I started shaking my head. “Her high blood pressure has nothing to do with it.”
“Explain how she died, then.”
“Say the assailant is right-handed, he brought his left arm around the front of her neck and used his right hand to pull the left wrist toward the right.”
I demonstrated. “This placed pressure eccentrically on her neck, resulting in fracture of the right greater cornua of the hyoid bone. The pressure collapsed her upper airway and put pressure on the carotid arteries. She would have gotten hypoxic, or air hungry. Sometimes pressure on the neck produces bradycardia, a drop in the heart rate, and the victim has an arrhythmia.”
“Could you tell from her autopsy if the assailant started using a choke hold that ended up a yoking? If he was just trying to subdue her and used too much force, in other words?”
“I can’t tell you that from medical findings.”
“But it’s possible.”
“It’s within the realm of possibility.”
“Come on, Doc,” Marino said, exasperated. “Get off the witness stand for a minute, okay? Somebody else in this office besides you and me?”
No one was. But I was unnerved. Most of my staff had not shown up for work today, and Susan had acted bizarrely. Jennifer Deighton, a stranger, apparently had been trying to call me, then was murdered, and a man who claimed to be her brother had just hung up on me. Not to mention, Marino’s mood was foul. When I felt a loss of control, I became very clinic.
“Look,” I said, “he very well may have used a choke hold to subdue her and ended up applying too much force, yoking her by mistake. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to suggest that he simply thought he’d knocked her out and didn’t know she was dead when he placed her inside her car.”
“So we’re dealing with a dumb shit”
“I wouldn’t conclude that if I were you. But if he gets up tomorrow morning and reads in the paper that Jennifer Deighton was murdered, he may be in for the surprise of his life. He’s going to wonder what he did wrong. Which is why I recommended we keep this away from the press.”
“I got no problem with that. By the way, just because you didn’t know Jennifer Deighton don’t mean she didn’t know you.”
I waited for him to explain.
“I’ve been thinking about your hang ups. You’re on TV, in the papers. Maybe she knew someone was after her, didn’t know where to turn, and reached out to you for help. When she got your machine, she was too paranoid to leave a message.”
“That’s a very depressing thought.”
“Almost everything we think in this joint is depressing.”
He got up from his chair.
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Check her house. Tell me if you find any feather pillows, down-filled jackets, feather dusters, anything relating to feathers.”
“Why?”
“I found a small feather on her gown.”
“Sure. I’ll let you know. Are you leaving?”
I glanced past him as I heard the elevator doors open and shut. “Was that Stevens? “I asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got a few more things to do before I go home,” I said.
After Marino got on the elevator, I went to a window at the end of the hall that overlooked the parking loon back. I wanted to make sure Ben Stevens’s Jeep was gone. It was, and I watched as Marino emerged from the budding, picking his way through crushed snow lit up by street lamps. He trudged to his car and stopped to vigorously shake snow off his feet, like a cat that’s stepped in water, before sliding behind the wheel. God forbid that anything should violate the freshened au and Armor All of his inner sanctum. I wondered ft he had plans for Christmas and was dismayed that I had not thought to invite him in for dinner. This would be his AS Christmas since he and Doris had divorced.
As I made my way back down the empty hall, I ducked into each office along the way to check computer terminals. Unfortunately, no one was logged in, and the only cable tagged with a device number was Fielding’s. It was neither tty07 nor tty14. Frustrated, I unlocked Margaret’s office and switched on the light.