"Someone's trying to cover this up," Judy said to Nick as they walked out of the Precinct One station.
Nick nodded. "Somehow I doubt Scursly decided it was a nice day to take a dip in the river."
Judy couldn't imagine that there very many of those days to begin with, and she tried to fit the new piece of information in with what they already knew. "Let's say Scursly killed Carajou and Zoya was framed for it," she began slowly.
"You can say that because it's probably true," Nick interjected lightly, but there was a slight frown on his face that Judy took as a sign that he was seriously considering what she was saying.
"Then whoever killed Scursly and this Bauson—you don't know who Bauson is, do you?" Judy said, interrupting her own train of thought.
Nick hadn't reacted at all to Bogo saying the name, but she couldn't be sure whether that meant that the name meant nothing to him or that he hadn't wanted to give anything away considering the buffalo's suspicious mood. Nick shook his head briefly. "Never heard of the fella," he said with a slight shrug.
"Then whoever killed Scursly and Bauson was, what? What were they trying to do? Keep them silent?" Judy asked, returning to her original point.
Nick considered it for a long moment as he climbed into the Buchatti. "Maybe," he said at last, "Scursly had a big mouth even when I knew him as a small timer. Not exactly a quality you want in a hit mammal, you know. But some mammals change. Others don't."
Judy looked up at Nick as she took her own position behind the wheel of the car. He was looking ahead over the long and brilliantly blue hood of the Buchatti, and there seemed to be something melancholy in his expression. She thought back on how Bogo had treated him, the distrust over barely concealed contempt that Nick had borne without complaint. The buffalo, at least, seemed to believe that all Nick was or would ever be was a gangster and all of his efforts to help Judy were at best something self-serving and at worst some kind of elaborate ruse. Judy paused, the key to the Buchatti in her paw, and rather than using it she put her paw on Nick's. His ears perked suddenly upwards at the touch, and he slowly turned his head, looking down at her. "I'm sorry about Bogo," she said quietly, "He just doesn't know how you've changed."
A half-smile quirked one side of Nick's muzzle, and he removed his paw from underneath Judy's and gestured broadly at himself, from the tips of his upright ears to the bottoms of his feet. "Ah, Carrots," he said, and his smile widened, "You say that as though I haven't always been this perfect."
Judy laughed, and Nick continued. "Now are we going to sit here running our gums, or do you want to go back to Dr. Tolmie?"
Judy started the car, willing to let Nick play it all off as something of a joke. She couldn't help but notice, though, that on the entire drive from the police station back to the medical examiner's office, the somewhat downcast expression he had been wearing as he looked forward out of the car never returned.
Mrs. Monax, the woodchuck who had been behind the reception desk the last time they had visited, was there again. She was dressed just as primly as before, her white dress spotlessly clean, and her mood didn't seem any better. Judy had barely walked into the lobby, Nick a step behind her, before Monax slid the glass partition that separated the reception desk from the main part of the lobby and barked, "Dr. Tolmie's waiting for you. Autopsy Room #2, down the stairs and to the right."
Before Judy even had the chance to thank the woodchuck, she had slid the partition shut again and turned her focus to a massive stack of paperwork that she was filling out. There was a deep crease in Monax's forehead as she frowned down at her paperwork, muttering something so quietly about ZPD's Precinct Three that even Judy's ears could barely catch it from behind the glass. It didn't sound like Monax was complaining about her or Nick, at least, and when Judy called her thanks as they walked past the desk the woodchuck didn't even look up.
The basement of the medical examiner's building was just as it had been before, cold and brightly lit with floors of gleaming linoleum and walls of equally shiny white tile. The door to Tolmie's office was closed and the light was off as they passed it on their way to Autopsy Room #2. The door was propped open, and while they were still a far distance away from the room, Nick suddenly made a grimace of distaste that Judy didn't understand until they were inside the autopsy room. She suddenly understood why the door was open and a powerful fan was running; the room was easily one of the worst things that she had ever smelled.
Judy had thought that it had been bad in her apartment when the winds would shift and blow the smell of the slaughterhouses where countless chickens were butchered every day in her direction, but that stench would have been preferable to what filled the autopsy room. It was the awful smell of raw and somehow rancid sewage mixed with that terrible slaughterhouse smell, and the sharp chemical scent of what must have been a powerful disinfectant somehow only made it worse.
The interior of Autopsy Room #2 didn't look too different from the room that they had viewed Carajou's body in, although Judy thought that the autopsy table and the metal drawers set into one of the walls were larger than the other room. Dr. Tolmie was standing at a counter and writing in a notebook, apparently oblivious to the smell, while a young and unfortunate-looking pig who must have been an assistant was scrubbing down the autopsy table, which was splattered with brilliantly red droplets of blood.
The pig saw them walking in and looked over to Dr. Tolmie. "The prohi and her fox are here, sir," he said.
His voice had a peculiar breathy quality that made Judy think he was trying to only breathe through his mouth. Nick shot Judy a somewhat amused look, wordlessly mouthing, "Her fox," as they waited for Tolmie to respond.
Judy shot him a wordless gesture of apology in return that the pig didn't seem to notice, having already returned to his cleaning with his mouth set in a grim line. A second later, Tolmie jerked his head up from his notebook, his thick glasses sliding down his nose and almost off his face before he caught them with the paw holding his pen. He ended up leaving a black ink mark on the side of his head, just under his ear, that he didn't seem to notice as he fussily adjusted his glasses and peered back at the pig. "Hmm? What was—" he began, and then he caught sight of Judy and Nick.
"Ah!" he cried happily, dropping his pen as he clapped his paws together, "Agent Hopps! How very good to see you again, yes, very good. And you as well, Mr. Wilde."
He snapped his notebook shut and tucked it under his arm as he waddled over to where they were standing in the doorway. "Come in, come in," he said, apparently missing their reluctance to enter the room.
"Jimmy, I can finish up here," Tolmie said to the pig, "Why don't you see to those death certificates Agatha was nagging us about, hmm? Captain DuPoitou is not a patient donkey, I'm afraid."
Jimmy apparently didn't need to be told twice. He dropped his rag and made a beeline for the door, not even bothering to remove his stained white lab coat. "I'll have them done in a jiffy," he said over his shoulder.
He was almost a quarter of the way down the hall before Tolmie called after him, "And do give her my apologies for the delay."
Judy saw Jimmy's retreating figure nod, and then turned her attention back to the little wombat standing before her. Dr. Tolmie was wearing a wrinkled lab coat with fewer questionable stains than the one that the pig had been wearing. Underneath it he wore a sweater only a little different from the one he had been wearing the last time Judy saw him, although he was wearing a somewhat nicer pair of slacks. "I do apologize," Tolmie told Judy, "We've been ever so busy lately. I don't know how the city expects me to manage, I really don't."
Judy could feel her expression fall, wondering if he didn't have anything to tell them, but the wombat hastily added, "But the matter you're here on is very interesting, very interesting indeed. Come, come, look at this."
Dr. Tolmie was positively bouncing with energy, and he beckoned for Judy and Nick to follow him to one of the metal drawers, which he pulled open with a grunt of effort. The smell in the room somehow got even worse, and Nick turned away. Tolmie slid the drawer only about a foot out, but when he pulled back the sheet draped over the corpse it was far enough. Seeing the head was all Judy needed to see that the corpse was a gazelle, but he didn't match Nick's description of a gazelle with unusually short horns or Isabel's description of one with long silver horn sheaths. The gazelle on the cold metal slab didn't have horns, just two small nubs not even an inch long where they had clearly been sawed off. "Remarkable, isn't it?" Dr. Tolmie said, beaming, "I thought of that theory of yours as soon as I saw this body. What if Carajou was gored with horns indeed!"
Judy looked away from the waterlogged corpse and at the doctor. "Was Scursly the one who stabbed Carajou?" she asked, and she couldn't help the note of excitement that crept into her voice.
Dr. Tolmie's enthusiasm momentarily dipped. "Ah, maybe," he said, "There's not enough of the horns left for me to be certain. But I measured the distance between them. It's possible. Likely, even, I would say. I would need his horns to be sure, though."
At Tolmie's words, Nick had glanced over at the corpse and then quickly looked away. "That's Scursly alright," he said.
Judy looked up at Nick. She had gotten the idea, when they had last visited the medical examiner, that he was somewhat squeamish around dead bodies, and the addition of the awful smell the body was producing could have only made it worse for him. "Could we see the other body?" Judy asked, "And then finish talking about this in your office?"
Dr. Tolmie's eyes, enormous behind his glasses, blinked at her. "It's the smell, isn't it? My, it must be rather awful, but I've gotten quite used to it. It's actually quite interesting, you see. The river—"
Nick cut him off with a polite little cough, and Tolmie hastily finished. "Certainly, certainly, if that's what you'd like."
He quickly covered Scursly's head and closed the drawer, and then opened the one next to it. It smelled just as bad as Scursly's body, but the badger looked surprisingly peaceful. In fact, he practically looked as though he was just sleeping. He was probably about the same age as Scursly, although even from just seeing his head and shoulders it was obvious he had a much thicker, bulkier build. "Do you recognize him?" Judy asked, nudging Nick.
Nick looked at the body for a moment, his tail sweeping from side to side. "No," he said at last.
Dr. Tolmie shrugged as he put the corpse back away. "To my office, then?"
A few moments later they were in Tolmie's office again, which if anything looked as though the paperwork had multiplied since they had last been there. "Could you tell when Scursly's horns were cut off?" Judy asked.
Dr. Tolmie didn't hesitate before answering. "After he died," he said, "It's quite obvious. There's no sign that the wounds bled while he was alive. Rather fortunate for the poor fellow, I'd say. Removing horns is a messy business, you know. That's not personal experience speaking, of course."
He brushed one paw against the mussed up fur atop his head, where he quite obviously had no horns, before he continued. "Quite painful, I hear. They were rather crudely removed, too, with a hacksaw, I think. The left horn was only cut about two-thirds of the way through before being snapped off."
As Dr. Tolmie paused in his recitation, Judy thought about what that implied. She didn't know exactly how strong horns were, but it seemed to her that to break one off even if it had been cut part of the way through would take a decent amount of strength. Then again, whoever had done the sawing might have stopped sawing and broken the horn off because they had been too tired to after cutting one horn completely off and the other most of the way off to continue, or they might have been in a hurry.
"So they were both already dead when the car went into the river?" Nick asked.
Judy thought she understood his train of thought. If Scursly's horns had been removed after his death, the logical conclusion was that they had been removed prior to the Camellac going into the river, and it wasn't much of a leap to assume that Bauson had been dead too. Dr. Tolmie rubbed his paws together. "An excellent question, Mr. Wilde! Very astute of you, yes. Neither one of them drowned. No water in the lungs makes that quite clear, I can assure you. And their blood!"
The wombat shook his head. "It couldn't possibly be more obvious. Wait here, I'll show you."
Tolmie bustled out of his office, and Nick looked over at Judy. "This whole thing stinks, and I don't just mean because they went into the river."
Judy nodded. The smell had needed no explanation; the car must have gone into the Zootopia River at one of its more polluted points, probably in either the industrial or meatpacking areas, and the foul smell had soaked into the bodies. Nick was also right that things didn't quite seem to add up. If the murders of Scursly and Bauson had been a cover up, it didn't seem like a particularly well-executed one. Then again, perhaps the point hadn't been to cover anything up but merely to kill them. Maybe Scursly's silver horns had just been taken as a grisly trophy. Tolmie had only said that it was likely that Scursly was the one who had stabbed Carajou, not that it was definite. Maybe it was a coincidence, but Judy thought there had to be some kind of connection beyond what they had learned about Carajou and Scursly spending time together shortly before Carajou's death.
"And how," Judy agreed, tapping her foot against the floor thoughtfully.
"We'll have to see what Tolmie has to say about the cause of death," she continued.
Nick nodded, and they lapsed back into silence until Tolmie returned with three small glass vials clutched awkwardly in his paws. Two of them were vividly red while the third was duller and blackish. From what Tolmie had said before leaving the room the vials were obviously blood, and when he spoke he confirmed it. "These two," he said, holding aloft the vials full of bright red blood, "Are the samples I took from Scursly and Bauson. You see the color? How beautifully red they are?"
Although Judy didn't think there was anything beautiful about blood (an opinion she suspected Nick strongly agreed with), she nodded, and elbowed Nick until he did the same. "This one," Tolmie said, holding the vial full of the darker blood out towards them, "Came from a goat who was smothered. You see how dark it is?"
Judy felt a horrible fascination at the little bit of evidence of murder, and Tolmie gave her a grim little smile. "Her husband will see the electric chair, I think. He tried to make it look like a gas leak, but the blood doesn't lie. Carbon monoxide is what killed Scursly and Bauson, but not this poor goat. The color the blood turns is unmistakable."
Judy thought through the sequence of events. Scursly and Bauson had been murdered, perhaps in the car that they were found in. Judy's parents had repeatedly drilled into her head, and the heads of all her siblings, the dangers of gas lamps and automobile exhaust in enclosed spaces; she knew carbon monoxide could kill quickly. Once Scursly was dead, his horns had been removed, and then his body and Bauson's had been pushed into the river in a stolen Camellac identical to one that Lionheart owned. "Could you tell when they died?" Judy asked.
Tolmie ran a paw through the fur atop his head before answering. "Not with any certainty, I'm afraid. The vehicle was pulled out of the river near at about one thirty in the morning. I'd say the time of death was within the twelve preceding hours, but I can't narrow it down more than that."
Judy frowned. That helped somewhat, but it was still a wide range. Scursly and Bauson might have been dead before she had even learned about Scursly. Before she could continue any further down that line of thought, Nick asked Tolmie a question. "Where's the Camellac now, anyway?"
The wombat seemed surprised at the question. "Certainly not here!" he said with a little chuckle, "Goodness, where would we put something like that? The police have an impound lot, I think."
Nick nodded and stroked his muzzle, but didn't say anything else. "Do you have their personal effects?" Judy asked, and Tolmie nodded.
"Certainly," he said, "But before I get them, is there anything else?"
Judy looked at Nick, who simply shrugged, and then back at the doctor. "Is there anything else you noticed? Anything at all unusual?"
Tolmie paused a moment, seeming to consider the question. "Yes and no," he said, "There were no signs of struggle, which isn't unusual in carbon monoxide poisoning. In this case, though, it seems—to me, at least—to quite obviously be murder, which makes it somewhat unusual indeed. It's possible, I think, that they were incapacitated somehow, but I haven't found anything in their blood yet."
He shrugged, and gave Judy a self-deprecating smile. "But I'm certainly not a cop."
"How long will it take you to finish testing?" Judy asked.
"Oh, I should be done around noon for the most common ones," Tolmie said, "I'll stop there, unless you have reason to believe something, ah, more exotic was used."
"That'd be wonderful," Judy said, "You've been a huge help."
Tolmie swelled at the praise, and Judy continued. "Could you have a courier send your results to me at the Bureau of Prohibition?"
When he frowned slightly, she quickly added, "It's just... um, it'd be... more convenient for me than having to go back to the police station."
"Midday traffic," Nick jumped in smoothly, "You know how it is."
Tolmie chuckled. "I do indeed. Certainly, I'll send everything to your office once I'm done. I imagine you'll want to take their personal effects with you?"
Judy nodded, and Nick asked, "Would you happen to have an airtight box?"
"I think I can arrange that," Tolmie said before waddling out of his office, "Just a moment."
Once the wombat's footsteps had receded down the hallway, Nick turned and looked at Judy. "You don't quite trust the police, do you?" he asked, his tone conversational.
She was glad that he had so quickly picked up on what she had been thinking and even jumped in to bolster her justification, and she nodded. "If Bogo can't trust his officers, why should I?" she asked, and Nick nodded approvingly.
"I really must be brushing off on you," he said, his comfortably sly smile on his face.
Judy gave him her own knowing smile. "Only your best qualities."
Author's Notes:
The title of this chapter, "Deep River," comes from a 1927 Paul Robeson song; considering how Nick and Judy ended up with a water-logged car and two corpses to investigate, it seemed appropriate.
The Zootopia River, which Scursly, Bauson, and the Camellac were fished out of, is based on the Chicago River. The real life Chicago River has the interesting distinction of having had its flow reversed; it originally flowed into Lake Michigan from the Mississippi River watershed, but in the year 1900 a massive civil works project reversed this. The reason for doing so was pretty straightforward: Lake Michigan served, and still serves, as the source of fresh water for Chicago and the surrounding areas. Sewage and industrial waste was dumped into the Chicago River, which was consequently so polluted that it didn't flow very fast and had the well-earned nickname of the "stinking river." This was a health concern on its own, but since that polluted water went into the city's drinking water supply, it became a health crisis—typhoid fever was a serious concern. Reversing the flow solved the problem of contaminating the drinking water and with Lake Michigan as a source the speed of the river also increased. However, since sewage and industrial waste was still dumped into the river, this just meant that the problem had been moved elsewhere. There's a part of the Chicago River that was called Bubbly Creek because all of the runoff from Chicago's slaughterhouses gathered and slowly decomposed there, causing large bubbles of gas to form and pop on the surface of the water. Although that's long since been cleaned up, pollution of rivers in the US by industrial runoff remained a serious concern even decades after the 1920s. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland was so polluted that between 1868 and 1969 it caught fire at least 13 times. The 1969 fire caused public outcry demanding better control of pollution and was one of the major pushes that led to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 by the executive order of President Richard Nixon.
Suffice it to say, I think, that anything pulled out of the river in the 1920s probably wouldn't smell very good.
One of the things I find particularly fascinating about the past is the development of science and medicine. In this chapter, I've tried to be true to the actual methods available in the 1920s for determining the cause of death, which I'll explain here.
To begin, I'll start with an explanation of carbon monoxide poisoning. It's important to note that carbon monoxide really does kill by poisoning; it's possible to die of it even if the oxygen concentration in the air is normal. Normal air is about 21% oxygen by volume, with about 78% by volume composed of nitrogen and the remaining volume composed of argon, carbon dioxide, and a few other trace gases. Carbon monoxide can kill at concentrations as low as 0.16%, which generally takes a couple hours, and higher concentrations kill much more quickly. Anything above 1.28% is about as close as you can get to instantly fatal, with death occurring after a few breaths. The question, then, is why carbon monoxide is a poison; if there's still a normal volume of oxygen available in the air to breathe, why does carbon monoxide kill? The answer comes down to how our blood works.
Virtually all animals with blood (and even some without blood) use hemoglobin as the means by which oxygen is transported. Although there are some slight variations from species to species in the precise structure, the basics in all mammals are the same: hemoglobin is a large molecule made out of four globular proteins, each of which can carry one oxygen molecule. Hemoglobin can also transport up to four carbon dioxide molecule, but it doesn't carry them in the same place that it does oxygen, which will be important to explaining carbon monoxide poisoning.
You can think of hemoglobin as being a bit like a large conversion van that's being used for passengers. It's got four seats that only oxygen can use and four seats that only carbon dioxide can use. Imagining your circulatory system to be a city and your lungs an airport, you have trillions of these vans running around, picking up oxygen at the airport when it arrives and dropping it off where it's needed and picking up carbon dioxide and taking it back to the airport so it can leave. As your body's metabolism uses oxygen and generates carbon dioxide, this process works quite well for keeping things moving.
Where carbon monoxide comes in, to continue the metaphor, is that it steals oxygen's seats. When those vans arrive at the airport to pick oxygen up, carbon monoxide will push it out of the way and claim the seat. Worse, carbon monoxide doesn't want to get out of the seat, and will just keep riding around. Even if there isn't much carbon monoxide coming in, it'll still beat the oxygen to the hemoglobin, and eventually there won't be enough oxygen where it's needed to keep your body running. That's a somewhat simplified explanation of the mechanism, but hopefully it's enough to understand the basics. But how can you tell if someone died of carbon monoxide poisoning?
In the process of binding to hemoglobin, carbon monoxide also alters the shape of it, which results in it becoming a vivid red color. The change in color has been known long before we knew what carbon monoxide was; there are writings from thousands of years ago of dead bodies that practically look alive due to having the rosy color of life. As carbon monoxide is generated by wood-burning fires, it was not and still isn't an uncommon form of death, so it's been known to happen for quite some time.
Since carbon monoxide will stay bound to hemoglobin even after death, blood samples from someone who died of it will remain that vivid red color. Carbon monoxide was first identified in 1800, and by 1846 its properties as a poison had been well-documented in scientific literature. A good forensic examiner in the 1920s would definitely be able to make the correct diagnosis, although in the 1920s there were certainly plenty of bad ones.
Hopefully that explanation made sense, but if nothing else, please take away the idea that carbon monoxide is very dangerous. Having a fire burning without sufficient ventilation or running a car in an enclosed space are two of the most common ways for people to die of carbon monoxide poisoning, and they're very much preventable. The initial symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning tend to include confusion and drowsiness and they set in very quickly, which means that it doesn't take much before it's too late for someone to save themselves.
For one of the other bit of medical deduction in this chapter, I'll have to explain the structure of horns. Horns and antlers are different, and a gazelle like Scursly would have horns. Horns have a core of living bone, surrounded by a layer of keratin (the same material fingernails and hair are made of) and other proteins, and are a permanent structure. Antlers begin as live bone, surrounded by a thin layer of skin called velvet that provides nutrients to the bone as it grows, but once the antler reaches its full size the bone dies and the velvet falls away. This is also why antlers can be shed without injury to the animal; the antler itself isn't composed of living tissue at that point. Horns can be, and sometimes are, removed from livestock, although it is generally done when the animals are very young by removing by cauterization the bud that would eventually grow into a horn. Removing fully grown horns is a much more dangerous process for the animal due to the greater chance of infection.
The fact that horns are a living part of the animal means that, much like any other wound, it would be possible to see if it was caused before or after death by seeing if it bled. In this case, since Scursly's horns were sawed off after he died, there would be no indication of the same sort of bleeding that would have occurred if he was still alive when it happened.
Richard Bauson's name is derived from an archaic word for badger, bauson, that means "striped" and comes from the Old French word bausant. Dragones was the first to get his species right, so this is the promised shout out in my notes. Cimar of Turalis WildeHopps was next in, followed by DrummerMax64 and then ChaoticRhymer. Enjoy the fabulous no-prize!
Pigs actually have a very good sense of smell (they can be trained to find truffles, for example), which explains why Dr. Tolmie's assistant is having such a hard time of it cleaning up.
Captain DuPoitou's name is a reference to the breed of donkey from the Poitou region of France; as the breed is called the Baudet du Poitou in French, I simply styled it in the fashion of similar French family names like DuBois.
Using a jiffy to mean a short amount of time is a bit of slang that far predates the 1920s; its first recorded use was in 1785, and while its origins are unknown it might have originally been in reference to lightning, which would indeed be very fast.
Before electric lighting was widespread, gas lamps were quite common, both in homes and on streets, and they burned illuminating gas, which could pose a significant danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. Since the infrastructure for gas was widespread, illuminating gas also saw widespread use in powering appliances like stoves, heaters, and even refrigerators. Deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning were fairly common in this time period due to leaks, and there are definitely examples of attempts at covering up murders by blaming a gas leak.
This chapter marks the last update I'll make in 2017, which was the first full year of me posting chapters. As always, I'm incredibly grateful to you, the reader. I never could have imagined the sort of response that I would get when I first started posting back in 2016, and I've even made a few friends in the process. I hope that, no matter what challenges lie ahead, you have a wonderful 2018, and I look forward to posting again in the New Year!