and flipped the head over. The skin was greenish brown, the face swollen. The tongue was a livid purple. The eyes were missing, as were the eyelids. The stump of the neck was shredded. A single strip of muscle dangled from it, concealing a dirty white collarbone within.
Durban spoke to the coroner, who then scraped around in the ooze at the bottom of the tray with the forceps until he found what he was after. He pulled out something, then went over to a bench to wash it. He returned a moment later and gestured at me to hold out my hand. In my palm he deposited a white serrated triangle. Then he talked in an animated manner for several minutes. When he finished, Durban informed me, “There is no question that the doctor was attacked by a very large great white shark. The size of the tooth makes the animal over twenty feet in length. That's well over twenty-five hundred pounds of fish.”
“So his head was like the pit?” I asked, motioning at the thing on the tray.
“What?”
“Like the pit in a piece of fruit—the bit you don't eat.” Durban still didn't get it. “Did the shark spit the head out or something?” I asked.
Durban wasn't sure whether I was being serious. I was. Not knowing anything about shark attacks, I was interested to know why there was anything left of the man at all. She frowned, then put the question to the coroner. The man laughed like he'd just heard an extremely funny joke and then proceeded to play a little impromptu charade for my benefit. Durban interpreted as the coroner acted out. “He thinks the shark came up beneath the doctor and took his whole body in its mouth.” Just as well Durban was on my team. I was still stuck on the coroner miming what appeared to be “three words, first word rhymes with night.” To assist my understanding, the Japanese man traced his hand across his own shoulder and neck. And then what he was acting out clicked: bite. Just as I caught on, Durban said, “He believes the shark bit clean through Tanaka's neck and shoulder. The tooth was found embedded in the collarbone.”
I had an image of the shark using the doctor's collarbone as a toothpick and then licking its lips. “Have toxicology tests been done?” I asked.
Durban passed the question along and then handed back the translation. “Yeah. Seems he was smashed. Blood-alcohol content up over zero point one.”
“How does he know that?” I asked. As far as I was aware, alcohol didn't hang around in the blood indefinitely, and I knew the head had been found almost a week after it had been parted from its body.
Durban asked Hashimura, and then said, “The human body processes around an ounce of alcohol every hour. But once you're dead, those processes stop. Also, the head's been kept chilled in near-freezing water a couple of days. That preserves the blood and tissue.”
I nodded. The unusual circumstances surrounding the recovery of the doctor's head came to mind. They'd been elaborated upon in my briefing notes. One of the engines on the Natusima, Tanaka's expedition ship, overheated and had to be shut down. A storm and dangerously high seas meant the ship, reduced to one engine, had to be towed to Yokohama. It was dry-docked and the problem was traced to a blocked seawater intake essential to the engine's cooling system. Inside the pipe, wedged there like a cork in a bottle they found Tanaka's head, which I now knew everyone thought at first was a coconut.
“Have the local police followed up?”
Durban repeated the question for the coroner, who nodded and then spoke.
“They have and they're satisfied,” Durban translated. “Every one's calling it accidental death.”
“Yeah. I guess it'd be tricky murdering someone with a great white shark.”
“I don't know… Several years ago, a guy dressed in a panda costume murdered a woman in a Tokyo park. He caught the train home afterward. True story,” Durban added, just in case I was waiting for the punch line. I imagined a panda with bloodstained fur sitting cross-legged in the train, surrounded by Japanese workers heading home, everyone reading their newspapers. I said, “Do you think that's relevant to what we've got here?”
“No. What you said about someone using the shark as a murder weapon just reminded me.”
Whether the shark had anyone inside it before it struck its victim, who knew? But it certainly had someone inside it now—Dr.