Blood of the Demon

first. Negligent homicide, perhaps? I’m not the one who decides how the charges go. I just tell you guys how she died.” Then he gave a small sigh. “Not that it matters if Brian did this.”

“I’m keeping an open mind as far as that goes,” I said.

Doc nodded, then his gaze shifted to me, taking in my attire. “I see Carl conned you into helping out. Keep this up and I might hire you away from the PD.”

I wrinkled my nose. “No thanks, Doc. This one’s fine, but if this had been a week-old decomp, you and Carl would be on your own.”

He laughed. “Oh, so that’s how it is?”

“Yup. That’s how it is.”

He grinned and picked up his clipboard, beginning his examination of the body.

Carl took a hypodermic syringe and held it out to me. “You said you wanted to help,” he said calmly. “Do you want to get the vitreous?”

“Ugh! No. Way.” I shuddered as Doc laughed, and even Carl cracked a smile. Getting the vitreous involved sticking a needle into the eyeball and drawing the fluid out. At the first autopsy I’d attended, Carl had made a point to show me how the needle could be seen through the pupil after it was inserted. I could handle a lot of things, but the needle in the eye always squicked me out.

Carl gave a soft sigh and shook his head as he swiftly and expertly slid the needle into the side of each eye to extract the clear fluid. “I have to do everything myself,” he teased.

How had I ever thought this man to be dour and humorless?

He squirted the fluid into a tube, then dropped the syringe into a Sharps container. Meanwhile, Doc set his clipboard aside, and pulled a black case out from beneath a cabinet. He popped it open and pulled out three pairs of colored goggles and a device that looked like a complicated flashlight. I recognized it as an ALS, an alternate light source. “Kill the lights, please, Kara.”

I obligingly flicked the lights off, then put the yellow-tinted glasses on as Doc began to shine the ALS carefully over Carol’s body.

“Look at that,” Doc said, as the bruising on her neck stood out in stark contrast to the rest of her skin. “There may not have been much showing, but here you can see where the scarf dug in.” He scanned it over her torso and thighs next. “And there ya go.” Several bite marks stood out clearly. “Just a few love nips. Nothing too hard or too deep.”

I bent closer, frowning at the marks. “Wait,” I said, and pointed to a mark on her right breast. “Shine the light on this one.”

Doc complied. “See something?”

A flutter of excitement wound through my belly. “Would you say that the teeth that left those marks are in good shape? All of them there?”

He shrugged. “I’m no dentist, but it looks like there are impressions from all the front teeth, at least.”

I straightened. “Brian was missing a tooth in the front. Got it knocked out during a pickup basketball game last week and hadn’t had it fixed yet.”

Carl let out a low whistle. “And if Brian didn’t kill her, why would he kill himself?”

“Exactly. If he didn’t kill her, then I rather doubt he pulled the trigger.” The thought of a fellow officer being murdered was hideous, but it was a damn sight more bearable than the thought that he’d been a murderer. I peered again at the bites as Doc bent his head for a closer look. Unfortunately, the marks weren’t nice and clear, and I couldn’t tell for certain if there was a gap in the bruising or not.

After a few seconds Doc sighed, shaking his head. “I can’t tell. They’re not hard bites. We’d have to consult a forensic odontologist. Or we can find out for sure another way. Kara, can you get me a swab, please?”

I handed him the swabs and the vial of sterile water. Doc dampened the swab with the sterile water and then carefully wiped across the bite marks. “Whoever bit her left saliva behind,” he explained. He repeated the process in several more locations on her body, then finally switched off the ALS and pulled off his goggles while I turned the room lights on.

Doc packaged the swabs up in an evidence envelope. “Fortunately, it doesn’t matter if whoever it was wore a condom. Saliva’s just as good.” He put the envelope aside, then picked up a syringe with a wickedly long needle and jabbed it into her groin area, working it around until he was able to get into the femoral artery to draw blood. Then another syringe went into the area just above her pubic bone, drawing out urine. “I’m running a full tox screen on her,” he said, glancing at me as he filled various vials. “It still looks like an accidental asphyx, but we want to be sure she wasn’t drugged.”

I started to run my fingers through my hair, then stopped when I remembered that I was wearing gloves that had dead person on them. I sighed as my nose suddenly started itching fiercely. Never failed: As soon as I knew I couldn’t touch my face, I was overwhelmed with the need to.

If it’s not Brian’s DNA, then he probably wasn’t the one who killed her, and his murder was merely staged to look like a suicide. Which led to the question: If that’s the case, were Brian and Carol killed by the same person?

I shook my head. I was getting ahead of myself. First I needed to find out if it was Brian’s DNA. “This will tell us for sure if it’s Brian, right?”

“I’ll call down to the lab in Slidell to tell them I need a rush on a comparison,” Doc said. “I’ll casually drop that this is the son of a judge, but it’ll still be at least a week or two. Convenient that we have access to Brian’s DNA.” He nodded his head toward the cooler.

I watched as Doc completed the rest of the rape kit, including the vaginal, rectal, and oral swabs, the nail scrapings and clippings, blood and hair samples.

The rest of the autopsy went quickly. Carl took the completed rape kit and disappeared into the office to get it sealed and ready to take to the lab. Doc worked quietly and efficiently, opening her up and removing the organs, weighing and slicing samples, then peeling back the skin and muscles of the throat. “The hyoid bone isn’t broken, so it wasn’t a forcible strangulation—not like your Symbol Man cases.” He straightened from his close examination. “Asphyxiation held just a bit too long.” He shrugged. “Y’know, Carol had a rep for being pretty indiscriminate about who she fooled around with. I think most of the PD and half the DA’s office had slept with her.”

“I can’t believe I’m so out of the gossip loop,” I said with a laugh.

“It’s better that way, trust me. Besides, you’ve been a little preoccupied lately.” He glanced at me. “How’s your aunt doing?”

My throat tightened. “No change.”

He gave me a sympathetic smile. “It’s been only, what, six, seven weeks? There’s no trauma, so she has every chance of coming out of this.”

I sighed, and once again had to resist the urge to run my fingers through my hair. “Yeah. Sure.” I wished it was as easy as that.

“Doc’s right,” Carl said from behind me, thoroughly startling me. “She’ll come out of this. But you’re too stressed out. You need to eat more. You look better with some meat on your bones.” He extended a saw to me. “Wanna cut a head open?”

I groaned. “No. And thank you for going straight from eating to cutting heads.”

He shrugged and plugged the saw in as I escaped to the viewing room.

I ALMOST DIDN’T come back out for Brian’s autopsy. Even on the other side of the wall, I could feel that there was something wrong about the body. I’d maintained a fleeting hope that I was wrong on the scene, both with Brian Roth and Davis Sharp, but the gaping void and tattered remains were still there.

I forced myself to return to the cutting room once Brian’s body was on the table. His body was a lot messier, mostly because of all the blood that had seeped out into the bag from the big holes in his head. His head had been wrapped in a sheet to try to control some of the blood, but it was still a nasty mess when Carl opened up the bag.

Doc pulled Brian’s lips back and looked down at his teeth, eyes narrowed. “Missing right front incisor. You’re right, Kara.”

I allowed myself a pleased smile. “All right, Doc,” I said. “Did he pull the trigger himself or was he murdered?”

“No fucking idea,” he said, narrowing his eyes as he picked up a scalpel and began to shave around the holes in the scalp and skull. “But I’m hoping to have an answer for you soon.” He peered at the wounds, lifting sections of skull that had been in the body bag and fitting them to the still-intact part of the skull. He put his hand out and Carl placed a long plastic rod in it without being asked —a sign of how long the two had worked together.

Doc poked the rod into the hole at Brian’s right temple, working it carefully until it protruded through the other side. Despite the morbid look of the thing, there was no better way to get a solid idea of what the trajectory of the bullet had been.

Doc peered at the rod, then shrugged and glanced back at me. “Well, the angle’s consistent.…” He frowned, then shook his head. “And he was definitely shot at close range, though I’m not seeing signs that the gun was flush against his head.”

“What do you mean?”

He pointed to the shaved area of scalp. “There’s plenty of stippling from gunpowder, but there aren’t any burns or blackening of the edges, and”—he peeled the scalp back to show the skull —“on a contact wound, you’d have a stellate-shaped entrance wound, and you’d see blackening on the skull as well.”

“So … he didn’t kill himself?”

He merely gave an infuriating shrug. “I can’t say that either. He could have held the gun a few inches away.”

“You’re no help,” I said sourly. “What about gunshot residue on his hands?”

“There could be GSR on his hands just from being in the same room when the gun was fired,” he pointed out.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Don’t give up hope yet,” he reassured me with a gesture toward the bagged hands. “I’ll check to see if there’s any blowback on his hands, plus I’ll ask the lab to swab the gun for contact DNA. It was his duty weapon?”

“Yeah.”

“Then if someone else’s DNA is found, that’s fairly telling.” He unbagged Brian’s hands, then lifted them for me to see and for Carl to photograph. “This isn’t much help either.”

I scowled. “Covered in blood.”

“Yep. He had his hands in a pool of his own blood.”

“So for now it’s undetermined?” I asked, knowing the answer already.

Doc nodded. “For now. Sorry.”

I stripped off my gloves and other protective gear. “All right. I guess I have to make some phone calls.” And continue to try to figure out what was eating essence. “You’ll call me if you find anything interesting on Davis Sharp?”

“You’ll be the first to know,” he replied.

Well, I wanted to bury myself in work, I reminded myself as I left the morgue. At this rate I won’t have time to worry about anything else.

Chapter 11

A visit to tessa was next on my to-do list, and I pulled into the parking lot of the Nord du Lac Neurological Rehabilitation Center shortly before noon. Nord Neuro, as everyone called it, was a three-story facility situated across the street from St. Long Parish Hospital. The owners did their best to make the place look warm and inviting—nice landscaping, clean exterior, fresh paint—but there really was no way to make that kind of place look nice. Still, I appreciated that it didn’t look like a total hellhole. I’d tapped heavily into my own savings as well as Tessa’s to pay for her care—grateful that I had the power of attorney to do so. Nord Neuro was a private facility, which meant that it was fucking expensive, even with Tessa’s insurance. But I knew that, one way or another, I would be paying the bills for only a couple of months.