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I decided to wait on Coach Hargrove. He was fine in the refrigeration unit until Lily and Sheldon got back, and then we could start piecing him together again. But for now, my focus was on the Jane Doe.
There was something about the unidentified victims that made me want to work harder to see justice done. No one deserved to go nameless, as if their life had never existed. They had families and memories that deserved to be honored, and the faster I could put a name to her face, the better.
Percy and Henry had transferred her onto the large metal table I used for autopsies. She lay pale, the blue of her veins making her skin look like marble. The lividity in her body wasn’t unusual for someone who’d been tossed in a creek. The head, arms and legs tended to hang forward, so she would have been face down in the water, which was why all her blood had pooled in the front of her body.
The white nightie was twisted around her waist, what was left of it tinged pink with blood. I removed it carefully, documenting the brand and size, and then doing the same with her underwear.
I turned on my playlist to fill the empty space. Nat King Cole came out from the speakers and I hummed along to “Nature Boy” as I collected every piece of debris that still clung to her body and put it in a sterile tray.
I took her body temperature, which didn’t mean much since she’d been submerged in water, but her body wasn’t badly decomposed like someone who’d been in the water for weeks, and she was only slightly bloated. I had some other suspicions about her death as well, but I wouldn’t know for certain until I cut her open. And I’d be able to narrow the window of time of death from her organ decomposition.
“Thirteen stab wounds,” I said, meticulously noting them on the body chart. I measured each one in length and depth. “One weapon. Serrated edge. Whoever killed you was very angry. Each one got a little deeper. It got a little easier every time they stabbed you.”
She had abrasions on her hands and feet, her cheeks, knees, hips—all consistent with her trip down the river. But there was a contusion along her left jaw—a discoloring of green and purple—consistent with a blow to the face that was most definitely perimortem.
Once I finished with her exterior, I took x-rays, and then I turned off the music and turned on my recorder so I could make notes without taking the chance of dropping my pen in an open cavity.
It wasn’t long after I’d cut her open that my suspicions were confirmed. Official cause of death was not the thirteen stab wounds in her chest and stomach that had somehow managed to miss major arteries that would’ve caused her to bleed out quickly.
I collected a sample of water and mud and algae from her lungs and labeled them. Cause of death was drowning. She was still alive when her killer had thrown her in the river. After the body dies and oxygen stops flowing to the brain, we go through what’s called autolysis. We literally start to self-digest and our cells start eating themselves from the inside out. Even with her being submerged in water and not having an accurate body temp, I knew she’d probably been dead somewhere around thirty to sixty hours.
There wasn’t a lot to put in Jane Doe’s file. I knew she was unmarried and had never given birth. I knew she was at least twenty-three years old because her sacrum was fused together. I knew she’d broken her leg as a child and it had been expertly set and healed properly. I knew she was either a student or worked at a desk job from the curvature of her neck and spine—she was someone who spent long hours at a desk or computer—but she also spent time in the gym based on her musculature. And I knew she’d been violently stabbed and tossed into the river like a piece of trash, where she’d eventually died.
I was hoping Jack would be able to tell me more.
I’d lost track of time, so I was surprised when I heard someone keying in the code and opening the heavy reinforced door upstairs.
“I suppose I should thank you for the hands-on experience,” Lily called out. “But I’m not there yet.”
“Understandable,” I said.
“I will say it’s easy to stay skinny in this job,” Lily said. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to eat for another couple of weeks.”
“As long as you can still drink water, you should be able to live without food for approximately fifty to seventy days,” Sheldon said. “Angus Barbieri holds the record for going three hundred and eighty-two days without food. He lived on tea, soda, and vitamins. But he was Scottish, so maybe that had something to do with it.”
“Thanks, Sheldon,” Lily said. “That’s good information in case I want to choose a slow and painful way to die or beat a world record.”
I hid my smile and turned the music down as they tromped down the metal stairs like a couple of kids coming home from school. Sheldon was my assistant at the funeral home. He was brilliant on the mortuary side of the business. His people skills…lacked.
He trailed after Lily like a lost puppy. I could tell by the look on his face he wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic about choosing to die a slow and painful death. Sheldon was an acquired taste. He was a thirty-year-old man who lived at home with his mother and looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. He wore Coke-bottle-thick glasses, had a comb-over, and he was the champion of useless trivia.
“Crime scene guys are finished too,” Lily said. “Some of the buckshot is in our remains, so we’ll need to get that back over to ballistics as soon as we can. But we got everything.” Lily patted the box she carried before setting it on the table. “You wouldn’t believe some of the places we found brain matter. It’s crazy what buckshot can do to soft tissue.”
“I didn’t throw up,” Sheldon said.
“Always a step in the right direction,” I told him. “The crime scene techs hate that.”
“I’m going back upstairs,” he said abruptly. “The viewing rooms will be open soon.”
“Hey, I heard back from the gravediggers,” I told him as he went back upstairs. “They were able to get the graves dug before the weather came in, but their excavator got stuck in the mud in the cemetery, so I’m sure you’ll hear complaints from Mrs. Lichner that we should have covered the excavator with flowers so it didn’t ruin her graveside backdrop.”
“I don’t like that woman,” Sheldon said. “She keeps patting the top of my head every time she asks for something. I have sensitive follicles. I had a dream last night I pushed her into the grave on top of her husband.”
“Did he push her back out?” Lily asked. “He probably wants some peace in the afterlife.”
I laughed and pulled Steve Hargrove out of the refrigeration unit to go through the preliminaries of the autopsy.
“Why don’t you start with the skull,” I told Lily. “Don’t remove any particles or buckshot yet. Just see what pieces of the skull we have and get them laid out. And you pick the music.”
