Unsolved (Invisible #2) - James Patterson Page 0,68

the manner of death? That, Emmy, I cannot conclusively say.”

“Okay, but we aren’t in court,” I say. “What do you think?”

She nods. “Best guess? Your Mayday died of natural causes.”

66

NO. THAT can’t be.

I stare at Lia’s face through the grainy Skype transmission and see a hint of apology in her expression.

It’s like the oxygen has been sucked out of this cubicle where Rabbit and I are sitting. I look at Rabbit as if somehow she can help.

Just when we were getting some momentum…

“Why, Lia?” I manage weakly. “Why natural causes?”

“The decedent had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Lung disease.”

“COPD,” I say.

“Yes, COPD. Undiagnosed, I gather. Certainly untreated. We’ve been unable to track down any medical history on the man.” She looks at Officer Ciomek, seated next to her at the morgue.

“I doubt that Mayday had seen a doctor in the past decade,” Ciomek says. “He did have a pretty bad cough. I once told him he should see somebody about it. He just said he had a cold.”

“So…COPD.”

“I can’t rule out that he asphyxiated due to untreated COPD. But I have to say, Emmy, that the reason I can’t rule this out is due, more than anything, to the lack of evidence of any other manner of death.”

“Nothing that suggests murder.”

“Nothing that suggests homicidal smothering. I’m sure you can understand that, while asphyxiation itself is easy to detect, evidence of foul play often is not. Your decedent unquestionably died of asphyxiation, but I can’t call it homicide.”

“Can you rule out homicide?” I ask, a drowning woman reaching for a life preserver.

“No, I certainly can’t rule it out. But I found almost no signs of antemortem injury suggesting a struggle.”

Antemortem—before he died, she means. No signs that Mayday struggled with an attacker.

“Nothing under his fingernails indicating he scratched at an assailant. Little in the way of external antemortem injuries. There was a contusion on his left ear and skull just above the ear, but the contusion doesn’t suggest a blow to the head as much as it does a fall. There was minor bleeding at the wound site, and mixed in with the blood were some chemicals common to asphalt as well as some grease. He was in an alley, after all. That’s a hard, dirty street surface.”

“He fell and banged the left side of his head on the street.”

“Yes. Which could happen for any number of reasons. If he struggled to breathe, he could have collapsed. From the fall, I can’t rule out homicide, accident, or natural causes.”

“Okay…”

“There was no neck compression, and thus little in the way of petechial hemorrhaging. No tiny blood vessels bursting,” she explains, probably for Rabbit’s benefit, not knowing how much she knows about forensic pathology. She knows that I have more experience with it than I care to admit. “If he strangled him, we’d likely see burst blood vessels in the neck region. We don’t have that.

“Hand compression—smothering with one’s hand—that didn’t appear to happen here either,” she continues. “The violence done to the nose and mouth would be evident in many ways that are not present here. Lacerations to the nose, lips, gums, tongue. We don’t have that.”

He didn’t strangle him. He didn’t close Mayday’s mouth and nose by hand. What did he do?

“Any possibilities, Lia?”

“One,” she says. “The decedent presented with minor petechial hemorrhages in his eyelids and pericardium, and his head and face were pale—more difficult to detect in an African-American man but nonetheless present.”

I don’t know what a pericardium is, but I guess I don’t care. I just want the punch line.

“And I did find very slight trace evidence of polyethylene on his tongue and in his lungs.”

“What does all this mean, Lia? How did he die?”

“If this was a homicidal suffocation, and that’s a big if,” says Dr. Janus, “my guess is that the offender wrapped a plastic bag over Mayday’s head.”

67

RABBIT AND I look at each other, trying to incorporate what Lia Janus just said into what we’ve learned about Darwin. Could a man in a wheelchair suffocate another man with a plastic bag?

Yes. If he got him to the ground and subdued him. That could work. But it wouldn’t be easy.

“The decedent was a good-size man,” Lia says as if reading my mind. “At presentation, he was over six foot two and weighed two hundred and twenty-one pounds.”

“And yet no signs of struggle,” I say. “He didn’t put up a fight.”

“The unexplained puncture wounds,” Rabbit chimes in.

“Yes,” Dr. Janus agrees. “That’s where the relevance of the puncture wounds