Now she was no longer blinded by faith, unlike her two friends. Nic could tell that Allison, with her steady churchgoing, thought of herself as more grounded than Cassidy, who flitted from belief to belief. But in Nic’s eyes the two women were basically the same. Imagining God—or the universe or karma or whatever—could offer them solace and comfort. Imagining they could influence events with their thoughts and prayers, when nothing could help them and they were powerless. You were on your own in this world, and when your life ended, that was it.
Tony’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “I’m not seeing any injuries other than the postmortem animal feeding.” He lifted the shoulder farthest away from the viewing room, rolled Katie on her side, and inspected her back. “Huh,” he said, his voice so low it seemed pitched for his own ears. “That’s interesting.”
Leif bent down and began to snap pictures.
Owen and Nic leaned closer to the window. “What?” Owen asked.
Tony looked up. “You know about lividity, right?”
Nicole said, “It’s when blood settles into the lower part of the body after death and changes the color of the skin.”
“Right. Lividity is like if I put a wet sponge down on the counter. After a few hours, the top would be dry and the bottom would be wet, because the water would drain to the bottom. Same with the blood in a dead body. Once the heart stops pumping, the blood settles and stains the skin. It won’t show anyplace the capillaries are compressed, like areas that are pressed against the ground.”
Nic still didn’t see what he was getting at. “Yeah?”
Katie’s skin was stained reddish-purple on the edges of her chest, under the tops of her shoulders, and on the sides of her abdomen—just the way it should be, since she had been found facedown.
“Katie has lividity in two different places.”
“What do you mean?” Owen asked.
Then Nic guessed the answer. “Is it because she was hanging, and eventually the branch broke, and she fell?”
“No. If that was the case, you would expect to see staining on the bottom of her feet.”
They all looked at her waxy yellow-white soles.
“But look at this.” He tugged at Katie’s shoulder, shifted the body until Nic and Owen could see what he already had—the fainter purple-red stains between the girl’s shoulder blades and on the small of her back.
“First she was on her back long enough for lividity to set in, and then later she was put in the position you found her in. But not all the blood migrated from her back to her front.”
“That fits with what we found at the scene,” Leif said. “We found a broken branch that might have been used for hanging, but it was thirty feet away from the body.”
“Can you tell when she was moved?” Nic asked. “How soon after death?”
Tony said, “My best guess is three or four hours. For lividity, you’ve got about a twelve-hour window. After that, you can move the body all you want, but it won’t cause any more staining. The question is—why did someone move her after she’d already been dead for a while?”
Suddenly Nic knew. “Her body was half under a bush. Someone killed her, panicked, and left, then returned to the scene and tried to hide her. That would explain the mud on the front of her coat.”
“Or it could be that she died and someone found her, maybe tried to help her, and then realized she was dead and dropped her,” Leif said. “This still doesn’t rule out suicide.”
As Tony and the assistant opened up the body, and Leif documented every step, Nic tried to watch them as she might a documentary. Keep her distance. Not think that a few weeks ago, this had been a girl with dreams and hopes and fears. On the pretense of shifting position, she shot a side-ways glance at Owen and was heartened to see that he looked like he was having a hard time too.
Tony looked up at them. “Basically, what we’re looking for is trauma or other indications of the cause of death. For example, heart disease might turn out to be the real cause of death for a middle-aged man.”
“Not in Katie’s case, though,” Nic said.
“No. Not likely in this girl’s case,” Tony agreed. “I’ll run some more tests, of course, but so far everything looks normal. Now I’m going to expose the neck structures to see if I can figure out what happened.”
He spent a long time examining what he found. Then he raised his eyebrows and murmured, “That’s it.”
Leif started snapping photos.
Nic had no idea what they were looking at, but she leaned forward anyway.
“We’re lucky she was facedown, or her neck might have gotten chewed up, too, and I would never have seen this.”
“Seen what?” Owen asked.
“This is the cause of death right there. She has a fractured larynx—and that obstructed the trachea. She died from asphyxia, since the air couldn’t reach her lungs.”
“But could that come from hanging?” Owen asked.
“It’s very unlikely. This was caused by a blow to the throat.” Against his own throat, Tony made a chopping motion with the side of his gloved hand.