Juan said nothing as Julia peeled back the sheet. Death never looked more ignoble, especially with the large sutured Y-incision Julia had cut to examine inside the chest and abdomen. The pirate was young, twenty at most, and skinny to the point of starvation. His hair was lank black, and his fingers and the bottoms of his feet were thickly callused. The pair of sneakers he’d worn when boarding the Oregon were probably stolen during a previous raid and were the first he’d ever owned. There was a single neat bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, an obscene third eye that was puckered around the edges.

Cabrillo couldn’t discount the brutality of what the pirates had done, but he also couldn’t help feeling a little pity as well. He had no idea what circumstances drove the boy to crime, but he felt the kid should have been with his family, not laid out on a slab like a dissected specimen.

“So what have you learned?” he asked after Julia drew the sheet back over the corpse’s head.

“This guy’s dead.”

“Well, since you performed an autopsy, I assumed he would be.”

“What I mean is if he hadn’t taken a shot to the skull, he would have died anyway, probably within the next few months.” She waved him over to a computer workstation. On the screen were spectrograph lines of a sample Julia had run. He had no idea what he was looking for. His puzzled expression prompted an explanation.

“Hair sample run through optical emission spectrometer.” The Corporation had bought the million-dollar piece of equipment not only for Julia’s medical bay but also for analyzing trace evidence. It had been key a year earlier tracking a missing shipment of RDX explosives. “During my exam,” Julia explained, “I noticed some pretty significant symptomatology. For one, he was about to suffer complete renal failure. Also, he’s anemic as hell; his gums are severely inflamed with late-stage gingivitis. I noted lesions all along his digestive tract and bloody crusts in both nostrils. It made me think of something, and the hair sample proved it.”

“What’s that?”

“This guy had had long-term exposure to toxic levels of mercury.”

“Mercury?”

“Yep. Without treatment, the mercury, like other heavy metals, builds up in tissue and hair. It eventually shuts the body down, but not before causing madness as it deteriorates the brain. I bet if you recheck the video of the pirate attack, you’ll see these guys fought with little regard for their own lives. The level of mercury contamination would have impaired this one’s judgment to the point where he’d fight on, no matter what.”

“Some of them tried to escape,” Juan pointed out.

“Not all of them had such elevated or prolonged exposure.”

“What about the Chinese?”

“I only checked one for toxicity, and she came up clean.”

“But this guy’s riddled with mercury?”