“How so?” Wyatt frowned.
“Well, we checked his phone after we got it working again and saw that he sent a message to his girlfriend three days ago. If we assume that he was in an accident after that and killed on impact, his body would have started to show signs of bloating. There weren’t any in this case.”
“So, what are you thinking?”
“The only time I’ve seen a delay in bloating is when a body has been stored in a freezer after death. It delays the bacteria from replicating too quickly and delays the bloating and decomposition process.” “Hmmm . . .” Wyatt thought out loud.
“We’ll know more when the autopsy results come back. They should be done in the next few hours,” Wilcox stood up from his desk. “Hey, you hungry? Because I’m ravenous. Working all-nighters really hits the ‘starvation’ switch,” Wilcox laughed.
“Strangely . . .” Wyatt said, closing the folder with crime-scene pictures in it, “. . . I’m pretty hungry, too.”
“Awesome. I know a great place around the corner that serves the best pancakes in town.”
They started to leave but were interrupted by Wilcox’s buzzing phone. He pulled it out of his pocket and listened intently for a few seconds before saying goodbye and hanging up.
“Breakfast is going to have to wait for a little while my friend. That was the coroner and they want us down in the autopsy rooms ASAP. He said there’s something that we need to see.”
13
Wilcox and Wyatt drove across town to the pathology lab, but fortunately—because it was still before 9:00 A.M.—most people had yet to start moving around the city, and they got to the offices relatively quickly.
Wilcox parked his car and they climbed out, hastily heading inside. Wilcox showed his badge to the young receptionist who quickly ushered them through the doors. Wyatt had to breathe through his mouth when they moved into the hallway of the autopsy rooms. The combination of dead bodies and strong antiseptic liquids was wreaking havoc on his empty stomach. Wilcox moved through to the third autopsy room and pushed the doors open.
“What have you got for us, Doc?” Wilcox asked the aging pathologist. Dr. William Young was an overweight, balding, and rather somber-looking man who looked like he spent too much time with the dead instead of the living.
“Actually, quite a bit,” he said as he pulled the sheet off Henry Martin’s body, which made Wyatt grimace. The pictures didn’t do reality justice, and because he was a small-town cop, he wasn’t used to such gruesome deaths.
“His face looks awful,” Wyatt piped up.
“It most certainly does, young man. But that’s what a broken beer bottle and a lot of rage will do to someone’s soft tissue in their face,” Dr. Young answered matter-of-factly.
“A beer bottle?” Wilcox asked. “Are you sure?”
“100%. There were still shards of green glass in the cuts, and after a few tests, we could even narrow it down further to a Heineken bottle. The glass shards from the vehicle weren’t responsible for this: someone did this to him and staged it to look like an accident. They probably hoped that the vehicle wouldn’t be discovered for a while and the body would start decomposing before it was located, but I guess luck wasn’t in their favor,” Dr. Young removed the sheet entirely showing Martin’s damaged body. “There are several bite wounds on the corpse, and by the size of these claw marks, I’m almost certain a grizzly was responsible for them.”
“How do you know that they weren’t inflicted by the killer?” Wyatt asked. “These were inflicted postmortem, and there was still saliva in the bite marks which proved to be therapsid.” Young answered.
“Thera . . . what?”
“It’s the order that grizzly bears belong to, so it was a simple deduction,” Young stated.
“What else have you got for us, Doc?” Wilcox asked.
“Well, your suspicions about the body being in a freezer proved to be correct. But it was only for a day or two before the body was thrown off the cliff.”
“You’re going to have to explain how you know that, Doc.” Wilcox held up his hands in resignation.
“There are definitely signs in the tissue that freezing was occurring after death, but this didn’t spread deep into the internal organs. If the body was in the freezer for any longer, the changes would have occurred in the deeper organ tissues. But that isn’t the best find.”
“Well? Come on, Doc—the suspense is killing us.”
Dr. Young picked up a bag containing three long blond hairs that were covered in dry blood: “These were on the victim, and they may very well belong to our killer. I’ve sent the follicles away to look for any DNA matches in the system, but nothing has come back yet.”
“Thanks Doc, this might just be what we need to crack the case,” Wilcox smiled, and he and Wyatt left the building.
30 minutes later they were sitting down at the diner and waiting for their pancakes to arrive. “What do you think?” Wilcox asked Wyatt, taking a sip of his coffee.
Wyatt exhaled forcefully, “I have absolutely no idea. Whoever did that to him must have really hated him.” Wilcox narrowed his eyes at Wyatt, “You do know that you’re going to be a suspect in this?”
“The realization has crossed my mind,” Wyatt leaned forward and inhaled deeply.
“Look mate, if you had anything to do with this, I can help divert the gaze away from you, if you know what I mean. You saved my ass once; I’ll happily return the favor. Besides, the way that I see it, this guy deserves what he got.”
“I know, thanks Robert, but I had nothing to do with this. Though, I have a feeling that I may know who did,” Wyatt stared down at
