I waited.
“And this was the only cut you found?”
“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps you’ll find something else when you conduct your own examination. But I found nothing else except the bullet hole I mentioned. In her lower lumbar, the tenth dorsal.”
“Yes. You said the bullet hit the spinal cord.”
“Right. She was shot in the back. I recovered the slug from her vertebra.”
“Any idea of the location of the shooting?”
“We don’t know where she was in the woods – or if she was even in the woods when she was shot.”
“And she has this cut to her hand,” Dr. Vessey mused, peering into the scope again. “No way to know which came first. She would have been paralyzed from the waist down after being shot, but she still could have moved her hands.”
“A defense injury?”
I asked what I suspected.
“A very unusual one, Kay. The cut is dorsal versus palmar.”
He leaned back in the chair and looked up at me. “Most defense injuries to the hands are palmar.”
He held up his hands palm out. “But she took this cut to the top of her hand.”
He turned his hands palm in. “I usually associate cuts on the top of the hand with someone who is aggressive in defending himself.”
“Punching,” I said.
“Right. If I’m coming at you with a knife and you’re punching away, you’re likely to get cut on the top of your hand. Certainly, you’re not going to receive a cut to your palmar surfaces, unless you unclench your fists at some point. But what’s more significant is that most defense injuries are slices. The perpetrator is swinging or stabbing, and the victim raises his hands or forearms to ward off the blade. If the cut goes deep enough to strike bone, I’m usually not going to be able to tell you much about the cutting surface.”
“If the cutting surface is serrated,” I interpolated, “with a slice, the blade covers its own tracks.”
“That’s one reason this cut is so interesting,” he said. “There’s no question it was inflicted by a serrated blade.”
“Then she wasn’t sliced but hacked?” I asked, puzzled.
“Yes.”
He returned the bone to its envelope. “The pattern of serrations means that at least a half an inch of the blade must have struck the top of her hand.”
Returning to his desk, he added, “I’m afraid that’s as much information as I can give you about the weapon and what might have occurred. As you know, there’s so much variability. I can’t tell you the size of the blade, for example, whether the injury occurred before or after she was shot, and what position she was in when she received the cut.”
Deborah could have been on her back. She could have been kneeling or on her feet, and as I returned to my car, I began to analyze. The cut to her hand was deep and would have bled profusely. This most likely placed her on the logging road or in the woods when she received the injury, because there was no blood inside her Jeep. Did this hundred-pound gymnast struggle with her assailant? Did she try to punch him, was she terrified and fighting for her life because Fred already had been murdered? And where did the gun fit in? Why did the killer use two weapons when it did not seem he had needed a gun to kill Fred? I was willing to bet that Fred’s throat was cut. Quite likely, after Deborah was shot, her throat was cut or else she was strangled. She was not shot and left to die. She did not drag herself, half paralyzed, to Fred’s side and slip her arm under his. Their bodies had been positioned this way deliberately.
Turning off Constitution, I finally found Connecticut, which eventually led me to a northwest section of the city that I suspected would have been little better than a slum were it not for the Washington Hilton. Rising from a grassy slope that covered a city block, the hotel was a magnificent white luxury liner surrounded by a troubled sea of dusty liquor stores, laundromats, a nightclub featuring “live dancers,” and dilapidated row houses with broken windows boarded up and cement front stoops almost on the street. Leaving my car in the hotel’s underground parking deck, I crossed Florida Avenue and climbed the front steps of a dingy tan brick apartment building with a faded blue awning in front. I pressed the button for Apartment 28, where Abby Turnbull lived.