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“I’m on a Billie Eilish kick,” Lily said. “But sometimes her songs can be real downers, so we might have to change to Taylor Swift.”
Lily was a rare unicorn. She was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, and I knew she’d modeled some in high school and college. She was close to six feet tall and had a long fall of black hair that reached the middle of her back. Her eyes were vivid blue and her body looked like it came from a Kardashian’s plastic surgeon. She had looks, but you’d never know by talking to her that she thought she had looks. Her kindness and humility were right up there with her brains. She had it all.
I remembered my first year of medical school, and I didn’t recall having it together like Lily did. She was working, going to school full-time, and she was dating a man seventeen years older than she was. Twenty-three-year-old me had been an underachiever compared to Lily.
“Right,” I said, not having a clue about either artist, but typing their names into my phone to make a new playlist. I put it on low volume in the background so I could still give a verbal assessment as I did the autopsy.
I pulled on a fresh pair of gloves and used the magnifier to go over every inch of Coach Hargrove’s clothes. I removed his shoes and bagged them, noting the spatter and taking a swab to make sure the blood was his. I removed his wedding ring and watch, bagging them so they could be returned to his wife. And then I removed the remainder of his clothing and hung them up inside a compartment with a tray at the bottom. I pressed the button and a low hum sounded as the clothes gently vibrated. I’d check it later to see if any particles or evidence had fallen into the tray.
From the neck down, Coach Hargrove looked like a perfectly healthy fifty-nine-year-old man. I took x-rays, and then I pulled the magnifier down and went over every inch of his skin, looking for something that indicated he was lying on my table because someone else put him there. I swabbed his hands for gunshot residue and it came back positive. Coach Hargrove was definitely holding the weapon that killed him. Not a good sign.
He was in great shape, there was nothing abnormal in his blood work, and his organs showed a man who took care of himself and ate right. He was someone who should’ve had a long life ahead of him.
“Coffee, raisins, wheat, brown sugar and milk in his stomach,” I said.
Lily squenched her nose. “Raisin Bran? Not what I’d choose for my last meal.”
“Me either,” I said, taking out organs and weighing them, and then putting them back.
“I keep finding these weird flecks,” Lily said a few minutes later. “Particles mixed in with the tissue. We must have scraped too hard and mixed fibers.”
I came over to the sterile metal table where she had Steve Hargrove’s brain, skull, and other fleshy pieces like his nose lined up and labeled.
“What do you mean flecks?” I asked, pulling down the overhead light so I could get a better view.
“It’s embedded in the occipital. It looks like red glitter,” she said. “I don’t know. It’s weird. Maybe there was glitter in the carpet?”
“Maybe,” I said, looking through the microscope. There were several shiny red flakes just like she’d said. “Grab an evidence bag and we’ll send these off to be analyzed. Have you found them anywhere else?”
“On that piece,” she said. “But I’m not sure what part of the skull it is yet. It’s fleshy. And brainy.”
“Parietal,” I said, turning the fragments carefully in my hand. “You can barely see the suture line.”
There was too much damage to the flesh around the pieces of skull I was holding. It was like holding a mangled piece of beef. I took the tweezers and painstakingly removed all the flecks I could find and dropped them in the bag Lily held open.
We spent the next couple of hours extracting buckshot from tissue and bone and then putting as much of Coach Hargrove together as we could.
“There’s still a good part of the skull that’s missing,” I said. “It was a twelve-pellet load of buckshot in the shotgun. We recovered eight pellets from his soft tissue. I’ll check with Jack to see if the techs picked up the remaining four. But the initial shotgun blast through the soft tissue of the underside of the chin means that those twelve pellets made soup out of Hargrove’s head. We’ve got pieces of flesh with shotgun residue, and swab tests on his right hand came back positive as well. So we know he was holding the weapon at the time it was fired.”
“Not looking good for anything but suicide,” Lily said.
“Yeah, but those red flakes are weird. And the flesh is too damaged. Let’s clean up the remaining pieces of skull and bone, strip the flesh, and then see what’s under there,” I told her. “While you do that, I’m going to run these things over to the crime lab.”
Lily grunted. “I don’t have anywhere else to be,” she said.
I stripped off my gloves and took off my apron and lab coat. “Yeah, I heard Cole got pulled in on the guy who got doused in gasoline and set on fire. That seems fitting for a full moon. But maybe he won’t be too late. The last I heard the guy survived.”
“That seems worse somehow,” she said.
“I can’t disagree,” I told her. “Text me if anything new comes up.”
Chapter Five
I’d lost track of time down in the basement, and I noticed it was past five by the time I got back upstairs and gathered all my things. The parking lot at the funeral home was full as the viewings for Merilee Walling and Bruce Lichner were well underway. The side of the funeral home with my office and the lab was blocked off from the viewing public, so I was able to slip out without notice.
It was still a couple of hours shy of sunset, but the sky was the same dark and gloomy gray it had been all day. The rain had let up a little so I could see other cars on the road as I made my way over to the sheriff’s office. I was assuming Jack would be there, but he could just as likely have been out on a call or dealing with the flooding.
Thoughts of flooding made me wonder if we’d be able to get to our own house, or if we’d be sleeping in the little room behind Jack’s office. Heresy Road was elevated, situated parallel on the cliffs overlooking the Potomac River. It was getting up to Heresy Road that was the problem.
