‘Clear signs of suffocation – face and neck puffy and dark red, petechiae numerous and fully developed. Wooden stool found tipped in doorway of closet indicates that subject stood on it to fasten the knot, then kicked it away. But not conclusive because stool could have been placed by anyone. Evidence of hanging ambiguous – subject was found suspended, but marks of strangulation – he’s not happy about the hanging groove, he went on and on about it. The hanging groove should be more pronounced, he says, with such a strong, slender rope as the one this victim was hanging on.
‘Also, the hyoid bone was not broken, which it often is by a hanging. Often but not always, he says we should remember. Especially with a short drop like the one she had in the closet. So … it appears possible the body was suspended after death – possible, but not certain.
‘On the other hand, the knot used to fasten the noose around the clothes pole is huge and clumsy, wrapped many times, the way an amateur or excited person would do it – consistent with self-inflicted death by hanging. And the edge of the hanging groove, at one point, was slightly puckered in the direction of slippage the cord would have taken when the weight of the body settled on it. He was proud of himself for noticing that, but to be honest I wasn’t sure I could see it.
‘Lividity evidence is not consistent – some blood settled in back and rear parts of arms, but also some lividity in soles of the feet.
‘Two puncture marks on upper left shoulder appear to match the footprint of the taser used by the Tucson Police Department. He was very unhappy that I hadn’t worn a taser, so he could match up the marks. I reminded him that’s for street patrolmen and he called Dispatch and got them to send a car. It was Byron, and you should have seen his face when … He wasn’t wearing his taser, he had to go back out to his car to get it. OK’ – as Delaney shuffled his feet impatiently – ‘yes, the marks matched. “Appeared to match” is how the doc said it – there was nothing he wasn’t prepared to question by then. Burn marks in those puncture wounds, by the way, indicate the jolt may have been sent more than once. Unless the puncture wounds were made by two hypodermic needles, in which case the burning might be due to whatever was injected. He’s having that tissue tested.
‘There’s a bruise at the base of the skull, indicating something soft but strong may have been pressed there for a minute or two while the victim was still alive.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like a fist, maybe? Or a large knot of some kind. The doc is sending out beaucoup samples of blood and tissue, of course,’ Ray said, ‘and he won’t reach any conclusions till they’re back. But for now, what he says is, “Don’t bet the farm on suicide. But don’t make up your mind to reject it, either.”’
‘Jesus,’ Delaney said, ‘I could have said that much without an autopsy.’
‘I kind of thought you might feel that way, so I asked him if he couldn’t give us a nudge in either direction. He got sort of offended and said, “I’m not going to tell you I know something before I know it.”’
NINE
Four-thirty … too late to go looking for Joey, Sarah decided. She walked around to Ollie’s desk and found him with Angela’s laptop, laughing quietly with his hand on his mouse.
Sarah asked him, ‘Finding any good stuff?’
‘Yeah, great old stuff. Did you ever get this dog email?’ He showed her a long message with pictures of dogs looking guiltily up at the camera. ‘The captions are priceless!’
‘You’re looking at dog videos? Have you lost your mind? You’re supposed to be looking for emails from Frank!’
Ollie looked sheepish, the way everybody does when they’re caught wasting time in the intellectual swamp of the internet. ‘I went looking for Ed’s email messages and I got distracted for a minute. So shoot me.’
‘OK,’ Sarah said, pretending patience. ‘Play FBI profiler for me and tell me all about Angela as a computer user.’
‘She’s just like my Aunt Kate – barely a computer user at all. It’s an old installation of Windows XP. The logon screen asks for a password but you can just hit Enter and it lets you in – she never bothered to set up a password. The machine has Microsoft Office on it but I can’t see that she ever created a document or saved a spreadsheet. Press the Outlook Express icon on the desktop and her inbox opens up. Almost every email she ever got is in that inbox, including the original Welcome to Outlook message. Nothing in the trash but some particularly nasty spam messages from random Russians. She read every joke email she ever got, but hardly ever forwarded one. Most of the junk email came from that clothing store owner she worked for. She had a very small circle of email correspondents.’