“It is all right to cry, Reverend Dawson.”
His eyes filled with tears. I heard Marino’s footsteps on the stairs. Then he strode into the kitchen and Dawson said the phrase again, in anguish, under his breath.
Marino looked at him, baffled. “I think your son’s home,” he said.
Susan’s father began to weep uncontrollably as car doors slammed shut out front in the wintry darkness and laugher sounded from the porch.
Christmas dinner went into the trash, the evening spent pacing about the house and talking on the phone while Lucy stayed inside my study with the door shut. Arrangements had to be made. Susan’s homicide had thrown the office into a state of crisis. Her case would have to be sealed, photographs kept away from those who had known her. The police would have to go through her office and her locker. They would want to interview members of my staff.
“I can’t be down there,” Fielding, my deputy chief, told me over the phone. “I realize that,” I said, a lump forming in my throat. “I neither expect nor want anyone down there.”
„And you?„ “I have to be.”
“Christ. I can’t believe this has happened. I just can’t believe it.”
Dr. Wright, my deputy chief in Norfolk, kindly agreed to drive to Richmond early the next morning. Because it was Sunday, no one else was in the building except for Vander, who had come to assist with the Luma-Lite. Had I been emotionally capable of doing Susan’s autopsy, I would have refused. The worst thing I could do for her was to jeopardize her case by having the defense question the objectivity and judgment of an expert witness who also happened to be her boss. So I sat at a desk in the morgue while Wright worked. From time to time he commented to me above the clatter of steel instruments and running water as I stared at the cinderblock wall. I did not touch any of her paperwork of label a single test tube. I did not turn around to look.
Once I asked him, “Did you smell anything on her or her clothes? A cologne of some sort?”
He stopped what he was doing and I heard him walk several steps. “Yes. Definitely around the collar of her coat and on the scarf.”
“Does it smell like men’s cologne to you?”
“Hmm. I think so. Yes, I’d say the fragrance is masculine. Perhaps her husband wears cologne?”
Wright was near retirement age, a balding, potbellied man with a West Virginian accent. He was a very capable forensic pathologist and knew exactly what I was contemplating.
“Good question,” I said. “I’ll ask Marino to check it, but her husband was ill yesterday and went to bed after lunch. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have on cologne. It doesn’t mean her brother or father didn’t have on cologne that got on her collar when they hugged her.”
“This looks small-caiiber. No exit wounds.”
I dosed my eyes and listened. “The wound in her right temple is three-sixteenths of an inch with half an inch of smoke – an incomplete pattern. A little bit of stippling and some powder but most will be lost in her hair. There’s some powder in the temporalis muscle. Nothing much in bone or dura. ”
“Trajectory?” I asked.
“The bullet goes through the posterior aspect of the right frontal lobe, travels across anterior to basal ganglia and strikes the left temporal bone, and gets hung up in muscle under the skin. And we’re talking about a plain lead bullet, uh, copper coated but not jacketed.”
“And it didn’t fragment?” I asked.
“No. Then we’ve got this second wound here at the nape of the neck. Black, burned abraded margin with muzzle mark. A little laceration about one-sixteenth of an inch at the edges. Lots of powder in the occipital muscles.”
“Tight contact?”
“Yes. Looks to, me like he pressed the barrel hard against her neck. The bullet enters at the junction of the foramen magnum and C-one and takes out the cervicalmedullary junction. Travels right up into the pons.”
“What about the angle?” I asked.
“It’s angled up quite a bit. I’d say that if she was sitting in the car at the time she received this wound, she was slumped forward or had her head bowed.”