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As I conduct my examination of the body, I can hear my physician sister’s voice, huffing about how I’m not a medical doctor and certainly not a medical examiner. I’ve had April’s voice in my head for my entire life, and it has always been a voice of criticism, not unlike my father’s and sometimes my mother’s.The steady barrage of “not good enough.” Not smart enough, not driven enough, notsingularenough. The last was most important. Oh, I was smart and I was driven, but compared to them, I was a very ordinary sort of above average.
Now, hearing April’s voice, I don’t hear criticism. I hear… well, I just hear April. My sister has come to realize she’s on the autism spectrum, a late-in-life discovery that she has embraced because it helps so much of her experience make sense. It also helps me to understand her. April’s words would be partly rebuke, but also an excuse to let her leap into the investigation.
“Wish you were here, April,” I murmur as I check Penny’s pockets.
She will be, eventually, but for now we are back to where we often are in our investigations, with me performing the role of coroner, pulling on what I learned growing up in a household of medical professionals.
Her pockets contain one used tissue and one empty condom wrapper, which really makes me hope the tissue was used for nose-blowing. I bag both.
I place the items into baggies. Then I look at her hands again. I’ve already examined the nails and noted that they seem clean. There’s a cut on one hand that could mean she at least raised it to defend herself, but the lack of broken nails or tissue in her nail beds suggests she didn’t have a chance to do more.
I hunker back on my haunches and consider. Except she did fall. We know that from the handprint on the ground near the moose encounter.
Could she have been wearing gloves? It’s cool enough at night for light ones. If she’d worn gloves, whoever buried her might have removed them, correctly interpreting they could carry trace materials.
I record a note into Dalton’s phone. Then I remove Penny’s jacket. As soon as I do, I know she wasn’t the one who zipped it up, despite the chill. The front of her T-shirt has been sliced, the weapon cutting into her abdomen. Blood soaks the bottom half of her shirt.
I check her jacket more carefully. There’s some blood on the inside, but not a lot, and no obvious traces on the outside. I fold the jacket and put it carefully into a second bag. Then I pull up the bottom of Penny’s shirt.
I try to estimate the wound length. I remember I have Dalton’s cell phone, which means I have an actual ruler—we’d downloaded an app and calibrated it. The wound is five and a half centimeters long. I take a photo. Then I use a wooden matchstick to prod open the slice. Maybe a centimeter deep, going just beyond a light layer of fat into the muscle.
I roll up Penny’s shirt. I don’t remove it—we won’t want to drag her naked body through the brush. I’m looking for more torso injuries. None on the front. I’ll need Dalton’s help to check her back.
Next I peel down her jeans. I have them to her thighs when I stop. There’s a deep slash across her left thigh. The depth and the position make me wonder whether it severed the artery. If so, there’s no blood, not until I look closer and see smears, as if someone cleaned it away.
I check her jeans. No, I hadn’t missed a slice in the fabric. They’re whole.
“Makeshift stretcher ready,” Dalton calls down. “How’re you doing?”
“I found two cuts from a sharp instrument. One’s across her abdomen, and the other—deeper—on her thigh. The one on her torso went through her T-shirt, and then someone zippedup her jacket to cover it. The one on her leg didn’t go through her jeans, meaning she wasn’t wearing them. I also found an empty condom wrapper.”
“Huh.”
“That suggests she was in her T-shirt when she was attacked. She may or may not have been wearing panties, but she was definitely half naked.”
“Huh.”
“The leg wound may have pierced the femoral artery. It’s in the right general area. No blood, though. Not under her body or on her jeans. There’s a smear, as if she was washed up.”
“And the torso?”
“That bled through her shirt, but the jacket was put on after it was done bleeding. That’s definitely not the cause of death, though.”
“So she bled out?”
“Mmm, possibly? That’d be an April question. Or a question for Yolanda’s on-site medic, if he has that kind of training.”
I turn back to Penny and continue examining her. “I never asked about the person you were chasing.”
“Not much to tell. I didn’t get close enough for a good look. They went to ground maybe a half mile from here. I was trying to figure out where they were hiding when Storm came.”
“I presume ‘they’ means you didn’t get close enough to guess at their sex.”
“I caught a glimpse. I’d lean toward male, but it could have been a stocky woman. All I saw was a dark jacket and jeans.”
“Any kind of hat?”
“Yeah. Looked like a ball cap.”
