in the room.
“I noticed the marks on her neck.”
The Medical Examiner looked at Frank keenly for a moment and then
shrugged. “They’re there. I don’t know what they mean yet.”
“I’d appreciate a quick turnaround on this one.”
“You’ll get it. Not many murders out this way. They usually get a
priority, y’know.”
The detective winced slightly at the remark.
The Medical Examiner looked at him. “Hope you enjoy dealing with the
press. They’ll be on this like a swarmhoneybees.”
“More like yellowjackets.”
The Medical Examiner shrugged. “Better you than me.
I’m way too old for that crap. She’s ready to go whenever.”
The Medical Examiner finished packing up and left.
Frank held the small hand up to his face, looked at the professionally
manicured nails. He noted several tears in two of the cuticles, which
seemed likely enough if there was a struggle before she’d gotten popped.
The body was grossly distended; bacteria raged everywhere as the
putrefaction process raced on. Rigor had passed long ago, which meant
she had been dead well over forty-eight hours. The limbs were supple as
the body’s soft tissue dissolved. Frank sighed.
She had indeed been here awhile. That was good for the killer, bad for
the cops.
It still amazed him how death changed a person. A bloated wreck barely
recognizable as a human, when just days before … Had his sense of
smell not already gone dead, he would have been unable to do what he was
doing. But that came with being a homicide detective. All your clients
were dead.
He carefully held the deceased’s head up, turning each side to the
light. Two small entry wounds on the right side, one large, ragged exit
hole on the left. They were looking at heavy-caliber stuff. Stu had
already gotten pictures of the wounds from several different angles,
including from directly overhead. The circular abrasion collars and the
absence of burns or tattooing on the skin’s surface led Frank to
conclude that the shots had been fired from over two feet away.
Small-caliber contact wounds, those fired muzzle to flesh, and
near-contact wounds fired from a distance of less than two inches from
the target, could duplicate the types of entry wounds present on the
victim. But there would be powder residue deep in the tissues along the
bullet track if they were looking at a contact wound. The autopsy would
definitively answer that question.
Next Frank looked at the contusion on the left side of her jaw. It was
partially hidden by the natural blistering of the body as it decomposed
but Frank had seen enough corpses to tell the difference. The surface of
the skin there was a curious amalgamation of green, brown and black. A
big blow had done that. A man? That was confusing. He called Stu over
to take pictures of the area with a color scale. Then he laid the head
back down with the reverence the deceased deserved even under the
largely clinical circumstances.
The medico-legal autopsy to follow would not be so deferential.
Frank slowly lifted the skirt. Underwear intact. The autopsy protocol
would answer the obvious question.
Frank moved around the room as the CU members continued their work. One
thing about living in a rich, although largely rural county, the tax
base was more than enough to support a first-rate if relatively small
crime scene unit complete with all the latest technology and devices
that theoretically made catching bad people easier.
The victim had fallen on her left side, away from the door.
Knees tucked partially under her, left arm stretched out, the other
against her right hip. Her face was pointed east, perpendicular with the
right side of the bed; she was almost in a fetal position. Frank rubbed
his nose. From beginning to end, back to the beginning. Nobody ever knew
how they were going to eventually exit this old world, did they?
With Simon’s help he did the’triangulation of the body’s location; the
tape measure made A screeching sound as it unwound. It sounded somehow
unholy in this room of death. He looked at the doorway and the position
of the body. He and Simon performed a preliminary trajectory path of the