The first order of business was to look at the X rays, and Jack snapped them up on the viewer. With his hands on his hips, Jack took a step back and gazed at the anterioposter-ior full-body shot. With no head and no hands, the image was decidedly abnormal, like the X ray of some primitive, nonhuman creature. The other abnormality was a bright, dense blob of shotgun pellets in the area of the right upper quadrant. Jack’s immediate impression was that there had been multiple shotgun blasts, not just one. There were too many beebee-like pellets.

The pellets were opaque to the X rays and obscured any detail they covered. On the light box they appeared white.

Jack was about to switch his attention to the lateral X ray when something about the opacity caught his attention. At two locations the periphery appeared strange, more lumpy than the usual beebee contour.

Jack looked at the lateral film and saw the same phenomena. His first impression was that the shotgun blasts might have carried some radio-opaque material into the wound. Perhaps it had been some part of the victim’s clothing.

“Whenever you’re ready, Maestro,” Vinnie called out. He had everything prepared.

Jack turned from the X-ray view box and approached the autopsy table. The floater was ghastly pale in the raw fluorescent light. Whoever the victim had been, he’d been relatively obese and had not made any recent trips to the Caribbean.

“To use one of your favorite quotes,” Vinnie said. “It doesn’t look like he’s going to make it to the prom.”

Jack smiled at Vinnie’s black humor. It was much more in keeping with his personality, suggesting that he had recovered from his early-morning pique.

The body was in sad shape although bobbing around in the water had washed it clean. The good news was that it had obviously been in the water for only a short time. The trauma went far beyond the multiple shotgun blasts to the upper abdomen. Not only were the head and the hands hacked off, but there was a series of wide, deep gashes in the torso and thighs that exposed swaths of greasy adipose tissue. The edges of all the wounds were ragged.

“Looks like the fish have been having a banquet,” Jack said.

“Oh, gross!” Vinnie commented.

The shotgun blasts had bared and damaged many of the internal abdominal organs. Some strands of intestines were visible as was one dangling kidney.

Jack picked up one of the arms and looked at the exposed bones. “A hacksaw would be my guess,” he said.

“What are all these huge cuts?” Vinnie asked. “Somebody try to slice him up like a holiday turkey?”

“Nah, I’d guess he’d been run over with a boat,” Jack said. “They look like propeller injuries.”

Jack then began a careful examination of the exterior of the corpse. With so much obvious trauma, he knew it was easy to miss more subtle findings. He worked slowly, frequently stopping to photograph lesions. His meticulousness paid off. At the ragged base of the neck just anterior to the collarbone he found a small circular lesion. He found another similar one on the left side below the rib cage.