Deadly Cry (DI Kim Stone #13) - Angela Marsons Page 0,21
cause of death, Keats would have taken samples from each organ and sent them to the lab for testing.
‘Normal,’ Keats said out loud.
Just like everything else, Penn thought. So far, there had been nothing not normal about Katrina Nock. She’d been in decent physical shape and all major organs had been functioning correctly. She’d never smoked, had no broken bones, good teeth and had eaten a bowl of cereal for breakfast.
Samples of blood and urine had been taken for toxicology to determine drugs, medicines and other natural body chemicals, but Penn didn’t expect anything out of the ordinary there.
Clean was the word that kept going through his mind. Everything about it was clean. The murder itself had been clean: confirmed by Keats as a broken neck. He had explained that when the neck breaks near the skull, three things happen – you can’t move, you stop breathing and your body loses the ability to control your heart – resulting in instant death.
‘But it’s not as easy as they portray it in the films,’ Keats had explained. ‘The neck bones and muscles offer some resistance, so we’re talking considerable physical strength to execute this method of murder, if you’ll excuse the pun.’
Penn had seen the fatal injury before in traffic collisions, but never as a result of murder.
There was no blood, no messy wounds, no bruises, no suffering, no emotion. It was almost like a different class of murder: polite, well-mannered, genteel. Without excessive violence. There was no mess.
‘Okay, Penn, I’m going to close her up now,’ Keats said, disturbing his thoughts.
Penn reached around to remove his face mask.
‘Okay, Keats, thanks…’
‘Didn’t say I was finished with you yet, did I?’ he asked, expertly bringing the flesh back together with the sailmaker’s needle and the heavy twine, which was much coarser than normal stitches. The end result always reminded Penn of a baseball.
‘Eager beaver,’ Keats said, glancing his way.
Oh, how Penn loved the cat-and-mouse games they played.
‘I’m a bit pushed for—’
‘It’s this I’m not sure about,’ Keats said, laying the needle onto the flesh that covered the rib cage. He went back to the scratches he’d noted on the left wrist close to Katrina’s watch.
‘I thought you said they were probably marks left by the watch,’ Penn questioned. It was the first thing he’d noted during the procedure, and Penn had written off their relevance.
‘It was definitely my first thought that at some point this girl was grabbed around the wrist, but I’d like to take another look.’
Penn watched as the pathologist took out a hand-held magnifying glass and peered closely at the scratches, even though they were obvious to the naked eye.
‘Hmm…’ he said, viewing the flesh at every conceivable angle.
Penn knew better than to prompt the man until he was finished, and so looked over his shoulder. He had agreed that the few small sticks and arcs had come from rough handling of the watch and had attached no further significance to the finding.
‘Hmm…’ Keats repeated. ‘I appear to have been mistaken.’
‘I’ll be sure to let the boss know,’ Penn quipped.
Keats peered over his glasses before continuing.
‘It’s no longer my opinion that these scratches were caused by the watch.’
Penn waited.
‘I believe these scratches were inflicted post-mortem.’
Penn considered his words. Scratches or marks received before the attack meant nothing. Wounds suffered during the attack spoke volumes about the struggle, physicality, physical ability and positioning. Wounds inflicted after the crime meant something else entirely. They were a message to someone.
Finally, with a strange sense of relief, he began to remove the protective garments Keats had forced upon him.
The murder was not so tidy after all.
Twenty-One
Kim stood in the exact same position that Katrina had stood when she’d been gesticulating. Bryant was standing outside, where Katrina had been looking to from the card stand.
She moved towards the door, just as Katrina had, and looked around, watching people go in and out of shops: looking down, looking at where they were heading, looking at phones. Why here? Why Katrina? Kim wondered for the hundredth time.
She stood in the middle of the pavement and did a 360-degree turn and saw what she hadn’t noted yesterday: between the Shop N Save and the chemist next door was a gap, joined together by an old white gate. Right now, the gate was closed.
‘Come on, Bryant,’ she said as she opened the gate and peered up the alley. In the distance, she could see the back of a white van she knew well. A forensics van.