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“Can you be more specific?” Maxasked.
“Typically an accident victim not wearing a seatbelt will have injuries over his or her whole body,” the doctor said. “In this case, Mr. Sterling had two fractures to the back of the skull and an injury to the knee consistent with his leg coming in contact with thedashboard.”
“How would his leg come in contact with the dashboard if he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt?” Abby asked. “Wouldn’t he have beenthrown?”
The question came from some part of her mind she didn’t quite have access to, a part of her mind that was still firing and making connections, that could discuss the details of her father’s accident with the clinical distance of abystander.
“Exactly my question,” Doctor Kowalski said. “And if he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, why were there no lacerations on his face, his arms? At the speed he was traveling, he likely would have been thrown from the car, or at the very least, thrown around inside thecar.”
“And he wasn’t,” Abbysaid.
“Not according to hisinjuries.”
“Which were at the back of his head,” Abbysaid.
The doctor nodded. “A strange place for impact given his position in the driver’s seat when he was found. And there’s one other thing.” He hesitated. “Your father had alcohol in his stomach. A lot ofalcohol.”
Abby shook her head. “My father’s been — had been — sober for fourmonths.”
“Normally, I would say that’s not much of a reassurance, but in this case, there’s an anomaly I can’texplain.”
“What kind of anomaly?” She was alert now, her mind sorting through the details of the conversation. There was a thread of expectation, an ominous anticipation that had every system of her body on highalert.
“Your father had an excessive amount of alcohol in his stomach,” Doctor Kowalski said. “But very little in hisbloodstream.”
Abby considered his words, trying to divorce herself from denial and expectation. It was hard to imagine her father breaking his sobriety, especially when things had been going so well, but it wasn’t unheard of: alcoholics fell off the wagon all thetime.
She needed facts, notemotion.
Emotion was always dangerous, and she had the strange feeling that that had never been more true than at thismoment.
“Are you saying my father had had a lot to drink right before the accident? Before it had time to hit his bloodstream?” sheasked.
“That was my first conclusion, but then I looked more closely at the police report.” He glanced down at the open folder in front of him. “We don’t know exactly how long your father’s truck was in the ravine before it was spotted, which makes it difficult to pinpoint the exact time of the accident, but we do know the cause of death was head trauma. We can assume that it happened during the accident, which gives us some indication of what time itoccurred.”
“Go on.” Abby was almost holding her breath, sensing another shoe about todrop.
“Based on factors discovered in the autopsy, we estimate the alcohol would have entered his stomach some time immediately before — or even after — hisdeath.”
Abby shook her head. “How is thatpossible?”
“My question exactly.” The doctor drummed his fingers on his desk. “Average absorption time for alcohol into the bloodstream is a minimum of about thirty minutes. The bottle recovered from the truck wasn’t large enough to account for the amount of liquid we found in the stomach, which means he would had to have started drinking before he left the ranch, where I understand heworked.”
“But the ranch is a half hour from where he went off the road,” Abbymurmured.
“And if he’d started drinking before he left, why hadn’t some of the alcohol hit his bloodstream,” Maxsaid.
It wasn’t a question. The details didn’t add up, plain andsimple.
“Are you saying…” Abby drew in a breath. “Are you saying someone forced alcohol on my father after theaccident?”
She had a flash of her father, battered from the accident that had sent his truck into a ravine on the side of theroad.
Someone coming upon him when he was hurt and needinghelp.
Someone hitting him over the head until he was dead orunconscious.
Someone forcing alcohol down his throat before leaving him to die alone in thedark.
