“The gun probably came off the street, then.” Anderson was suddenly next to me. “Drugs.”
“Case solved;” Marino replied. “Gee, thanks, Anderson. Hey, guys, we can all go home.”
I could smell the sweet, cloying odor of Kim Luong’s blood as it coagulated, the serum separating from the hemoglobin, cells breaking down. I withdrew the chemical thermometer Ham had inserted inside her. Her core temperature was 88.6 degrees. I looked up. There were three people in this room, not including Marino and me. My anger and frustration continued to build.
“We found her pocketbook and coat,” Anderson went on. “Sixteen dollars in her billfold, so it doesn’t look like he went in there. And oh, there was a paper bag nearby with a plastic container and fork. Looks like she brought dinner with her and warmed it up in the microwave.”
“How do you know she warmed it up?”Marino asked.
Anderson was caught.
“Putting two and two together don’t always make twenty-two,” he added.
Rigor mortis was in its early stages. Her jaw was set, and the small muscles of her neck and hands were, too.
“She’s too stiff for only being dead a couple hours,” I said.
“What causes it anyway?” Eggleston asked.
“Me, too. I’ve always wondered that.”
“I had one in Bon Air one time . . :’
“What were you doing in Bon Air?” asked the officer taking photographs.
“It’s a long story. But this guy has a heart attack during sex. The girlfriend just thinks he’s gone to sleep, right? Wakes up the next morning and he’s deader than dirt. She doesn’t want it to look like he died in bed so she tries to put him in a chair. He was leaning’ against it like an ironing board.”
“I’m serious, Doc. What causes it?” Ham asked.
“I’ve always been curious about that, too.” Diane Bray’s voice came from the doorway.
She was standing there, her eyes fastened to me like steel rivets.
“When you die, your body quits, making adenosine triphosphate. That’s why you get stiff,” I said, not giving her a glance. “Marino, can you hold her like this so I can get a picture?”
He moved closer to me, and his big gloved hands- slid under her left side as I got my camera. I took a photograph of an injury below her left armpit, on the fleshy side of her left breast, as I calculated body temperature versus ambient temperature, and how advanced both livor mortis and rigor mortis were. I could hear footsteps and murmurs and someone coughing. I was sweating behind my surgical mask.
“I need some room,” I said.
Nobody moved.
I looked up at Bray and stopped what I was doing.
“I need room,” I sharply said to her. “Get these people out of here.”
She jerked her head at everyone but me. Cops dropped surgical gloves in a red biological hazard bag as they went out the door.
“You too,” Bray ordered Anderson.
Marino acted as if Bray didn’t exist. Bray never took her eyes off me.
“I don’t ever want to walk in on a scene like this again;’ I said to her as I worked. “Your officers, your techs, nobody-and I mean nobody-touches the body or disturbs it in any way before I get there or one of my medical examiners does.”
I looked up at her.
“Are we clear on that?” I said
She seemed to give what I was saying thoughtful consideration. I loaded film in my thirty-five-millimeter camera. My eyes were getting tired because the light was bad, and I took the flashlight from Marino. I shined it obliquely on the area near the left breast, and then on another area on the right shoulder. Bray stepped in closer, brushing against me to see what I was looking at, and it was odd and startling to smell her perfume mingling with the odor of decomposing blood.
“The crime scene belongs to us, Kay,” she said. “I understand you haven’t had to work things that way in the past-probably not the entire time you’ve been here or maybe anywhere. That’s what I was talking about when I mentioned : . .”
“That’s a bunch of bullshit!” Marino hurled rude words in her face.