Cruel and Unusual - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 23

“Christ,” he said.

Shuffling through the paperwork in front of me, I handed him a body diagram, then opened an envelope and withdrew Polaroid photographs of Jennifer Deighton's neck.

“As you can see,” I went on, “there are no injuries externally.”

“What about the blood on the car seat?”

“A postmortem artifact due to purging. She was beginning to decompose. I found no abrasions or contusions, no fingertip bruises. But here” - I showed him a photograph of her neck at autopsy - “she's got irregular hemorrhages in the sternocleidomastoid muscles bilaterally. She's also got a fracture of the right cornua of the hyoid. Her death was caused by asphyxia, due to pressure applied to the neck “

Marino interrupted loudly. “You suggesting she got yoked?”

I showed him another photograph. “She's also got some facial perechia, or pinpoint hemorrhages. These findings are consistent with yoking, yes. She's a homicide, and I might suggest that we keep this out of the newspapers as long as possible.”

“You know, I didn't need this.”

He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. “I got eight un-cleared homicides sitting on my desk even as we speak. Henrico don't got shit on Eddie Heath, and the kid's old man calls me almost every day. Not to mention, they're having a damn drug war-in Mosby Court. Merry friggin' Christmas. I didn't need this.”

“Jennifer Deighton didn't need this either, Marino.”

“Keep going. What else did you find?”

“She did have high blood pressure, as her neighbor Mrs. Clary suggested.”

“Huh,” he said, shifting his eyes away from me. “How could you tell?”

“She had left ventricular hypertophy, or thickening of the left side of the heart.”

“High blood pressure does that?”

“It does. I should find fibrinoid changes in the renal microvasculature or early nephrosclerosis. I suspect the brain will show hypertensive changes, too, in the cerebral arterioles, but I won't be able to say with certainty until I can take a look under the scope.”

“You're saying kidney and brain cells get killed off when you got high blood pressure?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing significant.”

“What about gastric contents?” Marino asked.

“Meat, some vegetables, partially digested.”

“Alcohol or drugs?”

“No alcohol. Drug screens are under way.”

“No sign of rape?”

“No injuries or other evidence of sexual assault. I swabbed her for seminal fluid but won't get those reports for a while. Even then, you can't always be sure.”

Marino's face was unreadable.

“What are you after?” I finally asked.

“Well, I'm thinking about how this thing was staged. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make us think she gassed herself. But then the lady's dead before he even gets her into her car. What I'm considering is that he didn't mean to whack her inside the house. You know, he applies a choke hold, uses too much force, and she dies. So, maybe he didn't know her health was bad and that's how it happened.”

I started shaking my head. “Her high blood pressure has nothing to do with it.”

“Explain how she died, then.”

“Say the assailant is right-handed, he brought his left arm around the front of her neck and used his right hand to pull the left wrist toward the right.”

I demonstrated. “This placed pressure eccentrically on her neck, resulting in fracture of the right greater cornua of the hyoid bone. The pressure collapsed her upper airway and put pressure on the carotid arteries. She would have gotten hypoxic, or air hungry. Sometimes pressure on the neck produces bradycardia, a drop in the heart rate, and the victim has an arrhythmia.”

“Could you tell from her autopsy if the assailant started using a choke hold that ended up a yoking? If he was just trying to subdue her and used too much force, in other words?”

“I can't tell you that from medical findings.”

“But it's possible.”

“It's within the realm of possibility.”

“Come on, Doc,” Marino said, exasperated. “Get off the witness stand for a minute, okay? Somebody else in this office besides you and me?”

No one was. But I was unnerved. Most of my staff had not shown up for work today, and Susan had acted bizarrely. Jennifer Deighton, a stranger, apparently had been trying to call me, then was murdered, and a man who claimed to be her brother had just hung up on me. Not to mention, Marino's mood was foul. When I felt a loss of control, I became very clinic.

“Look,” I said, “he very well may have used a choke hold to subdue her and ended up applying too much force, yoking her by mistake. In fact, I'll even go so far as to suggest that he simply thought he'd knocked her out and didn't know she was dead when he placed her inside her car.”

“So we're dealing with a dumb shit”

“I wouldn't conclude that if I were you. But if he gets up tomorrow morning and reads in the paper that Jennifer Deighton was murdered, he may be in for the surprise of his life. He's going to wonder what he did wrong. Which is why I recommended we keep this away from the press.”

“I got no problem with that. By the way, just because you didn't know Jennifer Deighton don't mean she didn't know you.”

I waited for him to explain.

“I've been thinking about your hang ups. You're on TV, in the papers. Maybe she knew someone was after her, didn't know where to turn, and reached out to you for help. When she got your machine, she was too paranoid to leave a message.”

“That's a very depressing thought.”

“Almost everything we think in this joint is depressing.”

He got up from his chair.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Check her house. Tell me if you find any feather pillows, down-filled jackets, feather dusters, anything relating to feathers.”

“Why?”

“I found a small feather on her gown.”

“Sure. I'll let you know. Are you leaving?”

I glanced past him as I heard the elevator doors open and shut. “Was that Stevens? “I asked.

“Yeah.”

“I've got a few more things to do before I go home,” I said.

After Marino got on the elevator, I went to a window at the end of the hall that overlooked the parking loon back. I wanted to make sure Ben Stevens's Jeep was gone. It was, and I watched as Marino emerged from the budding, picking his way through crushed snow lit up by street lamps. He trudged to his car and stopped to vigorously shake snow off his feet, like a cat that's stepped in water, before sliding behind the wheel. God forbid that anything should violate the freshened au and Armor All of his inner sanctum. I wondered ft he had plans for Christmas and was dismayed that I had not thought to invite him in for dinner. This would be his AS Christmas since he and Doris had divorced.

As I made my way back down the empty hall, I ducked into each office along the way to check computer terminals. Unfortunately, no one was logged in, and the only cable tagged with a device number was Fielding's. It was neither tty07 nor tty14. Frustrated, I unlocked Margaret's office and switched on the light.

Typically, it looked as if a fierce wind had blown through, scattering papers across her desk, tipping books over in the bookcase and knocking others on the floor. Stacks of continuous-paper printouts spilled over like accordions, and indecipherable notes and telephone numbers were taped to walls and terminal screens. The minicomputer hummed like an electronic insect and lights danced across banks of modems on a shelf. Sitting in her chair before the system terminal, I slid open a drawer to my right and began rapidly walking my fingers through file tabs, I found several with promising labels such as “users” and “networking;” but nothing I perused told me what I needed to know. Looking around as I thought,I noticed a thick bundle of cables that ran up the wall behind the computer and disappeared through the ceiling. Each cable was tagged.