You'll Get Yours, page 5
He gently pulled back an eyelid of the body on the table and directed their attention to the mucous membrane that lined the inside of the eyelid and the forepart of the eyeball. They saw dark red specks, tiny hemorrhages.
“Here in the conjunctive, you can see the petechiae, and if we move to her neck, you can see bruising to the front of the neck. There is also broken cartilage.”
“Strangulation...” D’Arcy mused. “Was there evidence of sexual abuse?”
“Er...I’ve uncovered no evidence.”
McLaughlin and D’Arcy were surprised and relieved in equal measures.
“I thought...” McLaughlin stuttered. “With her being stripped to her knickers atop the cannon...”
“Aye,” Keedy conceded with a nod of the head. “The phallic symbolism of that cannon between her spread legs didn’t go unescaped. No, but. I myself am intrigued by the lack of signs of sexual assault. There’s no vaginal bruising or what have you in any event.”
D’Arcy lowered her eyes.
Keedy adjusted his glasses. “Just to cover all bases, but, I’ve sent the knickers off to the lab to see if there’s any foreign DNA. Who knows?”
“So this might be a sexual crime, after all?” D’Arcy asked with a frown.
“I’m afraid that’s out of my remit, Nancy. But we’ve to see if that is in fact the case. Perhaps the knickers will only have her own DNA on them.”
The detectives absorbed this for a moment, then Keedy continued.
“You can see here on the left side of her skull, there’s evidence of blunt force trauma. I gather there was first some sort of altercation during which she fought back. She received a blow to the head. It seems as if she was struck in the head with a heavy object which disorientated her, perhaps even knocked her out. It appears to have been quite a violent, sustained attack.”
McLaughlin and D’Arcy looked at him grimly.
“I’ve taken fingernail scrapings for possible secondary DNA from the attacker due to the defensive wounds. Though, as this attack seems well-planned, I suspect the perpetrator would have worn gloves, so that’s probably a dead end.”
“And what about fingerprints, doctor?” D’Arcy asked.
Keedy looked affronted. “Fingerprints, did you say? Pah! Nowadays, only those out of their minds with drink or drugs or uncontrollable rage make the rookie mistake of actually leaving fingerprints at the scene of the crime. Them bloody killers have been watching too many episodes of Line Of Duty on the telly as of late! Even some of the most dull-witted of them seem to know enough about forensics today to wear gloves and tightly fitting caps so that the DNA doesn’t spurt out of them like fountains.”
They all knew DNA didn’t quite work that way but, chastised, D’Arcy lowered her head.
Dr. Keedy walked over to a set of monitors displaying scans of the body.
“As for time of death, she’s still in an advanced state of rigor mortis, so less than 24 hours ago, but you can probably tell that yourselves from the absence of bloating and the like. Your woman was presumably on the cannon all night long, so exposed to relatively cold weather and however much rain had a chance to fall on her before forensics erected the tent around her, but it's unlikely that these external factors would’ve significantly altered the overall time frame. An examination of stomach contents gave me a better idea of time of death. Her last meal was consumed two or three hours or so before death. Undigested food particles suggest more of a snack than a meal, but I’ll reveal more later.” He raised his eyebrows, arousing their curiosity. But they wouldn’t dare interrupt. “Her body temperature, the stiffness of the body, the livor mortis all suggest she has been dead for around 10 to 12 hours.”
McLaughlin grunted. “So we’re looking at...?”
“Between nine and eleven last night, sir,” D’Arcy was quick to put in. “You talked about lividity at the crime scene, doctor.”
Keedy grinned.
“Aye.”
He walked back over to the body on the slab and turned Regina Steps’ body on its side. He indicated the woman’s back and the backs of her arms and legs with a theatrical flourish of the hand.
McLaughlin bent forward and slipped on his reading glasses. He could just make out a vague bluish-purple discoloration barely evident along the posterior and the victim’s legs and arms.
“The livor mortis patterns on the victim's body indicate that she had been lying on her back for a substantial amount of time before being placed in the seated position on the cannon. I suppose that makes sense. Sure, it would take an even greater headbin than the one we’re dealing with now to throttle your woman as she sat atop the cannon.”
McLaughlin and D’Arcy were intrigued. Lying where?
“And just what is this substantial period of time, man?” McLaughlin wanted to know.
“As you can see, the marks are not very pronounced. The first signs of livor mortis can be observed an hour or so after death and, by examining the depth and extent of the discoloration, I am of the opinion that she couldn’t have been lying like that for long, perhaps an hour or two before being placed on the cannon.”
As per, McLaughlin and D’Arcy exchanged another look. Was it during this hour that the perp had stripped Regina Steps to her undergarments?
“Now on to the wee surprises,” Keedy said.
McLaughlin and D’Arcy shifted weight, the excitement rising.
“First off, as you might have been able to tell from a glance, your woman’s gone and dyed her hair.” The pathologist grabbed a handful of the bedraggled, wiry, too-tight perm, and the officers could detect some blonde roots. “She’s gone from a quite light natural blonde—still at her age—to this rather unremarkable mousy brown shade.” He parted the stiff purplish lips. “And at some stage in the past, she had her teeth capped.”
McLaughlin and D’Arcy exchanged a look. That wasn’t cheap.
Keedy smirked. “The capping of her teeth seems to have been quite some time ago, perhaps twenty or twenty-five years ago. You can see some are a bit chipped, which happens over age.”
D’Arcy considered. “So she would have been in her early twenties when she had the procedure done.”
Keedy nodded. “Since then, however, she hadn’t taken good care of them. There’s evidence of bruxism, that’s teeth-grinding to you, and periodontal disease. Typical of drug users. If I was a betting man, I’d say cocaine. Your woman’s liver also shows some signs of alcohol abuse. A bit too fatty and enlarged for my liking, with a slightly irregular, nodular surface. But I suspect this alcohol and drug abuse might have been in the past. Fatty liver disease is reversible, and I believe the liver was healing itself. So, good on her. But then, of course, as she was healing herself, she was murdered.”
“She was indeed, aye. Poor soul,” McLaughlin said.
“Of more interest than all this, but,” Dr. Keedy said, his own excitement coming to the fore, “is that I’ve found evidence your woman had a wee bit of work done on her nose.”
There were murmurs as McLaughlin and D’Arcy peered now with interest rather than trepidation at the skull before them.
Keedy used the tip of his pen to indicate what he had discovered.
“Can you see these fine incision scars along the sides of the nostrils? That’s a telltale sign of a rhinoplasty procedure if ever I saw one. If you look at your woman’s nose, you can see it’s unnaturally symmetrical. And!” Keedy was grinning from ear to ear. He moved down from Regina’s face to her chest. “Our dear victim’s breasts have also gone under the knife.”
McLaughlin and D’Arcy’s heads were reeling. Keedy’s excitement was infectious.
“Take a look at the incision scars around the areolas and down the breast fold. They're a clear indication of a breast reduction surgery.”
“So, she wanted to go smaller, did she?” McLaughlin mused. D’Arcy’s jaw tightened.
“Aye, right you are, Liam. And if you look closely at the breast tissue, you’ll notice that it’s been reshaped and contoured. It’s firmer and has a more compact appearance than what you’d typically find naturally.”
D’Arcy gave up the pretense of noting everything in her app. The pathologist would give them a report with all the information, in any event. She slipped her phone in her pocket and asked, “Can you tell us when she had these procedures done?”
“It wasn't recent. The breast reduction appears to have been done around four or five years ago.”
“How can you possibly tell, doctor?”
“Truth be told, I had to do a wee bit of research myself. Apparently, the incision scars go through a process called maturation, where they change in appearance and blend in with the surrounding skin.”
“So,” McLaughlin mused, “what you are seeing tells you it's been four or five years?”
“Aye. The fully healed nature of the breast reduction appears to make it contemporaneous with the nose job.”
D’Arcy had a look of wonder on her face that didn’t go unnoticed by Dr. Keedy.
“It’s the marvel that is forensic pathology, so it is. Time leaves its mark on the body, and we can read those marks if we know where to look.”
“You're the bloody marvel, Harley,” McLaughlin said.
“Now let’s move on to the next wee surprise. I’m sure you are wondering just how your woman’s thumb was held in place in her mouth. If the perpetrator had done it just on some deranged whim, the thumb would most certainly have fallen out of the mouth. The effects of gravity, you understand. But I’m of the opinion he,” his eyes flickered toward D’Arcy’s; he knew her well, “if I may, he must have wanted that thumb to be in her mouth when she was found.”
Regardless of the gender-specific language, D’Arcy’s eyes were shining over the tops of her lenses.
“Why would that be so important, do you think?” she asked.
“That’s your department, not mine. But important it must have been. To position the thumb in the mouth like that, he would have had to wait until rigor mortis set in. He’d have had to prop her arm up somehow, perhaps hold her arm in that position, her thumb in her mouth, and let’s not forget keep the jaw in place also—I’m sure he didn’t have more than two hands—for the few hours it would take rigor mortis to set in, adjusting the hand, thumb, jaw and lips as they went through the slight variations of the different stages of rigor mortis running their course. It would be extremely difficult in practice to achieve this. He found an ingenious way to get the effect he wanted, but.”
Keedy paused for effect.
“Go on then, man!” McLaughlin urged. “Tell us how he did it!”
A slight smile crossed the pathologist’s face as the officers leaned toward him.
“The mad bastard superglued her thumb to her tongue.”
“You’re joking!” McLaughlin wailed.
D’Arcy seemed bewildered.
“God’s honest truth. I had to use a scalpel to detach the thumb from the orifice. If you take a look at her lips again,” he pulled them open for the detectives to see, “you can still see the remnants of the glue. And look at the state of her tongue. You can see where I’ve pried the thumb free. And look at her thumb.”
Sure enough, the thumb was covered with glue residue.
“Rather resourceful,” Keedy said. “Now, of course, it’s up to you to figure out why this headbin of ours would want to engage in that type of madness.”
The three stood there for a moment in the silence of the examination room.
“Well, Harley,” McLaughlin said, and Keedy could tell he was on the verge of making his exit.
“But, no, no, no,” Keedy said. “I’ve not finished yet.”
Their eyes widened.
“You’ve more for us?”
“Aye, indeed,” Keedy trilled. “In fact, all I’ve done so far is build up to the two most exciting finds. Saving the best for last, as it were.”
“Out with it, man!”
Keedy nodded toward a large stainless steel tray next to the slab on which Regina Steps’ body lay. It was empty now, but the detectives could detect a greasy film and a vomit-like stench that made them want to do just that.
“As I indicated before,” Keedy continued, “I examined her stomach contents. I’ve since transferred them to that specimen jar over there.” He indicated a jar filled with liquid and mush. “That’s mostly stomach acids and what have you. I found the remnants of partially digested food. By examining the consistency and composition, I concluded that the victim had consumed a meal approximately two hours before her death.”
“Yes? And?” D’Arcy wanted to know.
“There was an absence of any other significant food particles, so this was the last supper the poor woman had. The distinctive shape and texture of the remnants made it easy to identify with ninety-eight percent certainty. But then I came across one item in her stomach that ratcheted up the certainty to one hundred percent.”
As Keedy went to his desk, McLaughlin muttered under his breath to D’Arcy, “Lord help me, he’ll soon be joining Regina on that slab if he doesn’t get a bloody move on and tell us what the woman ate.”
D’Arcy looked away.
Keedy stepped forward, holding out a sealable plastic container toward them.
“Ta-dah!” he chirped.
They squinted at the container.
D’Arcy gave a sharp intake of breath.
“Is that...?”
“Aye. Your woman swallowed an unpopped kernel of popcorn. Unlike their, er, popped cousins, they are quite hard and resistant to digestion. It doesn’t take a detective to tell where your woman probably spent the night before she was murdered. Unless, of course, she bought her own popcorn at the Sav-U-Mor or what have you and popped it in the microwave.”
There was the Brunswick Moviebowl, of course, but there really was only one main cinema in town...
“The Omniplex!” D’Arcy exclaimed. “Down the Strand Road. And right beside the Quayside parking garage, sir.”
“And the city walls, D’Arcy,” McLaughlin added.
Keedy was beaming. “You can thank me later. A bottle of 18-year-old Glenmorangie will do the trick nicely, ta.”
“In your dreams, man,” McLaughlin snorted. “You know the salaries we’re on.”
“And!” Keedy raised his index finger. “If your hearts can handle it, I’ve one more discovery to fill you in on.”
He saw their looks, surprised and grateful at the same time.
“The gift that keeps on giving, so I am, aye?”
He reached into the pocket of his lab coat and pulled out a small plastic forensic bag. It was labeled with the relevant procedural information.
They peered at the bag, trying to detect what was inside.
“I retrieved five strands of foreign hair from the woman’s body, various locations, one on the foot, one on her back, and so on. If you look closely, you can see it’s jet black. Definitely not hers. And they’ve got their roots still, so a greater chance there’ll be some DNA traces.”
McLaughlin and D’Arcy couldn’t believe their luck. Could it be as easy as this? Had the perp slipped up? Was the murderer within their grasp?
“I’m gobsmacked,” McLaughlin said.
“Yes,” D’Arcy said. “Me too.”
Keedy nodded.
“A wild daft mistake. For all your perpetrator’s efforts to remain unknown, I fear he’s gone and dropped the ball. Of course, I’ll fast-track the strands, and soon may the bubbly flow.”
McLaughlin and D’Arcy left the morgue with a spring in their steps.
CHAPTER 7
DC LYONS HAD SUNK INTO the passenger seat of DC Cahill’s grotty Kia Niro compact with slight reluctance. His posture was now stiff in silent protest against the vehicle as they made their way from the station to the Rocking Mermaid, the pub near the city walls. But he kept his mouth shut. Hens seemed a good lad, struggling a bit with all the rules and regulations of the team, aye, but hadn’t they all at the beginning? There was no use alienating the lad by telling him he thought his car was shite.
Rain spit at the car from all angles as Cahill sped down the Strand Road. The Kia’s windshield wipers squeaking in protest set Lyons’ whitened teeth on edge. To add to his discomfort, something odd was now playing from a streaming radio station from Cahill’s smartphone on the dashboard. Cahill had clicked it on the moment he started the car. It sounded like some salsa disco monstrosity from the seventies.
Lyons looked out of the corner of his eye, and Cahill was tapping his hand on the steering wheel along to the music. Lyons was taken aback. Cahill didn’t seem the type... He’d have thought the lad would be into grime or some such, the music of the day at least.
To make himself feel better, Lyons flicked down the sun visor and checked himself out in the vanity mirror. Blocking out the music, he gave himself a sly grin. He smoothed his mustache and ran a hand through his quiff. Not for the first time that day, he thought, Oh, you handsome devil, you.
“A steaming pile of shite,” Cahill muttered.
“Pardon?!”
“This case, I’m on about. I’ve a feeling we might be collecting our pensions before we ever solve it. My head’s spinning from it all.”
“Och, have faith, Hens. McLaughlin’s the best on the force. And we’ve Hawkins and her computer skills. And D’Arcy,” Lyons had to admit.
The smartphone speaker strained at the sudden burst of double bass drums, rapid-fire guitar riffs and growled vocals, which didn’t appear to be in any English Lyons knew.
“Dear God, man, what station from hell have you got that set to?”
Cahill beamed proudly and sat straighter in his seat. “Och, I don’t know if you know this about me, Tom, I suppose I haven’t let on to anyone in the station yet, but I’m a bit of a, er, chart enthusiast, me. A music freak.”
A spotty, pudgy, ginger music trainspotter. The poor lad, Lyons thought. He’d have to take him for a lads’ night out and show him the ropes, teach him how to find a woman before he got any older and all hope disappeared. Take him on a clothing shopping spree while he was at it.
