What I saw in the circle of reflected illumination were several silvery segments that had the striated, flattened surfaces of metal shavings, such as the turnings made by a lathe. I fitted a Polaroid MicroCam to the microscope and took high-resolution instant color photographs.
‘Take a look,’ I said.
Fielding, then McGovern, bent over the microscope.
‘Either of you ever seen anything like that?’ I asked.
I peeled open the developed photographs to make certain they had turned out all right.
‘It reminds me of Christmas tinsel when it gets old and wrinkled,’ Fielding said.
‘Transferred from whatever cut her,’ was all McGovern had to say.
‘I would think so,’ I agreed.
I removed the square of white cloth from the stage and preserved the shavings between cotton balls, which I sealed inside a metal evidence button.
‘One more thing for the labs,’ I said to McGovern.
‘How long will it take?’ McGovern said. ‘Because if there’s a problem, we can do the work at our labs in Rockville.’
‘There won’t be a problem.’ I looked at Fielding and said, ‘I think I can handle it from here.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll get started on the next one.’
I opened up the neck to look for trauma to those organs and muscles, beginning with the tongue, which I removed while McGovern looked on with stoicism. It was a grim procedure that separated the weak from the strong.
‘Nothing there,’ I said, rinsing the tongue and blotting it dry with a towel. ‘No bite marks that might be indicative of a seizure. No other injuries.’
I looked inside the glistening smooth walls of the airway and found no soot, meaning she was no longer breathing when heat and flames had reached her. But I also found blood, and this was further ominous news.
‘More premortem trauma,’ I said.
‘Possible something fell on her after she was dead?’ McGovern asked.
‘It didn’t happen that way.’
I noted the injury on a diagram and dictated it into the transmitter.
‘Blood in the airway means she inhaled it — or aspirated,’ I explained. ‘Meaning, obviously, that she was breathing when the trauma occurred.’
‘What sort of trauma?’ she then asked.
‘A penetrating injury. The throat stabbed or cut. I see no other signs of trauma to the base of the skull or lungs or to the neck, no contusions or broken bones. Her hyoid’s intact, and there’s fusion of the greater horn and body, possibly indicating she’s older than twenty and most likely wasn’t strangled manually or with a ligature.’
I began to dictate again.
‘The skin under the chin and superficial muscle are burned away,’ I said into the small mike on my gown. ‘Heat-coagulated blood in the distal trachea, primary, secondary, and tertiary bronchi. Hemoaspiration, and blood in the esophagus.’
I made the Y incision to open up the dehydrated, ruined body, and for the most part, the rest of the autopsy proved to be rather routine. Although the organs were cooked, they were within normal limits, and the reproductive organs verified the gender as female. There was blood in her stomach, too; otherwise it was empty and tubular, suggesting she hadn’t been eating very much. But I found no disease and no other injuries old or new.
Height I could not positively ascertain, but I could estimate by using Trotter and Gleser regression formula charts to correlate femur length to the victim’s stature. I sat at a nearby desk and thumbed through Bass’s Human Osteology until I found the appropriate table for American white females. Based on a 50.2 millimeter, or approximately twenty-inch, femur, the predicted height would have been five-foot-ten.
Weight was not so exact, for there was no table, chart, or scientific calculation that might tell me that. In truth, we usually got a hint of weight from the size of clothing left, and in this case, the victim had been wearing size eight jeans. So based on the data I had, I intuited that she had been between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and thirty pounds.
‘In other words,’ I said to McGovern, ‘she was tall and very slim. We also know she had long blond hair, was probably sexually active, may have been comfortable around horses, and was already dead inside Sparkes’s Warrenton house before the fire got to her. I also know that she received significant premortem injury to her upper neck and was cut right here on her left temple.’ I pointed. ‘How these were inflicted, I can’t tell you.’