“A bit more than a few hundred cc’s. It’s possible to have only that much, but it’s not probable.
So finding only a few hundred cc’s is not something concrete, it’s just suggestive.”
“Suggestive of what?” Marissa asked.
“Suggestive that she was already dead when she fell,” Ken said.
Marissa was stunned. For a moment she couldn’t speak. The implications were too horrendous.
“So you can see our problem,” Ken said.
“If we say something like this officially, we have to have more proof. We have to come up with an explanation of what killed her before she fell. Unfortunately, we haven’t found anything on gross or microscopic. We went over her brain extremely carefully and found nothing. The only eh ance is toxicology and so far we’ve gotten a big zip.”
“What about her dying as she fell?” Marissa suggested.
“From fright or something?”
“Come on, Marissa, be serious,” Ken said with a wave of his hand.
“That only happens in the movies. If she was dead before she hit the ground, then she was dead before she fell. Of course that means she was tossed out of the building.”
“Maybe she hadn’t paid her bill,” Greg suggested jokingly.
“But with all due respect, I think we’d better get on with our present case before the body putrefies.”
“If you want, I’ll call you if we come up with anything,” Ken said.
“Please,” Marissa answered. She was in a daze as she headed for the door.
Ken stopped her by calling out: “Remember, Marissa, mum’s the word. Don’t say anything to anybody.”
“Don’t worry,” Marissa called over her shoulder.
“Your secret is safe with me.” But of course she’d have to tell Wendy.
At the door, Marissa paused again. Turning around, she called out to Ken.
“Do you have a chart on her?” she asked.
“Not really,” Ken said.
“Just the stuff they wrote in the ER, which wasn’t much.”
“But I suppose the business office got some details for billing,” Marissa said.
“I’m sure,” Ken said.
“You didn’t happen to know if they got her social security number?” Marissa asked.
“You got me there,” Ken said.
“But if you want to look, the chart is on my desk.”
Marissa pulled open the door and left the autopsy room.
“My feeling is that we can’t assume it’s true,” Wendy said, twirling her ice cubes in her mineral water.
“Thinking Rebecca Ziegler was killed and then tossed out of a window is too preposterous.
It can’t be true. The amount of blood in a chest after an aortic rupture has to be defined by a bell-shaped curve. Rebecca Ziegler was just at one end of the curve. That has to be the explanation.”
Wendy was sprawled in the corner of the couch in Marissa’s study. Taffy Two was sitting on the floor, hoping for another Goldfish cocktail cracker. Marissa was at her desk.
They were waiting for Gustave to arrive. He’d had late-afternoon emergency surgery, but was due any moment. At Wendy’s urging, the women had decided to get together with their husbands for a casual dinner of pizza. They were hoping that if the men got to know each other, they might decide to come to one of the Resolve meetings. Wendy thought that would be extremely helpful. Marissa wasn’t so sure.
“At least I got her social security number from her chart,” Marissa said.
“If we can figure out a way to get into the Women’s Clinic records, we can see what poor Rebecca read on her last day. That is, if she read anything.”
“Here you go again with that wild imagination of yours,” Wendy said.
“So now you think they took her upstairs, bumped her off, then tossed her out the window. Come on, it’s too farfetched even to consider.”
“Regardless,” Marissa said.
“We’ll let it go for the time being.
At least we did find out that she had the same infectious process in her tubes. That we know for sure.”
Suddenly Marissa fumbled through her papers, searching for the phone numbers for Marcia Lyons and Catherine Zolk.
Calling each woman in turn, Marissa learned what she intuitively suspected: both women confirmed that their internists had talked about their taking isoniazid. The internists had been worried about TB.