“Oh. But that should mean,” Ashton considered, thinking hard. “She must have hurt her assailant pretty good, or he’d have finished the rape after he knocked her out.”
“Good reasoning job, son. That’s what I think, too. The hospital has a forensic physician on her case, so if she has any hair or tissue samples on her – under her fingernails, for instance, and by the way, they think they did find some – we’ll get the rundown on that once it’s been processed. Meantime, you and I are going over to the apartment to look for additional clues and evidence.”
“Let’s go, then.”
The boyfriend, Owen Jackson, was being held in the hallway while three Imp City police beat cops stood guard over the door, when the two investigators arrived. They identified themselves in VR to the waiting police officers and Jackson, and the guards let them inside.
“Stay behind me, Nick, and keep your eyes peeled,” Gorski told him. “We want to avoid disturbing things, and try to get a picture of what might have happened based on the clues, then we’ll start looking for more details based on that. If we don’t find those details, we back off again and adjust our big picture.”
“Right,” Ashton confirmed. “I get it.”
“Good.”
Gorski entered the apartment slowly, followed by Ashton. They stood by the door and surveyed the apartment, including the door, front and back.
Before them lay the den, with a couch, coffee table, two end tables with lamps, two armchairs, one on each side of the couch and at right angles to it, and a wet bar in the corner. A couple of bookcases stood on the wall opposite the wet bar, as well as a small rack containing folding tray tables; the complete set of tables remained in the rack.
The narrow coffee table had been turned over, and one leg was broken; both lamps were on the floor, one broken, both with crushed shades; the couch had been shoved back at one end, twisting the adjacent end table, and the corresponding armchair was forced well to the side, pivoted to face roughly the same direction as the couch. The throw pillows on the disarranged end of the couch had been flung to the floor in various parts of the room, but the ones on the other end still lay tucked into the corner of the couch. The upholstery of the couch had blood smears, and there were two small puddles of blood on the floor near the broken leg of the coffee table, one on each side of the table. Two coffee cups on the twisted end table had been overturned, their contents running over the tabletop and onto the floor in various places.
“All right, Nick, what happened, and where should we look for what?” Gorski asked, somewhat to Ashton’s surprise.
“Um, okay, lessee,” he said, quickly collecting his thoughts. “She let a friend in for coffee. She sat on the end of the couch, he sat in the armchair, and they talked for a bit. He made a move, she said no, and he didn’t take no for an answer. He tried to push her down on the couch and rape her, and she fought back, shoving him away. He fell over the coffee table, turning it over and crunching one of its legs, and she tried to get out the end, but he grabbed her – probably by the ankle, with him still down on the floor – and she stumbled and grabbed for the end table. It slid, and she lunged forward for the armchair, managing to kick him, maybe in the face. If she broke his nose, that might explain one puddle of blood on the floor…but so would a head wound, from his fall over the table. But he jumped up and got in front of her – the way the armchair is turned, she couldn’t have gotten it in that position herself, but it could have slid some with her body weight – then shoved her back. She grabbed his arm to keep from falling, but then she probably either kicked or kneed him hard in the groin, and he shoved her down. She hit her head on the broken table leg, and that created the second puddle of blood...and the cranial damage that put her into a coma. But if she hit him hard enough in the groin, he wasn’t going to be doing much with the personal tackle for a while.”
Gorski raised an impressed eyebrow.
“Could you elaborate on the rationale for your deductions?” he asked.
“Sure, sir. There’s no evidence the door was forced; she let him in. Ergo, she knew him. There may or may not be latents on the door; we probably need to check. There are two cups of coffee, one black, one with cream, so she offered him coffee; she wasn’t drinking alone. Which also means there’s probably the remains where she made the coffee in the kitchen someplace. There’s not enough coffee spilled for the mugs to have been full when he attacked, so they sat and talked for a while. They were friends. Or at least, she thought so.
“The end of the couch next to the coffee mugs is shoved back hard enough to scratch the finish on the floor; that argues for some weight on it. He was trying to push her down and force her. That, in turn, caused the far end of the couch to smack that end table, toppling its lamp – notice how it fell away from the couch, and parallel with it? But she fought back, and probably managed to get a foot into his belly or the like and shove hard. That sent him back and over the coffee table, which turned over – I’d say he got a leg or a foot hung under it – and his weight
