Thrill Kill (Matt Sinclair #2) - Brian Thiem Page 0,7
done the external, but I wanted to point some things out to you before I proceed.” He pointed to a white line running through the lightly charred flesh on her stomach. “This is a Caesarian scar.”
“She had a baby?”
“There’s no way to know if she gave live birth or not, only that she had the surgery,” Gorman said, as if it were obvious. “It’s well healed, so her pregnancy could have been a number of years ago. If you look at the neck, you can see some abrasion of the skin, apparently caused by the rough fibers of the rope that was used to suspend her from the tree. But what you don’t see is more interesting.”
“The absence of ligature marks?”
“Precisely. The abrasion marks might appear to be ligature marks to the uninitiated, but they are clearly postmortem. She was hung after she was dead. There is some bruising on the neck, which is consistent with manual strangulation, but it’s doubtful that was the cause of death. I’ll know more when I open her up. I also examined the burn marks on her body and concluded they occurred after she was dead as well. They occurred when the body was in an upright position, as indicated by the rising flame marks in the skin that are pointing toward the head. Therefore, my preliminary assumption is there was some degree of struggle, at which time she was manually choked. She was then shot in the head, which caused her death. Next, her body was suspended from the neck, and finally, it was burned.”
Sinclair watched as Gorman opened the chest cavity with a Y-shaped incision across the chest. He stepped aside to let his assistant move in and cut through the ribs and breastbone with long-handled pruning shears. Even though Sinclair had attended countless autopsies, the crunch of bone still made him wince. Gorman lifted off the breastplate, took blood samples from the thoracic cavity, and removed the organs. He examined each one carefully before cutting off pieces and placing them in marked containers. He used the shears to cut through the pelvic bone and spent several minutes examining that area.
He recorded long medical descriptions into a recorder that hung on a swivel above the table, then turned to Sinclair and summarized. “She was in excellent physical condition. Excellent muscle tone and low body fat indicates a healthy diet and some sort of vigorous exercise program. Liver, heart, and lungs appear healthy. There’s no damage to the outer layer of the vaginal canal or mucosa, despite the insertion of the piece of clothing several inches into the canal. I conclude that no instrument was likely used, because if one had been, some tearing would have been likely. I found no indication of semen, but I’ll collect samples for examination. The burns in the pubic region definitely occurred postmortem.”
Gorman cut into the neck tissue along the line where the rope had rested. “As I suspected, there’s no underlying tissue damage, which means the victim was dead when the constriction around the neck by the rope occurred.” He cut into two purplish bruises on the front of her neck and slowly dissected the windpipe, closely examining the throat and neck region. “Someone strangled her with their hands. Most likely from the front, with the thumbs pressing into the larynx and thyroid cartilage, which fractured the hyoid bone. That injury may have eventually led to her death if the muscles and tissue swelled and cut off her air supply, but it appears the bullet ended her life before that occurred.”
He looked at the bullet wound with a magnifying glass and snapped a half dozen photographs with a digital camera equipped with a macro lens. “There’s no indication of fouling in the tissue of the wound, nor any on the skin around the wound. I do, however, see signs of stippling on the skin.”
No experienced pathologist would estimate the range of a gunshot based on his examination of the body alone, but Sinclair could tell from the wound that it was not a press contact, where the gun muzzle was touching the victim. Likewise, the absence of fouling—soot or residue from burned gunpowder—indicated that the gun was probably at least six inches away, assuming the weapon was a medium-powered handgun. Stippling, also called tattooing, resulted from unburned gunpowder embedding in the skin around the wound and seldom occurred beyond two feet. But without knowing what kind of gun and ammo was used, he could only estimate