I squeezed the throttle a bit and eased the tip of the saw down onto the ice near one of the body’s outstretched hands. In an instant my face and glasses were covered with a layer of shaved ice. Sputtering, I let off the gas, set the saw down, and wiped my cheeks and lenses. For my second attempt, I cocked my head to one side as I lowered the snarling teeth into the ice. This time, the shower of ice crystals streamed onto my arm and shoulder, but my face remained clear. The chain bit into the ice easily, and before long I felt the saw break through the underside. Now the saw sprayed both ice and water onto me, and I could feel my coat beginning to get soaked and cold. I squeezed the throttle trigger all the way, which churned more water but also sped the saw’s progress through the ice. It took less than a minute to cut an arc stretching from just beyond one of the corpse’s outstretched hands, up and over the head, and down to the other hand. I stopped, knelt near the waist, and began cutting through the ice along the right side of the body. My plan was to work my way down to the feet, which would put me safely back on the pool’s deck when I made the final cuts to free the slab from the surrounding ice.
Once I’d cut through the ice on the right side down to the knee, I switched sides and began cutting down the left side, not stopping until I was alongside the left foot. Then I shifted back to the right side. By this point, the slab containing the body was barely connected to the main sheet of ice; only a few inches of ice beside either foot held the slab in place. With one foot, I gave an exploratory tap on the slab. It did not move. I tapped harder. Nothing. I stomped, and suddenly, with a sound like a rifle shot, the ice cracked—not just the small tabs of ice holding the slab in place, but the larger sheet on which I stood. The surface buckled beneath my feet, and I felt myself begin to fall. Instinctively I flung up my arms to regain my balance, and the chainsaw flew from my grasp. My arms were seized by two pairs of strong hands, and two of the uniformed officers hauled me up onto the deck of the pool. As they did, my prize chainsaw thudded onto the slab of ice, which had now been set free. As the slab bobbed, the saw slid back and forth a time or two, and then slithered past the corpse’s head and plunged into the pool. The deep end of the pool. There was a moment of collective silence, broken by a soft “oops” from one of the officers. Then I heard a snort that I recognized as Miranda’s, followed by a giggle—also Miranda’s—and then rising gales of laughter, not just from Miranda but from the six cops, too.
AN HOUR LATER, BACK AT UT, I eased the truck into the garage bay of the Regional Forensic Center. Miranda fetched a gurney and we carefully slid the icebound corpse onto the gurney, faceup, and wheeled it toward the autopsy suite. Detective Emert, who was also authorized to serve as a coroner, had gravely pronounced the iceman to be dead, once he’d stopped laughing about my chainsaw.
Miranda and I stopped in the hallway outside the autopsy suite long enough to weigh the corpse on the scales that were built into the floor. The scales, which automatically subtracted the weight of the gurney, gave the weight as 162 pounds. I knew that fifteen or twenty pounds of that total was ice, though, and I made a mental note to weigh the body again once the ice had thawed and dripped off.
As we wheeled the gurney into the suite, the medical examiner, Dr. Edelberto Garcia—an elegant Hispanic man in his late thirties—looked up from the corpse he was autopsying, a young black male. One of Garcia’s purple-gloved hands cradled the top of the man’s skull; the other hand held a Stryker autopsy saw, with which he had just opened the cranium. Sixty seconds from now, he’d be removing and weighing the brain. Garcia nodded at us, glanced at the body we’d just wheeled in, and looked a question at me. I nodded back at him and said, “Okay if we park this guy by the sink for a couple days, Eddie?”
Garcia’s eyes looked mildly surprised through the blood-spattered shield he wore. “Don’t leave him in here,” he said. “He’ll smell to high heaven. Put him in the cooler. I’ll try to get to him tomorrow.”
“He’s frozen solid,” I said. “If I put him in the cooler, it’ll take him a week to thaw out. Even in here, at room temperature, it’ll take a day or two.”
“Ah,” he said. “Sure, right there is fine.” He looked more closely at the body, noticing the ice that formed a rectangular frame around it. “You fish this guy out of a frozen pond?”
“Frozen swimming pool,” Miranda said. “Dirtier than any pond I ever saw. Ask Dr. B. how he got the guy out of the ice.” She snorted, just as she had in the momentary silence that had followed the splash at the pool. “Ask him about being prepared.”
“Watch it, smarty-pants,” I warned. “You are skating—” I stopped, one word too late.
“On thin ice?” She finished my sentence gleefully, then proceeded to recount my chainsaw misadventure to Garcia. As she pantomimed my whirling arms, the chainsaw’s slow-motion arc through the air, its slithering to-and-fro across the bobbing ice, and its plunge into the murky depths, they laughed until tears streamed from their eyes.
“Very funny,” I said. “Except to the guy whose chainsaw is rusting at the bottom of the pool.”
“Fear not, master,” she said. “All will be well. Because you are the Man of Stihl.”
CHAPTER 3