“Doctor,” Larkin pressed.
“All right, all right. Your Jane Doe measures approximately five foot three inches in length, and clocks in at a whopping sixteen pounds, postmortem,” Baxter began. “There’s no body mass estimation technique to accurately account for extremes such as emaciation or obesity, so I’m not able to provide an antemortem weight.But….” He set his hands far apart on the steel railing of the table, leaning forward and studying Larkin and Doyle over the top of his glasses. “Between us, if I made the assumption that her BMI was completely average, then based on the weight of her skeletal remains and estimated age, I’d put her around a hundred and ten to a hundred and thirty pounds.”
“What’s her age,” Larkin asked.
“Between fifteen and seventeen.”
“What?” Larkin asked with a hard inflection. “Are you sure.”
Baxter raised one eyebrow and said, losing the humorous tone from earlier, “Should I not be?”
Larkin crossed his arms and considered the mummified remains. The skin was flakey and leathery in appearance, discolored, and pulled taut over bone and remaining tendon. Her face had a sunken appearance—hollow cheeks, a flat nose where the cartilage had collapsed, and dipped lids still closed over eyes no longer there. She still had lashes. And there was something about that detail—something about its innocence and mortality—that struck Larkin as particularly devastating. “She was found inside the wall of a former peep show.”
“So sayeth the CSU detective who’d been crawling around in there,” Baxter replied.
“She was wearing a wedding ring,” Larkin added.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Detective. Her clavicle hadn’t begun fusing, which means she was very likely closer to fifteen years of age than seventeen.”
Larkin swore under his breath. He turned to Doyle and said, “This means we’re back to two separate victims. The woman in the video wasn’t a child.”
Doyle continued, “And if there’s any chance this girl was employed at the Dollhouse, she was undoubtedly using false identification of some kind.”
“The sham-fly,” Larkin concluded.
“Which means,” Doyle said as he turned his attention to Baxter. “We’ll definitely be needing that casting for a facial reconstruction.”
Baxter moved to the counter, picked up a box beside the sink, and held it out. “Fresh from the 3-D printer.”
“Thanks,” Doyle said, accepting it.
“You know how old married couples speak to each other in a secret language?” Baxter asked, motioning between the two. “That just happened.”
“Don’t say it,” Larkin murmured.
But Doyle smiled his beautiful, flirtatious smile, and said, “We’re work husbands.”
Larkin sighed.
“I proposed on one knee,” Doyle continued.
Baxter nodded meaningfully. “That’s hot.”
Larkin cut the two off. “Detective Doyle says the fabric that was found around her neck wouldn’t have been of sufficient strength for strangulation.”
“Well, her hyoid bone isn’t broken. Of course that doesn’t mean strangulation didn’t still occur, but the usual indicators we look for in an autopsy—subcutaneous desiccation or hemorrhaging at the nape and lymph nodes—I can’t check those when her muscle and tissue is drier than California.” Baxter heaved a sigh and added, “But I sent her for an MRI last night. I didn’t find any damage that would indicate cause of death being manual strangulation.”
“That was a fast turnaround,” Doyle said.
“She got the princess treatment,” Baxter explained, patting the girl’s arm with a gloved hand. He inclined his head in Larkin’s direction. “Word from the top is, if it’s got his name on it, it’s now considered a priority. Which meant Lawrence had to come in after he’d already changed into a pair of sweats and poured a very large glass of wine yesterday evening.”
Larkin ignored that. “If not strangulation, how did she die.”
Baxter offered a self-assured smile. “Come around the table.” He found a magnifying glass among the plethora of supplies and tools on the countertop as Larkin and Doyle moved to Jane Doe’s righthand side. He held the glass over the inside of the girl’s elbow and asked, “What do you see?”
Larkin didn’t lean down to inspect the mummified skin, but instead stared, unblinking, at Baxter. “A pathologist asking a rhetorical question.”
Doyle, meanwhile, stooped to study the inner arm. “He doesn’t like being asked questions he can’t answer… are these track marks?”
