Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(54)
“If you look closely,” Cooper said, stroking the cracks delicately with a fingertip, “you will observe that the edges of the fractures are splintered, rather than snapped cleanly. This implies that, at the time of the injuries, the bone was flexible and moist, not dry and brittle. In other words, the fractures are not a post-mortem artifact; they were inflicted at or around the time of death. They were caused by several forceful blows—I would estimate at least three—from a flat surface, four inches wide or more, with no sharp edges or corners.”
I beat the urge to swallow; he would see it if I did. “Well,” I said. “I’m no pathologist either, but that looks to me like it could kill someone.”
“Ah,” Cooper said, smirking. “It could, but in this case, we cannot state with certainty that it did. Look here.”
He groped around at Rosie’s throat and fished out two fragile slips of bone. “This,” he said, fitting them neatly together into a horseshoe, “is the hyoid bone. It lies at the top of the throat, just beneath the jaw, supporting the tongue and protecting the airway. As you see, one of the greater horns has been completely severed. A fractured hyoid bone is associated, so near exclusively as to be diagnostic, with either motor vehicle accidents or manual strangulation.”
I said, “So, unless she was hit by an invisible car that somehow drove into a basement, someone choked the living shite out of her.”
“This,” Cooper informed me, waving Rosie’s hyoid bone in my direction, “is in many ways the most fascinating aspect of the case. As we noted previously, it appears that our victim was aged nineteen. In adolescents, it is rare to find the hyoid broken, due to the flexibility of the bone—and yet this fracture, like the others, is clearly perimortem. The only possible explanation is that she was strangled with extreme force, by an assailant with some physical strength.”
I said, “A man.”
“A man is a more likely candidate, but a strong woman in a state of intense emotion certainly cannot be ruled out. One theory seems most consistent with the full constellation of injuries: the attacker caught her by the throat and slammed her head repeatedly against a wall. The two opposing forces, from the wall’s impact and the attacker’s momentum, combined to fracture the hyoid and compress the airway.”
“And she suffocated.”
“Asphyxiated,” Cooper said, giving me a look. “So I believe. Detective Kennedy is in fact correct that the injuries to the head would have resulted in death in any case, due to intracranial hemorrhage and damage to the brain, but the process could have taken anything up to a few hours. Before that could occur, she was quite probably dead of hypoxia caused either by manual strangulation itself, by vagal inhibition due to manual strangulation, or by obstruction of the airway due to the fractured hyoid bone.”
I kept hitting the mental switch, hard. For a second I saw the line of Rosie’s throat when she laughed.
Cooper told me, just to ensure he f*cked up my head as thoroughly as was humanly possible, “The skeleton shows no other perimortem injuries, but the level of decomposition makes it impossible to determine whether there were any injuries to the soft tissues. Whether, for instance, the victim was sexually assaulted.”
I said, “I thought Detective Kennedy implied she had clothes on. For whatever that’s worth.”
He pursed up his lips. “Very little fabric remains. The Technical Bureau team did in fact discover a number of clothing-related artifacts on or near the skeleton—a zipper, metal buttons, hooks consistent with those used in a brassiere, and so forth—which implies that she was buried with a full or near-full complement of clothing. This does not, however, tell us that this clothing was in place at the time of burial. Both the natural course of decomposition and the considerable rodent activity have shifted these items enough to make it impossible for anyone to say whether they were buried on her or merely with her.”
I asked, “Was the zipper open or closed?”
“It was closed. As were the brassiere hooks. Not that this is probative—she could have re-dressed herself after an assault—but it is, I suppose, indicative to some degree.”
“The fingernails,” I said. “Were they broken?” Rosie would have put up a fight; a hell of a fight.
Cooper sighed. I was starting to bore him, all these standard-issue questions that Scorcher had already asked; I needed to get interesting or get out. “Fingernails,” he said, giving a dismissive little nod at a few brownish shavings beside Rosie’s hand bones, “decompose. In this case, they, like the hair, were partially preserved by the alkalinity of the environment, but in a severely deteriorated form. And, as I am not a magician, I am incapable of guessing their condition prior to that deterioration.”
I said, “Just one or two more things, if you’ve got the time, and then I’ll be out of your way. Do you know if the Bureau found anything else with her, apart from the clothing artifacts? Keys, maybe?”
“It seems probable,” Cooper said austerely, “that the Bureau would have more knowledge of that than would I.”
His hand was on the drawer, ready to slide it shut. If Rosie had had her keys, either because her da had given them back or because she had nicked them, then she had had the option of coming out the front door that night, and she hadn’t taken it. I could only think of one reason for that. She had been dodging me, after all.