“Well, they’re not supposed to,” he noted, with a smile. “Yet there has to be a little bit of leeway in what we do. This isn’t just a job for today. It’s a long-term gig for us.”
“Exactly.” She tossed back the last of her coffee, put down her cup, and said, “Let’s go.”
As they headed toward the morgue, they found parking in the back of the hospital and walked down to the basement via the tunnel, where the morgue was situated. She knocked on the doors of the offices, and, when there was no answer, she turned the knob and stepped through, but the rooms were empty. She rolled her eyes and headed down to where the real action was.
“You were really thinking he’d be in the office?” Rodney asked, with a grin.
“He’s never in his office, is he? But it’s before the rest of it, so you always think you have to start there.”
“I don’t know. I think I would just completely ignore offices at this point and head down to his little corner,” Rodney explained. And that’s what they did anyway.
When she stepped through the double doors, Dr. Smidge looked up and frowned. “Gown up. Make sure you scrub down well.”
She walked over, scrubbed her arms, put on a gown, grabbed gloves, and headed toward him. Smidge only ever requested this when he wanted her to see and to touch the body. She knew that Rodney would stay a little farther back because he couldn’t stand this part. As she stepped up to the autopsy table, Smidge pulled the sheet off the victim. She sucked in her breath.
“What do you notice?” he asked her.
She shot him a look. “One of the first things is,” she stated boldly, “now that she’s been washed, what was done to her is so damn clear.”
“Well, it’s clear, but it’s not clear,” he argued. “You see the visible trauma without all the blood everywhere.”
“The blood was bad enough,” she murmured. “At the scene it looked horrific. Now it’s like cold and clinical.”
He nodded. “Which is a good thing because it allows us to see more. So what do you see?”
Kate studied the body, pointed out the wrists, with fractures, the ankles both broken. A shin fracture had a bone showing. The breast area she had to force herself to look at. “Completely cut off as a circle,” she noted, peering forward. “It’s a weird hollow though.”
“Yeah, that’s what they look like after breast implants.” Her gaze immediately went to the second one and then back to the first one, and he nodded. “She had both breasts done.”
“Have you taken out the other one?”
“Not yet.” He pointed. “Does it look like it’s out?”
She could feel herself flushing because, of course, it wasn’t. “You can ID her based on those, right?”
“Yep, when I get there,” he stated. “What else do you notice?”
“Well, her throat.” She paused. “But the wound looks odd. That didn’t do more than cause her a lot of pain and possibly knock her out, but it’s not the cause of death.” She pointed to the higher-up slash.
“Vocal cords,” he noted quietly.
“Right, so we were on target with that one.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Therefore, she couldn’t have screamed.”
“Any idea when?”
“Probably midscream,” he stated boldly, “realizing that he would have to minimize the noise.”
“Or first off?”
Dr. Smidge shrugged. “Either way, it’s effective.”
“And doesn’t she then feel like she’s drowning in her own blood?” she asked.
“Absolutely, but she would have still been alive.”
Kate winced. “Even with the heavy blood loss from all these injuries?” She shook her head. “The human body is amazingly resilient.”