He glanced at me across the table.
‘Suicide?’ he continued to speculate. ‘And she couldn’t bring herself to kill the colt? What’s his name, Windsong?’
But there were no answers to any of these questions right now, and we continued to make X-rays of personal effects and pathology, to give us a permanent case record. But mostly we explored, in real time on screen, recovering grommets from jeans and an intrauterine device that suggested she had been sexually active with males.
Our findings included a zipper and a blackened lump the size of a baseball that turned out to be a steel bracelet with small links and a serpent silver ring that held three copper keys. Other than sinus configurations, which are as distinct as fingerprints in every human being, and a single porcelain crown on the right maxillary central incisor, we discovered nothing else obvious that might effect an identification.
At close to noon, we rolled her back across the corridor into the autopsy room and attached her table to a dissecting sink in the farthest corner, out of the main traffic. Other sinks were busy and loud as water drummed stainless steel, and stepladders were scooted as other doctors weighed and sectioned organs and dictated their findings into tiny mikes while various detectives looked on. The chatter was typically blunt with fractured sentences, our communication as random and disjointed as the lives of our cases.
‘Excuse me, need to be right about where you are.’
‘Darn, I need a battery.’
‘What kind?’
‘Whatever the hell goes in this camera.’
‘Twenty dollars, right front pocket.’
‘Probably not robbery.’
‘Who’s gonna count pills. Got a shitload.’
‘Dr Scarpetta, we just got another case. Possible homicide,’ a resident said loudly as he hung up a phone that was designated for clean hands.
‘We may have to hold it until tomorrow,’ I responded as our work load worsened.
‘We’ve got the gun from the murder-suicide,’ one of my assistant chiefs called out.
‘Unloaded?’ I answered back.
‘Yeah.’
I walked over to make sure, for I never made assumptions when firearms came in with bodies. The dead man was big and still dressed in Faded Glory jeans, the pockets turned inside out by police. Potential gunshot residue on his hands was protected by brown paper bags, and blood trickled from his nose when a wooden block was placed beneath his head.
‘Do you mind if I handle the gun?’ I asked the detective, above the whine of a Stryker saw.
‘Be my guest. I’ve already lifted prints.’
I picked up the Smith Wesson pistol and pulled back the slide to check for a cartridge, but the chamber was clear. I dabbed a towel over the bullet wound in the head, as my morgue supervisor, Chuck Ruffin, honed a knife with long sweeps over a sharpening stone.
‘See the black around there and the muzzle imprint?’ I said as the detective and a resident leaned close. ‘You can see the sight here. It’s contact right-handed. The exit’s here, and you can see by the dripping he was lying on his right side.’
‘That’s how we found him,’ the detective said as the saw whined on and a bony dust drifted through the air.
‘Be sure to note the caliber, make, and model,’ I said as I returned to my own sad chore. ‘And is the ammunition ball versus hollow point?’
‘Ball. Remington nine-mill.’
Fielding had parallel-parked another table nearby and covered it with a sheet that he had piled with the fire debris that we had already sifted through. I began measuring the lengths of her badly burned femurs in hopes I could make an estimate of height. The rest of her legs were gone from just above the knees to the ankles, but her feet had been spared by her boots. In addition, she had burn amputations of her forearms and hands. We collected fragments of fabric and drew diagrams and collected more animal hairs, doing all that we could before beginning the difficult task of removing the glass.
‘Let’s get the warm water going,’ I said to Fielding. ‘Maybe we can loosen without tearing skin.’
‘It’s like a damn roast stuck to the pan.’