Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

He leans forward, leans into me and stays there.

“Would the contusions look exactly like this, were that the case?” he asks.

“We can’t know for a fact whether she was bruised through clothing or not,” I reply.

“Would it be worthwhile to try the ALS?” He indicates the alternate light source still on the countertop, where Marino plugged it in hours earlier.

“It’s not going to help.”

“So that’s a no.” He meets my eyes.

“If you want to scan her in the very off chance you might visualize any faint or nonvisible bruises we’re missing, assuming we’re missing any brown patterns that are contusions?” I offer in a way that discourages him, because I must.

“It’s probably ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous, just illogical,” I reply.

“I agree. I mean, what are the chances?” he says.

“The chances of finding the usual evidence the ALS can be most helpful with are next to none.” But that’s really not what I’m discouraging him from, and it’s not really what we’re talking about.

I won’t have an affair with him unless I decide I don’t care if I completely destroy my life. It’s not about whether he has a chance with me but about how crazy it is that I’m even thinking these thoughts.

“Body fluids, fibers, gunshot residue, latent prints, deep tissue bruises?” I’m still talking about the ALS and what it might find under different circumstances, and I’m letting him know I understand what it’s like to want what you can’t have.

“Right. Forget it,” he agrees.

“That’s what I recommend. Not that I don’t understand being tempted to try.”

“She’s been in the water,” he says. “A waste of time.”

“And then it has to be explained,” I add. “Everything we do has to be explained.”

“Should I unplug it?” He reaches for the ALS power cord.

“Please,” I reply. “I’m really not interested in putting on goggles and spending an hour scanning the body from head to toe with the Crime-lite just so I can say we did. It might be worth going over her clothing, but that can wait.”

“We don’t know if she had on the clothing when she got these bruises.” Luke returns to that thought as he returns to the table. “Knowing whether she was dressed or not when someone grabbed her upper arms would be an important fact, wouldn’t it? Stripping a prisoner is more about submission than anything else, isn’t it?”

“Depends on who is doing it to whom and why.”

“The logic of torture, a terrible thing to consider, but there is a logic to it. Humiliation, intimidation, controlling your prisoner by stripping him, hooding him. Or her,” he says. “I’m assuming she could have been bound at some point with some type of ligature that was soft and wouldn’t necessarily leave marks on her skin.”

“It’s possible.”

“I imagine him coming up behind her like this.” He holds up his hands to grip imaginary arms, orienting his fingertips and thumbs the way they would be if he grabbed someone by the upper arms from behind. “Maybe to forcibly move her from one place to another, such as if he forced her into a room or dragged her, were she unconscious. Or if she were tied up in a chair and he’s trying to make her give him information so he could steal her identity, for example. Her PIN, her passwords.”

I shine the lamp down her lower legs, brightly illuminating the tops and sides of her ankles and feet, and I find more brownish marks, only these are darker and drier and indistinct in their shape. Picking up the scalpel to make small incisions, I find the darkened areas of skin have lost elasticity, are extremely hard, with no evidence of hemorrhage to the underlying tissue. Not contusions but patterns caused by something else, and I find more of them on the tops of her bare feet and areas of her ankles.

We pull her on her side so I can check her back, and there are two more indistinct hard brown areas on the underside of her right elbow and forearm.

“I’ve got no idea,” I puzzle. “Absolutely none.”

“Some type of postmortem artifact?”

“Unlike any I’ve ever seen before.” I excise a small section of the hard brown skin for histology. “It’s like cutting through stiff leather. I can’t imagine what might cause that, swaths of skin as much as four by three inches.”

“Like freezer burn, perhaps?”

“No. She’d have it all over if she was in a freezer and it caused that.”

“But what about if certain parts of the body came in contact with metal inside a freezer?” he suggests.

“Then the skin would stick.”

I insert the tip of the scalpel blade into leathery flesh just below the left sternum and incise down and to the right, and then do the same on the left and cut straight down to the navel, detouring around it to the pubic bone. It’s like making a Y-incision in wet slippery leather, and I reflect back tissue, cutting through ribs, removing the breastplate of them. I make an incision beneath the jaw to remove the neck organs and tongue.

“Her hyoid’s intact.” I make notes on a body diagram as I work, the odor of decomposition overpowering now. “No sign of injury to the strap muscles, to soft tissue. No airway obstruction or aroma of chemical asphyxia, such as due to cyanide. No injury to the tongue.”

Luke peels back the scalp, and the air vibrates with the loud whining and grinding of the oscillating saw, and bone dust is suspended in the bright white light. I open the major blood vessels, the inferior vena cava, the aorta, finding what I expect, that they are empty, with dry diffuse hemolytic staining. I see no evidence of blockage or injury or disease, just a moderate amount of calcification, certainly not enough to kill her.

“The brain’s too soft to section,” Luke reports. “But I’m not seeing anything to suggest cerebral injury. Dura’s intact and free of staining.” He writes it down.

Her organs are decomposed. Her lungs are collapsed, reddish-purple and very soft, the airways devoid of water, froth, sand, or foreign material, the gallbladder dry and wrinkled, with no residual bile. With each minute we work it becomes abundantly clear that this is an autopsy of exclusion, of ruling out possible causes of death and leaving little doubt that she either asphyxiated or was poisoned. But it will be a while—days, at least—before we have a complete ethanol and drug screen of liver tissue.

“No petechiae I can find.” Luke opens each eye. “No irregular areas of hemorrhage to the sclera or the conjunctiva. Of course, that doesn’t rule out asphyxia by smothering or strangulation,” he adds, and he’s right.

While there are no abrasions or contusions, no injuries I might associate with smothering or strangulation, the absence of facial or scleral pinpoint hemorrhages called petechiae doesn’t mean that someone didn’t place a plastic bag over her head or tie a gag around her nose and mouth or ram a cloth down her throat that obstructed her breathing.

Her gastric contents are granular and dry like animal feed. I adjust the light and use a lens, moving the material around with forceps.

“Dried out, desiccated meat,” I observe. “If I can see it grossly, it wasn’t very digested when she died.”

“There’s very little in her small intestine,” Luke lets me know. “Almost nothing in her large intestine. It usually takes what? A good ten hours for food to completely clear?”

“It depends on a lot of things. How much she ate, whether she exercised, her hydration. Digestion varies considerably with individuals.”

“So if she ate and the food hardly had begun to digest before she died,” he supposes, “chances are we’re talking only a couple of hours after her last meal?”