A Fugitive Truth: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,47

like other people do when they see a basket of kittens.

“I suppose you could look for defensive wounds,” I mused out loud. “Bruises or scratches, right?”

“Ooo-eee, bright girl! Yes, yes, yes…but!” Dr. Moretti exclaimed, lobbing the ball right back to me, caught up in the spirit of the game as she saw it. “But! The body can get real banged up, scraping along the bed of the water body during unconsciousness. You can even get weeds or gravel lodged in the mouth this way, if it happened in the great outdoors! It looks like a struggle when it’s just dumb luck!”

Heavens preserve me from Dr. Moretti’s brand of luck.

“Here’s the trick, though, Miss Smartypants. Look for material in the lungs! Water alone won’t tell you much, but if you find plant remains or gravel or other such trash in the lungs, then you can make a good case for murder.”

She sounded like she’d like to make a good case for murder and keep it as a pet. “Well, I won’t actually be looking myself—”

Dr. Moretti didn’t hear me, however, still caught up in her explication. “Still, it’s very iffy—even if you got none of those markers, you still might just have a killer who’s real quick and real strong. And stone-cold brutal. Man, when a person drowns, if they’re conscious, they struggle, hard, right to the end! It’s a desperate fight that takes a long, long time to lose. Minutes! You’d have to be one mean sonovabitch to hold someone under like that!” That fact awed her whereas all the others had just been interesting tidbits.

I mulled this over. “That helps me, I guess. I was just curious, and the police and coroner out here haven’t released any details yet—”

“Where are you? Monroe—that’s Redfield County? Well, I can’t say’s I blame you for being impatient,” Dr. Moretti said scornfully. “I know ‘Tigger’ Bambury and he’s even a bigger stiff than most of his patients. Oh, he knows his stuff, just no real feel for the subject, let’s say—”

All of a sudden, I had far too vivid an idea of what “a feel for the subject” might involve.

“—That it? I’ve got to go. Genius Ernie here is getting in deep and doesn’t know his gluteus maximus from his proximal radius—just put that Stryker down, Marcus Welby, Mother’s coming!—You can call again.”

“Thank—”

But the medical examiner had already hung up. I got the impression that not many people were welcome to call back, and I wasn’t certain that I could handle another exposure to that side of investigations. Dr. Moretti might know her stuff, but her lack of respect for the dead always made me cringe, particularly after I’d been trained for years to treat the human remains I might find with due dignity. No one should like her job that much.

I thought about what she’d told me as I walked back to the house to meet Brian. Once again I passed the place in the stream where I found Faith Morgan and I remembered what I’d seen that day. I hadn’t seen any sign of a struggle at all; I’d thought the leaves looked like a nest around her body. The stream was awfully shallow there, less than a foot deep, and Dr. Moretti’s words about alcohol and accidents came back to me with a surge of guilt: Maybe I’d been responsible in some way for Faith’s drowning…

C’mon, Em, stop it! Common sense spoke up, unexpectedly on my side for a change. You didn’t force her to drink anything, you didn’t tell her to go out roaming in the middle of the night without a coat or even stockings, and besides, what about her clean shoes? There was no way that she fell down that hill without getting mud all over them. You told the detective that you thought she was murdered and that’s still what you believe in your heart of hearts, so stop looking for even more trouble for yourself.

Even though I hadn’t got more than a lick of work done and, frankly, had got more questions than reassuring answers from my phone calls, I did feel a lot better than I had since Faith had died. My improving mood was bolstered when, just over the last hill, I saw Brian’s blue pickup crunching over the gravel to the parking lot behind the house. I waved even though there was no chance that he could have seen me. I picked up the pace a little, but enjoyed watching him get