Noah moved to the bottom of the table and used his coffee cup to motion toward Jane Doe’s feet. “Were her legs restrained as well?”
Dr. Feist nodded and joined him at the foot of the table. With great care, she folded the sheet up to Jane Doe’s knees. There were some bruises and abrasions on her shins, but they weren’t severe. Her ankles, however, showed several angry red rings where the skin had been rubbed away. Her toenails were painted bright pink. “These don’t look as fresh as the ones on her wrists. You can see that they definitely did not cause the types of deep abrasions you see on her wrists. It looks like she scraped or banged her shins sometime in the hours before her death, but I can’t say for sure whether or not her feet were bound while she was in the river.”
Noah said, “The river is powerful, but would it break zip ties on someone’s ankles?”
“I’m not sure if there is any way to know that,” Josie said.
Dr. Feist agreed. “I think all we can say with certainty is that within the last days or possibly weeks before her death, this woman was bound both hand and foot with what appears to have been zip ties.”
Noah frowned. “She was walking on the path to the riverbank. We have her on video. She fell but there was no indication that her feet were bound. If her legs weren’t bound, she should have been able to climb out from the rocks,” Noah said. “Don’t you think?”
Dr. Feist grimaced. “I haven’t seen the rocks you’re talking about, so I don’t know. What I can tell you is that she was out there for a long time. You didn’t notice her fingers, did you?”
Josie and Noah shook their heads. Dr. Feist stepped around to one of Jane Doe’s still-exposed hands and lifted it in the air so they could see. As Josie stepped closer, the unnatural pink coloring of the dead woman’s fingers came into greater focus. It looked like she had put her fingers into scalding water up to the second knuckle.
“Frostbite,” Josie said.
“Yes,” agreed Dr. Feist.
“It was only just below freezing yesterday,” Noah said. “Is frostbite even possible at twenty-five to thirty degrees?”
“With the wind chill making the ‘feels like’ temperature outside far lower than that, it’s possible. It would depend on the wind speed and how long she was exposed. If she was out in the dam area for several hours trying to break free from her restraints with a high wind speed and a ‘feels like’ temperature well below freezing then yes, this case of frostbite is certainly possible.”
Josie ran through the scenario in her head: this woman arrived at the Russell Haven Dam at almost five a.m., possibly meeting someone but more likely, having been brought there by someone. Then her attacker left her hands restrained and somehow placed her between the boulders? They would have had to force her to walk out to where the boulders were; she wasn’t sure it was possible to carry a grown woman, even a slight one, across the chute to those boulders and deposit her there.
Noah said, “The frostbite wouldn’t prevent her from getting free.”
“No,” said Dr. Feist. “But if she was out there all day trying to break free, she would have gotten frostbite.”
“She wasn’t restrained when we got to her,” Josie said. “She raised one hand in the air. That’s how I knew she was alive. But even with the water making her buoyant, I had a very difficult time getting her dislodged from the boulders. Is it possible she was trapped there, managed to get the zip ties off but then still couldn’t get out from between the stones?”
“Again, I can’t theorize without having seen the location where you found her, but I can definitively say that the broken rib would have severely limited her mobility and the head injury would have made her weak and disoriented. She likely lost consciousness at some point. Whether that was before she came to be between the rocks or sometime after that, I can’t say for certain. However, her coordination might not have been very good after the head injury, particularly once the subdural hematoma began to grow, putting pressure on her brain.”
Josie asked, “Would the head injury have killed her? If she hadn’t drowned?”
Dr. Feist touched the top of Jane Doe’s hand, staring down at her face. “It’s difficult to say. Again, it depends on her individual factors.”
Josie thought of how dazed she had seemed in the security camera footage when she fell on the path, how the hand had reached in from off-camera and dragged her off as though she were a ragdoll. Had she been too out of it to put up a proper fight? Had her attacker been able to march her out to the boulders with little resistance?
Noah said, “What about her manner of death?”
Dr. Feist looked back up at them. “Most of the time with a drowning death, unless we have very solid evidence to suggest that another person caused the victim to drown, we have to list the manner of death as accidental.”
“Not homicide?” Josie said. “Someone put her into that water release chute, between those boulders, with the intention of her being stuck there when the water was released.”
“It’s sadistic,” Noah added. “You can’t possibly believe that she wandered out to those rocks on her own with that goose egg on her head, a cracked rib, and all the bruises and abrasions she sustained. We know someone was with her. We have video of someone helping her up from a fall on the path to the riverbank.”
“It’s not about what we believe,” Josie muttered. “It’s about what we can prove. We can’t prove that someone put her between those rocks.”
Dr. Feist held up both hands to silence them. “Let me finish. You’re right. It is about what we can prove and what I think will withstand the cross-examination of a defense attorney in court, should you find the person who did this and bring them to trial. In this particular case, given my belief that she was not physically able to extricate herself from the chute due to her antemortem injuries, I will rule this as a homicide.”
Josie couldn’t help but think of the fear that must have seized Jane Doe, knowing that at any moment the water would crash down on her but that she was unable to escape. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Dr. Feist tucked Jane Doe’s arm back under the sheet. “Now, why don’t the two of you work on your end of this investigation and find the person who tortured and killed this woman.”
“Gladly,” Noah said. “Doc, is there anything else you can tell us that might help us figure out who this woman is or who tried to kill her?”
“I wish there was. Hummel took her fingerprints while he was here. He called to tell me he had run them through AFIS but didn’t get any hits. Until you figure out who she is and get her next of kin to claim her body, she’ll stay here with me.”
“We’ll be working on that today,” Josie promised.
Fifteen