City of the Dead (Alex Delaware, #37)(36)

Milo scrawled rapidly. Basia waited until his pen paused.

“Another point of interest: The wounds look markedly different. The facial damage is raw and ragged and fits the shape of the section of the bumper that’s bloodstained. The rear wound is a single patch of broken skin surrounded by significant swelling out of which blood had leaked.”

“Leaked not spurted?”

“Exactly,” she said. “There’s all sorts of important stuff running through the foramen magnum. Arteries, membranes, ligaments, a major nerve. When I dissected I found no damage to any of that but there was major edema in and around the brain stem. That’s lower brain, it controls respiration.”

“A blow could be fatal,” said Milo.

“Easily. And quickly. At that point I began wondering if he was dead before he hit the van. Then the blood work from the kitchen and the driveway came in and that clinched it. Most of it was his, and the relatively sparse amount plus the low-impact dripping is consistent with a single, blunt-force impact that shut off his vital functions without causing extensive gushing. So the obvious question is, how did a dead person encounter the van?”

“Like you said, shoved into it,” said Milo.

Basia nodded. “Carried outside and flung. Possibly to obscure the fatal head wound.”

“Any idea what he was bashed with and where?”

“Where is easy,” she said. “Some blood trickle appeared close to the couch where he was sleeping and continued across the living room and into the kitchen.”

Milo said, “I didn’t see anything on the couch or the living room.”

“Not on the couch, near it. Consistent with being on his stomach asleep and hanging slightly over the edge. The reason you didn’t see it was because it was faint—pinpoints. They grew progressively larger as the body was carried. But still, no major blood. Detective Reed is to be commended for noticing the spatter in the driveway.”

“One good blow but not a bloody attack.”

“But fatal nonetheless,” said Basia. “If you wanted to pick one spot to bash lethally, it would be right there.”

“Got it.”

Basia said, “You’re not surprised by any of this?”

“His not being the bad guy is one of the contingencies we considered.”

“Then good for you, it surprised me. You get a man versus van, you figure man versus van.”

She sighed. “Yet another humbling lesson in the evils of assumption. In terms of the weapon, the only thing I can tell you is it did its job without shattering the occiput. There is a certain finesse to that.”

I said, “So nothing like a baseball bat.”

“No way, Alex. A bat would’ve shattered the skull like an eggshell. Something smaller and lighter but dense.”

“Maybe one of those retractable batons.”

“Sure. Or a piece of pipe. Though we found no metallic residue so the hard plastic of a baton is a possibility.”

Milo said, “Or a good old-fashioned leather sap.”

Basia said, “I saw a few of those in Warsaw, not yet, here.”

“Last one I saw was at the academy museum,” he said, tenting his fingers. “Guy’s snoozing, one good whack, lights out, he’s hauled out to the street and is made to go airborne.”

“You do have a way with words. In terms of no blood on the couch, it’s also possible bleeding didn’t begin until he was up on his feet and gravity took over. It really is a small wound for something that lethal. The cause of death was compression, not blood loss.”

I said, “Most of the blood in the kitchen and on the driveway was his but not all.”

Basia faux-pouted. “There goes my drama.”

She thumbed pages in the file. “The blood typing is where you really got lucky. Ms. Gannett is A positive and the male victim is O positive so drawing a distinction between them is simple. The pool around her body is hers alone. While most of the trickle in the driveway is his, a small quantity of hers is mixed in.”

I said, “It traveled on the soles of the killer’s shoes.”

“Most likely. We know it isn’t the killer’s blood—one of those slippage things you get in cuttings—because we found a third sample of blood in the kitchen and now you really get lucky. Also O positive so easy enough to assume it was the male victim’s. But you know me, neurotic. Lacking DNA data and with the certainty of a third person present, I ran some subtests and found that the second O-positive sample had different HLA characteristics than that of the male victim. We double-checked the knife to make sure we hadn’t missed slippage blood and confirmed there was none. So your bad guy likely brushed against something in the house before hauling the male victim outside. I’ve already sent the techs back to check, instructed them to concentrate on the kitchen. Hold on.”

She punched a preset on her desk phone. “Hello, Roosevelt? This is Dr. Lopatinski…already? Wow, that’s great. Take tons of photos and send them to me as soon as you can. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

She laid the phone in its cradle, flashed the full-on face-splitting smile. “They just found the point of contact. Not in the kitchen, on the way out of the kitchen. An edge of the metal insulation strip around the door is cracked and the edges are burred—tiny metal thorns and on several of them was O-positive blood and I’ll lay odds the HLA will confirm that all or most of it is your perpetrator’s.”