Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

“By the time he got her on the bed, I seriously doubt she was talking or able to run. If you look here and here and here and here.” I refer to segments of string taped to blood droplets that begin at the bedroom’s entrance. “Cast-off blood from the backswing of the weaponin this case, the chipping ham­mer.”

Berger follows the bright pink string design and tries to correlate what it indicates with what she is seeing in photo­graphs she goes through. “Tell me the truth,” she says. “Do you really put a lot of credence in stringing? I know cops who think it’s bullshit and a huge waste of time.”

“Not if the person knows what he’s doing and is faithful to the science.”

“And the science is?”

I explain to her that blood is ninety-one percent water. It adheres to the physics of liquid, and it is affected by motion and gravity. A typical drop of blood will fall 25.1 feet per sec­ond. Stain diameter increases as the dropping distance in­creases. Blood dripping into blood produces a corona of spatters around the original pool. Splashed blood produces long, narrow spatters around a central stain, and as blood dries, it goes from bright red to reddish-brown to brown to black. I know experts who have spent their entire careers af­fixing medicine droppers of blood to ring stands, using plumb lines, squeezing or dripping or pouring or projecting blood onto a variety of target surfaces from a variety of angles and heights, and walking through puddles and stamping and slap­ping, and experimenting. Then, of course, there is the math, the straight-line geometry and trigonometry for figuring out point of origin.

The blood in Diane Bray’s bedroom, at a glance, is a videotape of what happened, but it is in a format that is un­readable unless we use science, experience and deductive reasoning to sort it out. Berger also wants me to use my intu­ition. Again, she wants me to edge beyond my clinical boundaries. I follow dozens of strands of string that connect spatters on the wall and the door frame and converge to a point in mid-air. Since you can’t tape string to thin air, the crime scene technicians moved an antique coat rack in from the foyer and taped the string some five feet from the base of it to determine the point of origin. I show Berger where Bray probably was standing when Chandonne struck the first blow.

“She was several feet inside the door,” I say. “See this void area here?” I point out a space on the wall where there is no blood, just spatters in an aura all around it. “Her body or his blocked blood from hitting that part of the wall. She was up­right. Or he was. And if he was upright, we can assume she was because you don’t stand straight up and beat someone who is on the floor.” I stand straight up and show her. “Not un­less you have arms six feet long. Also, the point of origin is more than five feet off the floor, implying this is where the blows were connecting with their target. Her body. Most likely, her head.” I move several feet closer to the bed. “Now she’s down.”

I point out smears and drips on the floor. I explain that stains produced from a ninety-degree angle are round. If, for example, you were on your hands and knees and blood was dripping straight down to the floor from your face, those drips would be round. Numerous drips on the floor are round. Some are smeared. They cover an approximate two-foot area. Bray was, for a brief time, on her hands and knees, perhaps trying to crawl as he kept on swinging.

“Did he kick or stomp?” Berger asks.

“Nothing I found would tell me that.” It is a good question. Stomping and kicking would add other shadings to the emo­tions of the crime.

“Hands are more personal than feet,” Berger remarks. “That’s been my experience in lust murders. Rarely do I see kicking, stomping.”

I walk around, pointing out more cast-off blood and satel­lite spatters before moving to a hardened puddle of blood sev­eral feet from the bed. “She bled out here,” I tell her. “This may be where he tore off her blouse and bra.”

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