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I said, “Every kitchen has knives.”
“Hmm…interesting. The opportunistic attacks I’ve seen have tended to be frenzied and far less organized so yes, you’re making sense. In any event, whatever struggle took place was minimal, her defensive wounds were comparatively shallow. Now on to your male victim, still unidentified.”
Milo said, “Damn. His prints still haven’t matched anything?”
“Unfortunately, no.” Basia flipped the file open, read for several moments, and closed it.
“Apparently he’s got no criminal history or a job that required him to get printed. At this point, he’s John Doe Number Twenty-Three. But don’t despair, the interesting part is what his body tells us.”
Milo scooched forward, pad and pen at the ready.
Basia said, “The first thing I noticed was how atypical his wounds were for someone interacting with a motor vehicle, especially such a large one.”
“No damage except the head.”
“Exactly. When people confront an oncoming force of that magnitude, the tendency is for the body to fly upward and travel along the hood toward the windshield. That causes significant injury to the entire front of the body—knees, ankles, wrists, ribs, face. This gentleman had none of that, just, as you said, damage to his face, with a slight bias toward the right side. In addition to that, the photos I saw indicate relatively minimal damage to the van’s bumper, suggesting a single carom-like bounce. As if he’d been propelled toward the van.”
Milo said, “Pushed in front of it.”
“That was my initial assumption. Then as I continued to examine the body, something else interesting arose. In addition to the frontal damage, there’s a single crushing blow at the back of his skull, along the lower edge of the occipital bone. Just above the foramen magnum, where the spine enters the skull. With the major damage being frontal, I found that placement puzzling. How could he incur such serious frontal damage then bounce back and get in dorsally? Theoretically, I suppose it could be due to a fall backward after impact with the back of the head bouncing on the sidewalk. But there’s no scraping at all to the rest of his dorsal skull. The other theoretical possibility is he spun in some weird way and incurred damage to both front and back. But neither feels right to me, especially the spinning scenario.”
Milo scrawled rapidly. Basia waited until his pen paused.
“Another point of interest: The wounds look markedly different. The facial damage is raw and ragged and fits the shape of the section of the bumper that’s bloodstained. The rear wound is a single patch of broken skin surrounded by significant swelling out of which blood had leaked.”
“Leaked not spurted?”
“Exactly,” she said. “There’s all sorts of important stuff running through the foramen magnum. Arteries, membranes, ligaments, a major nerve. When I dissected I found no damage to any of that but there was major edema in and around the brain stem. That’s lower brain, it controls respiration.”
“A blow could be fatal,” said Milo.
“Easily. And quickly. At that point I began wondering if he was dead before he hit the van. Then the blood work from the kitchen and the driveway came in and that clinched it. Most of it was his, and the relatively sparse amount plus the low-impact dripping is consistent with a single, blunt-force impact that shut off his vital functions without causing extensive gushing. So the obvious question is, how did a dead person encounter the van?”
“Like you said, shoved into it,” said Milo.
Basia nodded. “Carried outside and flung. Possibly to obscure the fatal head wound.”
“Any idea what he was bashed with and where?”
“Where is easy,” she said. “Some blood trickle appeared close to the couch where he was sleeping and continued across the living room and into the kitchen.”
Milo said, “I didn’t see anything on the couch or the living room.”
“Not on the couch, near it. Consistent with being on his stomach asleep and hanging slightly over the edge. The reason you didn’t see itwas because it was faint—pinpoints. They grew progressively larger as the body was carried. But still, no major blood. Detective Reed is to be commended for noticing the spatter in the driveway.”
“One good blow but not a bloody attack.”
“But fatal nonetheless,” said Basia. “If you wanted to pick one spot to bash lethally, it would be right there.”
“Got it.”
Basia said, “You’re not surprised by any of this?”
“His not being the bad guy is one of the contingencies we considered.”
“Then good for you, it surprised me. You get a man versus van, you figure man versus van.”
She sighed. “Yet another humbling lesson in the evils of assumption. In terms of the weapon, the only thing I can tell you is it did its job without shattering the occiput. There is a certain finesse to that.”
