Maggie Larson pouted her lips. “Morbid, but possible.”
Dr. Larson backed away from the skull and allowed Dr. Colt to take her spot. He, too, pulled surgical loupes from his overstuffed breast pocket and slid them onto his face. He was quiet for several seconds before he let out his characteristic “hmm.” Finally, Dr. Colt removed his loupes and dropped them back into his jacket pocket. He snapped off his gloves and rubber-band shot them into a garbage can across the room.
“Penetrating wounds of unknown etiology through the skull and dura and into the brain. Looking at the rest of the body and with Livia’s autopsy findings, he bled to death from these wounds. The inside lining of the skull is remarkable for left side blood-staining, indicating the victim never moved from a supine position after suffering these wounds. Put those conclusions in your report as well, Dr. Cutty. Make sure it’s detailed. Keep the cause of death as exsanguination. Manner, undetermined.”
“Undetermined?” Livia said. “I thought we were on the same page that this was a homicide.” Livia felt her bragging rights slipping away. The fellows fought each morning for the most interesting cases. A homicide was by far the best any of them had seen in their first two months. “Someone hit this guy with their car, and then . . .” Livia looked at Dr. Larson. “Drilled him in the head, or something. Dropped him in the bay when they were done with him.”
“We provide the facts, Dr. Cutty. The detectives sort them out. ‘Or something’ is not part of our survey or our vocabulary. Get his clothing to ballistics for analysis.”
Livia nodded.
“You did good work, Livia,” Dr. Colt said. “Sometimes, the findings point a strong finger at what exactly happened. Other times, they simply tell us what did not. This guy did not jump from any bridge, that’s what we know for sure. The rest is out of our hands.”
CHAPTER 4
In the following days, with help from the anthropology department, Livia discovered her non-jumper was approximately twenty-five years old. The body had not been vital for at least a year, and it had likely been in the water for only three days before the fishermen jigged it off the bottom. Police dredged the flats of Emerson Bay, a long sandbar popular to striped bass and sheepshead fisherman for the sudden depth change, and found near the site where Livia’s John Doe had been discovered a green tarp that had been tied by rope to four cinder blocks. Fibers from the rope matched evidence samples Livia had collected from the man’s clothing. Dr. Colt had also pointed to postmortem wounds—chafing to the muscles around the ankles and calves that Livia had originally missed. These, he explained, were the likely tie points for whoever tried to sink the body.
With help from the ballistics lab who analyzed the clothing, it was determined that the body had originally been buried. Soil analysis suggested the burial was in a place high in clay content and gravel. Adding weight to the burial theory, Livia described in her report two “shovel contusions”—a term coined by Dr. Colt, who suggested they trademark it—to the left upper arm. According to Dr. Colt’s analysis, the digger had become too aggressive during the excavation and stepped the pointed end of the shovel into the body instead of the dirt.
With no fingerprints available due to the state of decomposition, Livia relied on dental-path to do whatever they could to make a formal identification. It was the middle of October, three weeks after the body came to the morgue, before she heard anything. Livia was in her office completing paperwork on her morning case and preparing for afternoon rounds when Dennis Steers from dental-path poked his head in.
“ID’d your John Doe from last month,” he said.
Livia looked up from her work. “Yeah?”
“Homicide guys worked with Missing Persons and went back month to month. Your guy went missing last year. Reported by his landlord.”
“Landlord? No family?”
“I guess he was a bit of a drifter. MP detectives said his mother lives in Georgia and hadn’t talked to him in years. Didn’t know he was missing until she got the call.”
“That’s sad.”
Dennis dropped a thin file onto Livia’s desk. “Here’s what we have on him. Arrested just once, but had some detailed dental work completed a while back that allowed a positive ID.”
“Thanks, Dennis. I’ll be happy to get this off my desk.”
When he was gone, Livia pulled the file folder over to her and opened it. She saw in the top left corner a small square photo of a young, good-looking man. She read farther down and saw he had been reported missing in November of 2016.
Livia pulled out the death certificate to finalize her notes so it could be printed up and sent off to this young man’s mother in Georgia. Her first homicide was an interesting and challenging study, a case that required much guidance and one that taught her a great deal. Dr. Colt had apologized a half dozen times over the past month whenever he heard Livia was spending time on the case, either talking with the homicide detectives or preparing reports for Missing Persons or working with the ballistics lab on the soil analysis and cloth and fiber findings. It was her first clinger—a case that no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get rid of.
A life might end, Dr. Colt told her, but sometimes their cases live forever.
*