the distance from which it had been shot as somewhere beyond a few inches and less than two feet.
Gorman took a scalpel and made several deep incisions through the scalp, pealed the back of the scalp over the corpse’s face, and stepped back as his assistant cut through the skull with a high-speed electric rotary saw. Gorman carefully removed the skullcap, set it in a stainless-steel pan, and made a few cuts through the membrane to remove the brain. He probed the soft brain tissue with a finger, plucked out a copper-jacketed lead slug, and placed it in a plastic container. “Your firearms examiner can tell you for sure, but it appears to be a nominal thirty-eight caliber jacketed hollow point.”
Sinclair knew that could mean a 9mm, .38, .357 magnum, or .380, all very common calibers for handguns. Gorman took a stainless-steel probe and slowly worked it through the wound track in the brain until it came out the back. He held the brain up, shifted it until it was level, and looked at Sinclair. “From the location of the entrance wound, the bullet track, and where it came to rest at the back of the skull, I’d say the victim’s face was perpendicular to the barrel of the gun as well as close to ninety degrees laterally.”
Sinclair liked the manner in which Gorman explained his findings. Doctors with less experience would try to conclude how tall a shooter was based on the wounds or the direction the person was facing, but there were too many variables to come to quick conclusions. A shot that went directly into a victim’s forehead could result from both the victim and shooter facing each other or the victim being on her knees and the shooter standing and shooting from the hip, or it could just as easily result from the victim lying on the ground and the shooter standing directly over her and shooting downward.
“So, she was looking right at the gun, and it was up close and personal,” said Sinclair.
“That’s about all there is for you to see. If I discover anything else significant, I’ll give you a call. Good luck, Matt.”
*
Braddock was sitting at her desk typing on her computer when Sinclair walked into the homicide office. The office consisted of a large room containing eighteen small metal desks that had been purchased by the city when the Police Administration Building, or PAB, was opened more than fifty years ago. Walls were lined with metal file cabinets. A few windows overlooked Washington Street and the county court building across the street. On the opposite side of the room were two glass-walled offices, one of which belonged to the homicide lieutenant. The other had been converted into a soft interview room, a casual place to talk with family and cooperative witnesses. A table with chairs, a green vinyl-covered sofa, and a small end table with a cheap table lamp that had not worked in years filled the room. Toward the back of the main office were two metal doors that led to the other interview rooms—small six-by-eight rooms where Sinclair had spent countless hours trying to convince witnesses and killers to tell the truth.
“Was she alive when the killer lit her on fire?” Braddock asked.
Sinclair hung up his raincoat and suitcoat and poured himself a cup of coffee. “She died from the gunshot to the head and was hung and torched sometime later.”
“Thank God for that.”
“Before the gunshot, she was manually strangled hard enough to fracture the hyoid,” Sinclair said. “The gunshot was within a few feet.”
“Sounds like it was personal.”
Sinclair had come to the same conclusion. Other strangulation murders he had investigated were normally crimes of passion—committed during a sudden rage—rather than premeditated. But the firing of a bullet into Dawn’s head didn’t necessarily fit unless the killer just happened to have a gun on him and his anger totally engulfed him. Sinclair began running other possibilities and motives through his mind and finally realized how futile it was with the limited information he had so far.
Sinclair wrote the number ninety-two on a piece of paper from a memo pad, added today’s date and his and Braddock’s initials, and pinned it to the bulletin board. With only a few weeks left until the end of the year, it looked like the city would tally under a hundred murders for the year, something that had only occurred a few times in the last four decades. “I’m guessing the shooting took place somewhere