At that, Kate whistled. “So if no autopsy was done, and she died at the scene, it should have been just put down to natural causes.” She shook her head. “But they didn’t do that either.” Noting Smidge had signed the report, she picked up the phone and called his office. When he answered, as cranky and as testy as always, she smiled because that was a man after her own heart. Being bitchy just made her happy. “It’s Kate Morgan,” she said in a snappy voice.
“I’ve got nothing for you. If you’d stop sending bodies down here, I could actually get to them.”
“I hear you. Five years ago was another vehicular accident with a bike rider. Not the same block, just down a little bit farther.”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“No cause of death,” she said.
“What the hell has that got to do with me?”
“At the time, the investigators initially thought it was impact with the vehicle, but you found no obvious trauma to the body, right?”
“Right. I remember that case. That one puzzled me too.”
“So you could pull up nothing for it?”
“Well, if I said that, I said that,” he said in a cranky tone.
“Right, I get it. So, how is it that somebody dies from absolutely no sign of death?”
“The heart stops,” he snapped. “It happens.”
“But it wasn’t a heart attack?”
“No, and sometimes it happens like that. For one reason or another, we just don’t really know.”
“She had no underlying condition, but her heart stopped, and she just keeled over for no reason. That’s the best we could come up with?” Kate asked.
“It’s an open case, I believe.”
“It’s not closed in the sense that no cause of death was identified, so it hasn’t been closed because you didn’t decide if it was fromunnaturalcauses.”
“I couldn’t say either way. When I was pressured to put something down, that’s what I chose to put down.”
“Interesting,” she murmured.
“Don’t go calling me on that one,” he snapped. “On this one, however, I found a cause of death.”
“So, do we know that the hole in the back of her head caused her death?”
“Yes. It goes right into her brain.”
“So, theoretically, could she have ridden a little bit forward, even with that in her head?”
“Yes,” he said.
“How far?”
“I don’t know. Probably up to fifty, sixty, even seventy meters. I mean, we’ve had people walk into the hospital with knives sticking out of their skulls. So the self-preservation ability of the human body is amazing. Our cyclist could easily have been shot way down the road, and, not knowing what the hell happened to her, she faded more and more as she got to that intersection.”
“Do you know for sure that the vehicle did not cause her death?”
“Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “It did not cause her death.”
“Fine, because we have the driver. He came in and confessed.”
“Confessed to what? Hitting her?”