“Jack.” I motioned for Fielding.
He almost trotted to my side. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“I’m going to take you up on your offer.” I began labeling test tubes on a surgical cart. “I could use your help i f you’re sure you’re up to it.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“We’ll do him together.”
“Not a problem. You want me to scribe?”
“Let’s photograph him as he is but cover the table with a sheet first,” I said.
Danny’s case number was ME-3096, which meant he was the thirtieth case of the new year in the central district of Virginia. After hours of refrigeration he was not cooperative, and when we lifted him onto the table, arms and legs loudly banged against stainless steel as if protesting what we were about to do. We removed dirty, bloody clothing. Arms resisted coming out of sleeves, and tight-fitting jeans were Stubborn. I dipped my hands in pockets, and came up with twenty-seven cents in change, a Chap Stick and a ring of keys.
“That’s weird,” I said as we folded garments and placed them on top of the gurney covered by a disposable sheet.
“What happened to my car key?”
“Was it one of those remote-control ones?”
“Right.” Velcro ripped as I removed the knee brace.
“And obviously, it wasn’t anywhere at the scene.”
“We didn’t find it. And since it wasn’t in the ignition, I assumed Danny would have had it.” I was pulling off thick athletic socks.
“Well, I guess the killer Could have taken it, or it could have gotten lost.”
I thought of the helicopter making a bigger mess, and I had heard that Marino had been on the news. He was shaking his fist and yelling for all the world to see, and I was there, too.
“Okay, he’s got tattoos.” Fielding picked up the clipboard.
Danny had a pair of dice inked into the top of his feet.
“Snake eyes,” Fielding said. “Ouch, that must have hurt.”
I found a faint scar from an appendectomy, and another old one on Danny’s left knee that may have come from an accident when he was a child. On his right knee, scars from recent arthroscopic surgery were purple, the muscles in that leg showing minimal atrophy. I collected samples of his fingernails and hair, and at a glance saw nothing indicative of a struggle. I saw no reason to assume he had resisted whomever he had encountered outside the Hill Cafe when he had dropped his bag of leftovers.
“Let’s turn him,” I said.
Fielding held the legs while I gripped my hands under the arms. We got him on his belly and I used a lens and a strong light to examine the back of his head. Long dark hair was tangled with clotted blood and debris, and I palpated the scalp some more.
“I need to shave this here so I can be sure. But it looks like we’ve got a contact gunshot wound behind his right ear. Where are his films?”
“They should be ready.” Fielding looked around.
“We need to reconstruct this.”
“Shit.” He helped me hold together what was a profound stellate wound that looked more like an exit, because it was so huge.
“It’s definitely an entrance,” I said as I used a scalpel blade to carefully shave that area of the scalp. “See, we’ve got a faint muzzle mark up here. Very faint. Right there.”
I traced it with a gloved bloody finger. “This is very destructive. Almost like a rifle.”
“Forty-five?”
“A half-inch hole,” I said almost to myself as I used a ruler. “Yes, that’s definitely consistent with a forty-five.”
I was removing the skull cap in pieces to look at the brain when the autopsy technician appeared and slapped films up on a nearby light box. The bright white shape of the bullet was lodged in the frontal sinus, three inches from the top of the head.
“My God,” I muttered as I stared at it.
“What the hell is that?” Fielding asked as both of us left the table to get closer.
The deformed bullet was big with sharp petals folded back like a claw.