glanced off the central edge of the sternum and nicked the pulmonary vein.”
He folded back Pat’s skin-delicately, holding the flap between thumb and finger-and pointed with his scalpel, to make sure Richie and I both saw exactly what he meant. “Absent any other wounds or any medical treatment, this injury would have resulted in death within approximately twenty minutes, as the subject gradually bled out into the chest cavity. As it happened, however, this sequence of events was interrupted.”
He let the skin drop back into place and reached to pry up the flap below the collarbone. “This is the wound that proved fatal. The blade entered between the third and fourth ribs, at the mid-clavicular line, causing a one- centimeter laceration to the right ventricle of the heart. Blood loss would have been rapid and extensive. The drop in blood pressure would have led to unconsciousness within fifteen or twenty seconds, and to death perhaps two minutes later. The cause of death was exsanguination.”
So there was no way Pat had been the one who got rid of the weapons; not that I thought he had been, not any more. Cooper tossed his scalpel into the instrument tray and nodded to the assistant, who was threading a thick, curved needle and humming softly to himself. I said, “And the manner of death?”
Cooper sighed. He said, “I understand that you currently believe a fifth party was present in the house at the time of the deaths.”
“That’s what the evidence tells us.”
“Hmm,” Cooper said. He flicked something unthinkable off his gown, onto the floor. “And I am sure this leads you to assume that this subject”-a nod at Pat Spain-“was a victim of homicide. Unfortunately, some of us do not have the luxury of assumption. All of the wounds are consistent with either assault or self-infliction. The manner of death was either homicide or suicide: undetermined.”
Some defense lawyer was going to love that all over. I said, “Then let’s leave that blank on the paperwork for now, and come back to it when we’ve got more evidence. If the lab finds DNA under his fingernails-”
Cooper leaned over to the hanging mike and said, without bothering to look at me, “Manner of death: undetermined.” That little smirk slid over me, to Richie. “Do cheer up, Detective Kennedy. I doubt there will be any ambiguity as to the next subject’s manner of death.”
Emma Spain came out of her drawer with her bedsheets folded neatly around her like a shroud. Richie twitched, at my shoulder, and I heard the fast rasp as he started scratching at the inside of a pocket. She had curled up all cozy in those same sheets, two nights ago, with a good-night kiss. If he started thinking along those lines, I would have a new partner by Christmas. I shifted, nudging against his elbow, and cleared my throat. Cooper gave me a long stare across that small white shape, but Richie got the message and went still. The assistant unfolded the sheets.
I know detectives who learn the knack of unfocusing their eyes at the bad parts of post-mortems. Cooper violates dead children searching for signs of violation, and the investigating officer stares intently at nothing but a blur. I watch. I don’t blink. The victims didn’t get to choose whether or not to endure what was done to them. I’m spoiled enough, next to them, without claiming to be too delicate even to endure looking.
Emma was worse than Patrick not just because she was so young, but because she was so unblemished. Maybe this sounds twisted, but the worse the injuries, the easier the autopsy. When a body comes in macerated to something from an abattoir, the Y incision and the grating snap as the top of the skull comes off don’t pack much punch. The injuries give the cop in you something to focus on: they turn the victim from a human being into a specimen, made out of urgent questions and fresh clues. Emma was just a little girl, tender-soled bare feet and freckled snub nose, sticking-out belly button where her pink pajama top had ridden up. You would have sworn that she was only a hairsbreadth from alive; that if you had just known the right words to say in her ear, the right spot to touch, you could have woken her. What Cooper was about to do to her in our name was a dozen times more brutal than anything her murderer had done.
The assistant took off the paper bags tied over her hands to preserve evidence, and Cooper bent over her with a palette knife to take fingernail scrapings. “Ah,” he said suddenly. “Interesting.”
He reached for tweezers, did something finicky at her right hand, and straightened up holding the tweezers high. “These,” he said, “were between the index and middle fingers.”
Four fine, pale hairs. A blond man crouched over the pink ruffled bed, that tiny girl fighting- I said, “DNA. Is there enough there for a shot at DNA?”
Cooper shot me a thin smile. “Control your excitement, Detective. Microscopic comparison will, of course, be necessary, but judging by color and texture, there appears to be every probability that these hairs come from the head of the victim herself.” He dropped them into an evidence bag, pulled out his fountain pen and bent to scribble something on the label. “Assuming the evidence bears out the preliminary theory of suffocation, I would theorize that her hands were trapped beside her head by the pillow or other weapon, and that, unable to claw at the attacker, she pulled at her own hair in her final moments of consciousness.”
That was when Richie left. At least he managed not to put a fist through the wall, or puke his guts onto the floor. He just turned on his heel, walked out and closed the door behind him.
The assistant sniggered. Cooper gave the door a long, chilly stare. “I apologize for Detective Curran,” I said.
He transferred the stare to me. “I am not accustomed,” he told me, “to having my post-mortems interrupted without an excellent reason. Do you, or does your colleague, have an excellent reason?”
So much for Richie getting on Cooper’s good side. And that was the least of our problems. Whatever flak Quigley had been giving Richie in the squad room was nothing to what he could expect from now on, if he didn’t get his arse back into the morgue and see this thing through. We were talking lifetime nickname here. Cooper probably wouldn’t spread the word-he likes being above gossip-but the glint in the assistant’s eye said he couldn’t wait.
I kept my mouth shut while Cooper worked his way through the external examination. No more nasty surprises along the way, thank Christ. Emma was a little above average height for six, average weight, healthy in every way that Cooper could check. There were no healed fractures, no burn marks or scars, none of the hideous spoor of abuse, physical or sexual. Her teeth were clean and healthy, no fillings; her nails were clean and clipped; her hair had been trimmed not long ago. She had spent the little life she had being well taken care of.
No conjunctival hemorrhages in her eyes, no bruising to her lips where something had been pressed over her mouth, nothing that could tell us anything about what he had done to her. Then Cooper, shining his pencil torch into Emma’s mouth like he was her GP, said, “Hm.” He reached for his tweezers again, tilted her head farther back and maneuvered them deep into her throat.
“If I remember correctly,” he said, “the victim’s bed held a number of ornamental pillows, embroidered with anthropomorphic animals in multicolored wool.”
Kittens and puppies, staring in the torchlight. “That’s correct,” I said.
Cooper pulled the tweezers out of her mouth with a flourish. “In that case,” he said, “I believe we have evidence of cause of death.”
A wisp of wool. It was sodden and darkened, but when it dried out it would be rose pink. I thought of the kitten’s pricked ears, the puppy’s hanging tongue.
“As you have seen,” Cooper said, “smothering often leaves so few signs that it is impossible to diagnose definitively. In this case, however, if this wool matches that used in the pillows, I will have no difficulty in stating that the victim was smothered with one of the pillows from her bed-the Bureau may well be able to identify the specific weapon. She died either from anoxia or from cardiac arrest pursuant to anoxia. The manner of death was homicide.”
He dropped the tag of wool into an evidence bag. As he sealed it, he gave it a nod and a brief, satisfied smile.
The internal exam gave us more of the same: a healthy little girl, nothing to say she had ever been ill or hurt in her life. Emma’s stomach contained a partially digested meal of minced beef, mashed potato, vegetables and fruit: cottage pie, with fruit salad for dessert, eaten about eight hours before she died. The Spains seemed like the family-dinner type, and I wondered why Pat and Emma hadn’t eaten the same meal that night, but that was a small enough thing that it could easily go unexplained forever. A queasy stomach that couldn’t take cottage pie, a kid being given the meal she had refused at lunchtime: murder means that little things get swept away, lost for good on the ebb of that red tsunami.
When the assistant started stitching her up, I said, “Dr. Cooper, could you give me two minutes to go get Detective Curran? He’ll want to see the rest of this.”
Cooper stripped off his bloody gloves. “I am unsure what gives you that impression. Detective Curran had every
