the smackdown Fanshaw had given me, topped off by an ignominious limp home along Ponsonby Road. Still, I couldn’t help feeling I’d got off lightly from my encounter with Justin.
My smashed phone had turned itself off again but responded to a gentle but persistent hold-down press of the on button. I’d have to get it fixed before the shattered screen fell out and I lost everything on it, including, I reminded myself, the crime scene photos. My phone seemed to have taken on a perverse life of its own since being bashed, turning itself on and off whenever it felt like it. A message from Jason had been sent directly to voicemail, not that I minded too much having missed that call. He had left an excited message asking me to ring him ASAP. He actually used the acronym ASAP instead of the words. Jesus. Okay, sure. I’d ring him. But first I wanted to check those crime scene photos. Discovering that Justin had flown to Wellington on the Friday night had seemed like a breakthrough. Learning that the police already knew he’d gone to see Karen that night was a surprise and hearing from Fanshaw that he’d discounted Justin as a suspect was a whole new curve ball I needed to get my head around.
I went through the crime scene photos one by one, careful not to dislodge the shattered glass each time I swiped my finger across the screen. My knowledge of pathology is about as good as my knowledge of anatomy, and my understanding of the process of rigor mortis is rudimentary, to say the least, but I did know that in normal circumstances, it begins to set in a couple of hours after death. The muscles on the face are the first to stiffen. I used two fingers to enlarge the image of Karen’s face on the screen. Close-up there was a definite rigidity to the set of her jaw. I remembered being aware of it when I bent down and looked up into her face. I remembered the oily gleam of her eye, the lashes weighted with mascara. Normally it takes twelve to twenty-four hours after the heart stops beating for full rigor mortis to set in. It is an unmistakable and quite shocking phenomenon. I also knew it was a chemical reaction affected by temperature and atmospheric conditions and I was pretty sure some medical conditions could alter the time of onset as well but, as a basic rule of thumb, if Karen had died on Friday night, by the time I found her late-afternoon the next day, not to put too fine a point on it, she would have been as stiff as a proverbial plank of wood.
The exposed nipple beneath the dressing gown, the strong smell of Pantene conditioner, the clothes laid out on the bed ready to wear; it was obvious Karen had showered, put on some make-up and was preparing to dress for her flight to Auckland when she was killed.
According to Karen’s note to me, she didn’t know what her daughter looked like, which means she must have written the note and dropped the cheque into my letter box sometime on Friday evening, after she’d talked to me but before Justin gave her the photo of Sunny. And in that phone conversation, she had said her friend Manny was coming over for a prayer session. I’d had the chance to mention this to Fanshaw and Coleman during my interrogation, aka interview, with me on Monday, but I had decided against it. There was no way I was going to mention Manny or anyone else to Fanshaw now. Not after my formal warning and all. Allowing an hour for the flight from Wellington to Auckland, another hour from Auckland airport to the city, plus a bit of extra time in case of flight or traffic delays, I figured Karen would have had to book a flight no later than nine a.m. on Saturday to get to our arranged meeting at Wynyard Quarter at twelve-thirty. This would mean leaving home by eight at the latest.
Putting all this together, the time of her attack could be pinpointed pretty accurately to sometime between seven and eight on Saturday morning. Smithy said she would have fallen into a coma and most likely died a couple of hours after that. This scenario was backed up by the onset of the early stages of rigor mortis when I found her late Saturday afternoon. If Justin had