Kissed a Sad Goodbye

straw. But I can’t say I’m minding the bright lights all that much, and I get a nice variety of clientele.” She nodded towards the room at her back. “Nice fresh one, this, and just out of the cooler. Shouldn’t be too unpleasant for you, if you’re ready.”

They followed her into the room, masking and gowning as Kate retied her mask and pulled the instrument trolley up to the autopsy table. Was it possible to envy the dead? Gemma wondered as she looked at Annabelle Hammond’s body. The breasts were perfectly formed, neither too large nor too small; the neck slender, the shoulders well-shaped; the waist small and belly flat; the thighs smooth and slim. Even her feet and ankles were beautiful, and Gemma had seldom seen a set of toes worth writing home about. Fat lot of good all that loveliness did her now, of course—and it might even have got her killed. But it had certainly been a body to inspire passion, even obsession.

“Did you do the on-scene yesterday?” Kincaid asked Kate Ling. “Sorry to have missed you. Bit of a balls-up there.”

“The old headless-chickens routine,” Kate agreed as she pulled a new pair of latex gloves from the dispenser. “But I imagine we’ll cover everything now.”

As she reached up to switch on the microphone over the table, Kincaid said, “What about time of death? Off the record?”

The corners of Kate’s eyes crinkled as she smiled beneath her mask. “Half past twelve.” She laughed aloud as she saw Kincaid’s skeptical expression. “You asked me for off the record, and now you don’t believe me? Seriously, though, I’d say it’s not likely she was killed before midnight, although the calculation of body cooling is made a little more difficult by the fact that the ambient temperature began rising rapidly as soon as the sun came up. Lividity was fixed, but the corneas had just begun to cloud, and rigor was not fully established.”

Gemma looked up from her notebook, pen poised over the page. “Eight hours or less, then?”

Shrugging, Kate said, “There are always unanticipated factors. Perhaps the tox report and stomach contents will help you.”

“Spoken like a true pathologist,” Kincaid said, grinning, and it abruptly occurred to Gemma that he found Kate Ling attractive. It wasn’t that he was flirting, exactly, but there was somehow an extra degree of attentiveness in his responses. And his interest was a dangerous thing, as she well knew.

“Was she killed where she was found?” Gemma asked, diverting Kate’s attention from Kincaid.

“It looks that way, unless she was moved very shortly after death. The lividity corresponds to the position of the body.”

“Can you hazard a guess yet as to how she died?” Kincaid asked.

“Now that would be telling.” Kate reached up and switched on her microphone, then stated that she was continuing the external examination of Annabelle Hammond. She tilted the head back so that they had a good view of the throat. “We won’t know until we get into the tissue if there was any crushing of the larynx. But the bruising on the throat is minimal, as is the facial congestion.”

“Anything else obvious?”

Kate lifted one of Annabelle’s hands and then the other, examining the long, slender fingers. “No visible blood or tissue under the nails, but we’ll send samples to the lab just in case.”

When she’d finished her careful scraping of the nails, she buzzed for the attendant. “Gerald, let’s have a look at her back.”

Gerald turned the slender body with the ease of practice, and Kate began her examination of the back of Annabelle’s head, carefully parting the mass of red-gold hair with her gloved fingertips. “Here’s something,” she said after a moment, glancing up at them. She used a magnifier for a closer look. “I think it’s possible we have some blunt force trauma here. There’s a bit of loose hair and tissue, maybe a bit of swelling. We won’t know for sure until we peel back the scalp.”

Gemma swallowed and focused fiercely on her notebook. This was the part she hated most, even more than the initial incision and the removal of the internal organs. She’d always assumed that this part of the job would get easier for her the more exposure she had, but that hadn’t turned out to be the case, and somehow it was always worse when the corpse was as unblemished as this one.

“What about fluids on the body?” she heard Kincaid ask as she stared at the loops and dashes of her shorthand.

“Nothing came up on the swabs, and I’ve not found anything else obvious. No evidence of recent intercourse, either.”

“There’s no indication that this was a sex crime, then.”

Gemma heard Kate’s shrug in her voice as she said, “Not unless it’s a nutter who just likes to fantasize about it afterwards. But they usually leave something behind.”

When Kate had finished with Annabelle Hammond’s back and had Gerald turn the body again, she said, “Unless you have something else in particular you want me to look for, I’m ready to start the internal now.”

As Kincaid shook his head he met Gemma’s eyes. He knew she’d be struggling, but he wouldn’t embarrass her by saying anything. And from his expression, he wasn’t too keen, either.

Kate chose a scalpel from her array of instruments and spoke into the mike. “Right, then. Let’s begin with a Y incision.”

Gemma concentrated on breathing through her nose and recording Kate’s observations in her notebook. Healthy female. Probably an occasional smoker. No sign of a pregnancy, or of previous pregnancies.

When the internal organs had been removed and weighed, Kate said, “We’ll get the stomach contents off to the lab—should have something for you shortly. Now let’s have a look at the neck.”

Gemma glanced up just long enough to see the scalpel poised over Annabelle’s white throat; then she forced her gaze back to her shorthand.

“Look.” Kate sounded as though she’d found a prize in her Christmas cracker. “There’s some bruising on the tissue that didn’t show up on the skin. Odd, but you sometimes see that. And the hyoid cartilage is intact.”