He did not respond.
“Hello?”
I asked. “Hello?”
I was answered by a dial tone.
“That’s strange, “I said to Marino. “Are you familiar with a John Deighton who claims to be Jennifer Deighton’s brother?”
“That’s who that was? Shit. We’re trying to reach him.
“He said someone’s already notified him about her death.”
“You know where he was calling from?”
“Columbia, South Carolina, supposedly. He hung up on me.”
Marino didn’t seem interested. “I just came from Vander’s office,” he said, referring to Neils Vander, the chief fingerprints examiner. “He checked out Jennifer Deighton’s car, plus the books that were beside her bed and a poem that was stuck inside one of ’em. As for the sheet of blank paper that was on her bed, he hasn’t gotten to that yet.”
“Anything so far?”
“He lifted a few. Will run them through the computer if there’s a need. Probably most of the prints are hers. Here.”
He placed a small paper bag on my desk. “Happy reading.”
“I think you’re going to want those prints run without delay,” I said grimly.
A shadow passed over Marino’s eyes. He massaged his temples.
“Jennifer Deighton definitely did not commit suicide,” I informed him. “Her CO was less than seven percent. She had no soot in her airway. The bright pink tint of her skin was due to exposure to cold, not CO poisoning.”
“Christ,” he said.
Shuffling through the paperwork in front of me, I handed him a body diagram, then opened an envelope and withdrew Polaroid photographs of Jennifer Deighton’s neck.
“As you can see,” I went on, “there are no injuries externally.”
“What about the blood on the car seat?”
“A postmortem artifact due to purging. She was beginning to decompose. I found no abrasions or contusions, no fingertip bruises. But here” – I showed him a photograph of her neck at autopsy – “she’s got irregular hemorrhages in the sternocleidomastoid muscles bilaterally. She’s also got a fracture of the right cornua of the hyoid. Her death was caused by asphyxia, due to pressure applied to the neck “
Marino interrupted loudly. “You suggesting she got yoked?”
I showed him another photograph. “She’s also got some facial perechia, or pinpoint hemorrhages. These findings are consistent with yoking, yes. She’s a homicide, and I might suggest that we keep this out of the newspapers as long as possible.”
“You know, I didn’t need this.”
He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. “I got eight un-cleared homicides sitting on my desk even as we speak. Henrico don’t got shit on Eddie Heath, and the kid’s old man calls me almost every day. Not to mention, they’re having a damn drug war-in Mosby Court. Merry friggin’ Christmas. I didn’t need this.”
“Jennifer Deighton didn’t need this either, Marino.”
“Keep going. What else did you find?”
“She did have high blood pressure, as her neighbor Mrs. Clary suggested.”
“Huh,” he said, shifting his eyes away from me. “How could you tell?”
“She had left ventricular hypertophy, or thickening of the left side of the heart.”
“High blood pressure does that?”
“It does. I should find fibrinoid changes in the renal microvasculature or early nephrosclerosis. I suspect the brain will show hypertensive changes, too, in the cerebral arterioles, but I won’t be able to say with certainty until I can take a look under the scope.”
“You’re saying kidney and brain cells get killed off when you got high blood pressure?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing significant.”
“What about gastric contents?” Marino asked.
“Meat, some vegetables, partially digested.”
“Alcohol or drugs?”
“No alcohol. Drug screens are under way.”
“No sign of rape?”
“No injuries or other evidence of sexual assault. I swabbed her for seminal fluid but won’t get those reports for a while. Even then, you can’t always be sure.”
Marino’s face was unreadable.
“What are you after?” I finally asked.
“Well, I’m thinking about how this thing was staged. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make us think she gassed herself. But then the lady’s dead before he even gets her into her car. What I’m considering is that he didn’t mean to whack her inside the house. You know, he applies a choke hold, uses too much force, and she dies. So, maybe he didn’t know her health was bad and that’s how it happened.”