The Janus Project

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Thursday 01 January 2032

Elijah stood beside the virtopsy table as he had done hundreds of times before, awaiting the arrival of his next client. He felt sad that Eloise’s death had Suffered so. Of course, all deaths were to be lamented but at least most that came under his jurisdiction were there as a result of instantaneous or almost immediate demise.

In the past, the strokes of his scalpel and the removal and careful examination of organs would recount the story of how the victim met his or her end but the invasive nature of autopsies had given way to technology and virtopsies were now the norm. The tale that the dead body would tell would be the same – it was just the way it was told that had changed.

The double doors slid open and Eloise made her silent entrance. Elijah’s intern, Rory, guided the gurney into position alongside the virtopsy table and unzipped the body-bag.

Eloise was the third such victim that had graced Elijah’s table in as many weeks. The first, a teacher named Suzanne Washington, had been found in the playground of a local school, by a group of children playing tag. The second was eighteen-year-old Fiona Carpenter who was found in the parking lot of a shopping mall about five miles from the spot where Suzanne’s body had been found. And now Eloise was Elijah’s guest, having been abandoned under a large oak tree by the river – a popular locality for romantic walks – and found by a couple giving their dog one last walk before locking it safely inside the house, away from the fireworks and loud bangs.

Before the virtopsy began, Rory took photos of Eloise’s body whilst she was still in the body bag. Usually, Elijah would have noted the state and position of a victim’s clothing whilst the intern took the photos but, in Eloise’s case, this step was pointless as she had been stripped n***d by whoever killed her.

The young woman’s hands had been sealed in bags at the crime-scene so Elijah unfastened the bags in order to take residue and fingernail samples, although he wasn’t very hopeful of finding anything. Once he’d taken the samples he needed, he removed the bags completely, folded them, and put them to one side to be submitted as evidence.

A sterile automated forklift moved forward from its resting place on the other side of the Virtopsy Suite, slid its prongs delicately under Eloise’s body and transferred her to the virtopsy table. Built-in measuring equipment recorded the victim’s height and weight before the lift returned to its parking bay.

Elijah began his examination with a verbal summary of Eloise’s identification.

“For the record – date: Thursday, January 01, 2032: time: 09:47. Examiner in attendance: Elijah Boniface, assisted by intern Rory Truman.”

Elijah didn’t mind working New Year’s Day when most other people were at home with their families enjoying the holiday and shaking off their hangovers after the previous evening’s celebrations. In fact, he preferred it to being at home on his own. He had no family to speak of – he had no parents, he was widowed with no children (at least until a couple of years earlier when he discovered that he did, in fact, have a daughter that he hadn’t even known existed), and only had an estranged sister who lived in the north of the country. His friends were all gathered together with their families and he had no desire to be the spare wheel at their family reunions. If he was invited for a Christmas celebration he would graciously accept, but invitations to celebrate New Year fell on deaf ears.

“Commencing post-mortem examination of Eloise Hudson, Caucasian female, shoulder-length light brown hair, blue eyes, twenty-five years of age. I can see two distinguishing marks – a small tattoo of a hummingbird just above the right hip and a birthmark...”

He took a small medical calliper out of his pocket – sometimes old technology was just more convenient.

“A birthmark 2.4cm by 0.9cm on the upper inner left thigh.”

The first task was to collect evidence from the external surfaces of Eloise’s body. He searched for hair samples, fingernails, gunshot residue, fibres, paint chips, and anything else that shouldn’t be there but found nothing out of the ordinary. He wasn’t surprised. The few blades of grass from where she had been lying on the riverbank and a couple of dead ants were sealed in evidence bags just in case they might yet provide a useful clue.

Once the preliminary human evaluation was completed, it was time for the virtopsy to begin. Virtual autopsy tools – Magnetic Resonance Imagers, Computed Tomography generators, and 3D Scanning equipment had replaced the invasive and antiquated tools of yesteryear – saws, knives, scissors, rib-cutters, skull chisels, and forceps were no longer necessary. Not many years earlier, even the new equipment would have been separate entities but Elijah’s department had taken delivery of a much more manageable integrated MRI, CT, and 3D scanner unit the previous summer which meant that all he was required to do now was set the machine in motion. The analysis of the visual results was where Elijah’s true expertise lay.

A virtibot placed small disks along the exterior of Eloise’s body, in order to align the surface and interior scans. Elijah particularly enjoyed the next part of the process as the 3D scanner robot moved over the body, capturing a 3D colour image and casting a mesh pattern on the figure. He found this part of the process strangely alluring and he never failed to be amazed by its inherent beauty.

The CT scanner acquired 25,000 images, each representing a slice through Eloise’s body. Then followed the MRI and MRS scans. Within a few minutes, high-resolution images of bone and tissue were reconstructed and projected holographically in the centre of the room so that Elijah could walk around the image and study the virtual rendering in detail. With a couple of voice commands, he was able to hone in on anything of interest while Eloise’s body rested undisturbed on the virtopsy table. He had excellent hand-eye coordination and manipulated the images up and down as if he’d performed autopsies in this manner all his life, not just for the last few months. He was a quick learner.

He studied the hologram closely, looking for the slightest hint of something that the murderer may have inadvertently left behind. Whoever the killer was, he was either very clever or very lucky as the virtopsies of both Suzanne and Fiona had yielded nothing of any use. Elijah feared that the same was going to be true in Eloise’s case.

Wait.

He thought he saw something.

It was just a hint, a very slight shadow, but he was certain he wasn’t seeing things.

“Rory. Take a look at the image – specifically the right lung. Tell me what you see.”

Rory dutifully took a closer look. He wanted to say he saw something, to support his teacher and mentor, but he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“What am I supposed to be seeing, sir?”

Elijah shook his head.

“If I were to tell you that, lad, it would defeat the purpose of the exercise. Just look closely at the lung and tell me what you see.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t see anything unusual.”

Elijah grinned.

“Don’t worry, Rory. It’s taken many years for my eyes to gain the ability to spot things that others fail to see. With time, your eyes will become as honed as mine are.”

He gave the virtopsy unit new instructions.

“Target coordinates X-axis 028 to 033, Y-axis 042 to 057, Z-axis 016 to 019.”

The relevant section of the hologram displayed an enlarged image. Elijah turned to Rory.

“Do you see it yet?”

Rory shook his head.

“Sorry.”

Elijah gave new commands.

“Computer. Enhance image by a factor of ten.”

The image zoomed in. Rory still couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, so Elijah issued more explicit commands.

“Computer. Target coordinates X-axis 029.124, Y-axis 051.378, Z-axis 017.691 and enhance the image by a factor of ten.”

The system obediently zoomed in again on the required coordinates.

“And now?”

Rory peered hard at the image.

“I think I can see a short thin line in the secondary lobar bronchus but I have no idea what it is.”

This was Elijah’s moment of triumph, not just for him but for the case too.

“That, Rory, is a portion of a human eyelash.”

“An eyelash?”

“Yes. An eyelash. And it’s the first piece of evidence that will help us identify the killer. The murderer has unwittingly given us our first real clue.”

He waited for Rory to say something. He wasn’t hoping for congratulations or kudos for having good eyesight but for a correct investigative response to what he had just said. Rory obliged.

“Unless the lash belongs to Eloise.”

Elijah was satisfied. He had high hopes for the intern.

“Well done. Yes. Eloise could have ingested it at any time and it could just as easily belong to her as to her killer. Or even somebody else entirely. Whoever did this to her took great pains not to leave any evidence behind, but we lose between one and five eyelashes each day. If it’s the killer’s, he or she wouldn’t even know it had gone. ”

He paused and issued new commands to the computer.

“Extract the foreign body from coordinates X-axis 029.124, Y-axis 051.378, Z-axis 017.691.”

A micro-fine suction hose snaked from its housing on the autopsy table and burrowed beneath Eloise’s skin. A descendant of the keyhole surgery process that had become common in the late twentieth century, it left barely a trace of its intrusion – not enough for the n***d eye to perceive anyway. A couple of seconds later it withdrew from the body with the offending eyelash and deposited the evidence into a sterile container ready for DNA analysis. Elijah picked up the container to take to the DNA Suite. He turned to Rory.

“Finish off here for me, please.”

He knew that his intern was perfectly capable of running the relevant exit programs, returning the MRI/CT/3D equipment to its parking station, and placing Eloise back inside her allotted storage drawer. Rory was a good student but would never learn anything unless allowed to physically participate in virtopsies and, normally, Elijah would have let the intern participate more fully than he had in Eloise’s virtopsy. However, this case was a priority alpha. Eloise was the victim of a serial killer. He spoke to himself rather than anybody else.

“Let’s hope this lash isn’t Eloise’s. Otherwise, we’re back to square one.”