‘Why are you guys always making food analogies?’ came a deep, sure voice I recognized.
Teun McGovern, in full morgue protective garb, was walking toward our table. Her eyes were intense behind her face shield, and for an instant we stared straight at each other. I was not the least bit surprised that ATF would have sent a fire investigator to watch the postmortem examination. But I had never expected McGovern to show up.
‘How’s it going in Warrenton?’ I asked her.
‘Working away,’ she replied. ‘We haven’t found Sparkes’s body, which is a good thing, since he’s not dead.’
‘Cute,’ Fielding said.
McGovern positioned herself across from me, standing far enough back from the table to suggest to me that she had seen very few autopsies.
‘So what exactly are you doing?’ she asked as I picked up a hose.
‘We’re going to run warm water between the skin and the glass in hopes we can peel the two apart without further damage,’ I replied.
‘And what if that doesn’t work?’
‘Then we got a big fat mess,’ Fielding said.
‘Then we use a scalpel,’ I explained.
But this was not necessary. After several minutes of a constant warm bath, I began to very slowly and gently separate the thick broken glass from the dead woman’s face, the skin pulling and distorting as I peeled, making her all the more horrible to look at. Fielding and I worked in silence for a while, gently laying shards and sections of heat-stressed glass into a plastic tub. This took about an hour, and when we were done, the stench was stronger. What was left of the poor woman seemed more pitiful and small, and the damage to her head was even more striking.
‘My God,’ McGovern said as she stepped closer. ‘That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.’
The lower part of the face was chalky bone, a barely discernible human skull with open jaws and crumbling teeth. Most of the ears were gone, but from the eyes up, the flesh was cooked and so remarkably preserved that I could see the blond fuzz along the hairline. The forehead was intact, although slightly abraded by the removal of the glass, so that it was no longer smooth. If there had been wrinkles, I could not find them now.
‘I can’t figure out what the hell this is,’ Fielding said as he examined the bits of material mingled with hair. ‘It’s everywhere, all the way down to her scalp.’
Some of it looked like burned paper, while other small pieces were pristinely preserved and a neon pink. I scraped some of it onto my scalpel and placed it into another carton.
‘We’ll let the labs take a crack at it,’ I said to McGovern.
‘Absolutely,’ she answered.
The hair was eighteen and three-quarters inches long, and I saved a strand of it for DNA should we ever have a premortem sample for comparison.
‘If we trace her back to someone missing,’ I said to McGovern, ‘and you guys can get hold of her toothbrush, we can look for buccal cells. They line the mucosa of the mouth and can be used for DNA comparison. A hairbrush would be good, too.’
She made a note of this. I moved a surgical lamp closer to the left temporal area, using a lens to painstakingly examine what appeared to be hemorrhage in tissue that had been spared.
‘It seems we have some sort of injury here,’ I said. ‘Definitely not skin splitting or an artifact of fire. Possibly an incision with some sort of shiny debris imbedded inside the wound.’
‘Could she have been overcome by CO and fallen and hit her head?’ McGovern voiced the same question others had. ‘She would have had to have hit it on something very sharp,’ I said as I took photographs.
‘Let me look,’ Fielding said, and I handed him the lens. ‘I don’t see any torn or ragged edges,’ he remarked as he peered.
‘No, not a laceration,’ I agreed. ‘This looks more like something inflicted by a sharp instrument.’
He returned the lens to me, and I used plastic forceps to delicately scrape the shiny debris from the wound. I swiped it onto a square of clean cotton twill. On a nearby desk was a dissecting microscope, and I placed the cloth on the stage and moved the light source so that it would reflect off the debris. I looked through the eyepiece lens as I manipulated the coarse and fine adjustments.