Dr. Paul Ottoman, chief medical examiner assistant, was a thickset man in his fifties with an exuberant rubber face, thick graying hair, and the demeanor of a professor addressing students in a medical lecture rather than standing with Steve and Neil in the autopsy room, the woeful cadaver of Terry Farina laid out before them.
It was a little before nine the next morning, an hour after Steve received the call from the D.A.’s office that the M.E. had confirmed Steve’s suspicions that Terry Farina did not die by accident. The autopsy room was a clean well-lighted place in white porcelain and stainless steel. A butcher’s scale hung above the cadaver table.
Out of respect, a drape had been folded across Terry Farina’s waist. Her skin looked like gray Naugahyde and her face was still swollen and blue, her mouth opened as if in mid-sentence, her neck ringed with purple from the ligature. The large
Steve had to look away. That sensation was back—like a half-glimpsed memory or afterimage of an old TV set that’s been turned off. But it eluded him again.
From their few interludes during coffee breaks, he had found Terry pleasant, bright, and attractive. Because he had begun to think of himself as a man at the end of his marriage, the thought had flitted across his mind that she was the kind of woman he could be interested in if he and Dana did not make it—more of a survival impulse than a plan. So maybe it was something she had said or a mannerism of hers or some vague association. Whatever, some memory would flutter like a night bird out of the shadows, then at the last moment it would flick back before he could clap his eyes on it.
“Strangulation occurs with the compression of the jugular veins and/ or the carotid arteries, which leads to a reduction of oxygen to the brain, the loss of consciousness, and, if sustained longer than three minutes, death.”
Neil flashed Steve a look. “I think we know that.” He was holding a Styrofoam magnum of coffee, the stirrer clenched in his molars. The sight of Terry’s body had affected him also. Like combat soldiers, homicide cops were exposed to some of the worst images in life. Images that they’d rather not have in their heads—bodies in various stages of decomposition, the reduction of someone’s face to raw meat and bone, teenagers lying dead in the street in a pool of blood. Autopsies. Images like mental land mines you were required to negotiate and still remain sane. You did your best to be detached and stoical, throwing yourself into cool dry stuff like reports, paper chases, and lab analyses to help distance yourself from both victim and victimizer. But this was different. They knew Terry Farina.
“I’m sure, but you may not know that the time interval from compression to loss of consciousness is about ten seconds if both carotid arteries are compressed. And that’s what I believe we have here, which leaves us with three possibilities, at the top of which is suicide.”
Ottoman did not speak like a man jaded by what he saw on a daily basis. On the contrary, he held forth with the eerie enthusiasm of someone intellectually titillated by his work, like a math teacher explaining the Pythagorean theorem. But he had a disconcerting habit of flashing grins at dramatic moments as if repressing ghoulish delight.
“Most tourniquet suicides are by hanging with a slipknot noose fastened directly above the head so that full gravity quickens the loss of consciousness. Even when the body isn’t completely pendant—that is, the victim is partially resting on feet or knees—there’s enough pressure on the neck to cause unconsciousness in seconds. That’s not the case here. The stocking was at a thirty-degree angle with the horizontal.”
“So what are you saying?” Neil asked.
“I’m saying that someone intent on suicide would wrap the stocking around her neck and tie a full knot in front. Otherwise, she’d fall unconscious, the muscles in her neck would relax, the ligature would loosen, and she’d start breathing again. But that’s not the case here.” He flash-grinned again.
“What about accidental asphyxia?”
“Much more common with males, although the number of female victims has grown. So has the number of deaths—over a thousand each year—and the addiction rate of people unable to achieve sexual climax unless they’re strangled.”
“Remember the time when people just got laid?” Steve slipped in.
Another flash-grin. “The pathological term is
“Maybe she just miscalculated,” Neil suggested.
“That was my first guess since vaginal fluids suggest that she’d been sexually aroused. Also her nakedness, body position, and the intimate apparel. The headboard is high enough to provide the necessary pressure. She manually stimulates herself to achieve a climax before the pass-out point, but passes out instead. And she dies.” He grinned again.
Neil nodded. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“But I have problems with that. First, we found no trace of vaginal fluid on her fingers. Second, the ligature pressure is inconsistent with gravity. If she had passed out against the stocking, the pressure against her throat would be about thirty pounds per square inch, and less along the sides and back of her neck. We took cell samples of the bruised tissue around the full circumference and could not find any variation in damage. Pressure was consistent all around—showing contusions from a force two to three times that. Plus her windpipe was crushed.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning she died of a sudden and powerful strangulating force applied evenly around her neck and great enough to have knocked her out in seconds.”
Silence filled the room.
Then Neil said, “Maybe she pulled it too tight and passed out.”
Ottoman made another out-of-the-blue grin. “No, because the force that produced this trauma would have embedded the stocking into her neck evenly all around. You can see in the photo there’s a gap between her neck and the knot big enough to put two fingers into—just as the lieutenant reported.” He glanced at Steve. “Gravity could not account for that.”
“What about when the neck muscles relax?” Neil asked.
Ottoman removed two photographs from the pile and laid them out on the table. “Look at the knot—a standard double overhand knot, correct? Correct. But look at the short end of the stocking—about two inches, the other end stretched out to nearly four feet and tied to the bed. Unless she had an exceptionally strong grasp, I don’t believe she could have pulled the short end against the other to have created the killing force.”
“You mean it was tied then retied,” Steve said.
“Yes, and by a righty. And according to the report, the victim was left-handed.”
Then Steve said, “You’re saying the autoerotica was staged.”
“Yes, Lieutenant. I think she was murdered and set up to look like accidental asphyxiophilia.” He made a happy-face grin.
“But there were no signs of struggle,” Neil protested. “No forced entry. And nobody heard any cries or disturbances. No reports of visitors entering her apartment.”
“Yes, and no signs she was raped,” Ottoman added. “No semen, no vaginal bruises. No sign of condom lubricants. And no unattached foreign hairs on her body. And no sign of vaginal, anal, or oral sex. And, as you can see, no ligature marks on her wrists or ankles. No fingernail marks and scratches of the assailant on the neck. No defensive wounds anywhere.”
“So she knew her assailant but didn’t have sex with him,” Steve said.
“That would be my guess.”
“What does that tell us about him?” Steve asked, wishing Ottoman would cover Terry’s face with a cloth. The grotesque disfigurement was making his brain feel soupy.
“Or her,” Neil said. “It could have been a woman.”
“If so, a very strong woman.”
