Linder was a genial, nice-looking woman with short dark-blond hair. I’d worked cases with her before. Before becoming an ME, she had a lucrative pediatrician practice on the Upper East Side. But when she’d turned forty, inspired to do something more challenging, she had traded in Band-Aids and lollipops for psycho killers and floaters.
Her door was open and she was standing behind her desk, thumbing at the Fitbit on her wrist.
“You have one of these stupid fitness things, Mike?” she said. “They’re addictive. If you have nine hundred steps, you find yourself walking in circles around the room just to get to a thousand.”
“No, I don’t,” I said, and sat in the chair in front of her desk. “But I’m certainly no stranger to walking around in circles. Speaking of which, what’s going on with Mr. Mitchell? Or I suppose Mr. Doe is probably more appropriate. Unless we’ve heard from latent prints?”
She raised an eyebrow as she handed me her file.
“No such luck on the prints, Mike. As usual, the wheels of death processing grind slowly.”
“So what’s your take on Mr. Doe?”
“Where do I begin?” she said. “Did you see the amazing shape of this guy?”
“He did seem pretty trim. Worked out some, did he?”
“He looks like an Olympian. Jacked, as the kids say, with a body fat percentage in the single digits.”
I shook my head. This case just kept getting weirder.
“Anything else? Cause of death was the fall, right?”
“Yep. Massive bruising and impact contusions on the skin and muscle, especially to the head and upper chest. The bones in his face were completely pulverized.”
“Anything in his bloodstream that would have made a healthy person like him suddenly want to throw himself off a roof? Like flakka or something? Crystal meth? We have some indication that he might have thrown up prior to the fall.”
“No, nothing,” she said, surprised. “A little alcohol in his blood was all. You think he threw up? I don’t know about that. He had food in his stomach.”
“Is that so?”
“Yep,” Dr. Linder said. “Food and this.”
She lifted a plastic evidence bag on her desk beside the autopsy report. There were two items inside of it. One of them was yellowish and thin and looked like a deflated balloon. The other item looked like a thin slip of paper.
“What the hell is this?” I said. “How was this in the guy’s stomach? A piece of paper in a condom?”
“With numbers written on it,” the doctor said. “They seem random. I counted them twice. There are twenty-four of them altogether.”
“That’s just—”
“Yep,” Dr. Linder said.
“Like the way people sometimes smuggle drugs,” I mumbled, turning the bag over in my hand.
“The same exact way,” Dr. Linder said. “Have you ever seen something like this, Mike? Because this is a first for me.”