“I am. Are you strong? Savage isn’t a little guy.”
“I can handle myself if you can.”
“Let’s do it, then.”
Roy excused himself, and the two women wrestled the body from the cardboard coffin.
Savage definitely wasn’t little. Sam’s measurements said seventy-two inches, and the scale showed him at two hundred pounds. He was fully dressed in a black turtleneck and jeans.
“Is this how he came in?” Sam asked.
“This is how we got him,” Regina said. “We did the usual radiographs to make sure he didn’t have any devices or replacement joints, but the orders were to cremate him clothed.”
“Is that usual?”
“Sure. Put Grandma in her favorite blue dress before the cremation, that sort of thing.”
“Who dressed him, do you know?”
“No idea.”
“Okay. You have the radiographs?”
“I do.” She put them up on the light board, and Sam looked them over. She saw nothing of great significance, only a previous tibia fracture, well healed.
“Let’s get his clothes off. I can’t believe they redressed him after they examined him,” she said.
“From what I’ve been told, there was no real examination at all. You have a clean slate.”
Sam looked at Regina. “What? I knew there wasn’t an internal exam, but nothing external, either?”
“Not that I know of. It was a clear case of suicide, they told us, and warned us to be careful with the body because of the hydrogen sulfide. It’s the only reason we haven’t sent him through the retort yet—we wanted to give the chemicals time to dissipate.”
Sam shook her head, partly annoyed and partly glad. When they said no post, she’d assumed they were talking about an internal exam. What sort of fool wouldn’t do any external exam on a dead body? Someone was trying to get Timothy Savage out of the way, and fast.
Once his clothes were off, Sam started on a cursory check of the body. She stopped at the neck. There were bruises around his throat. Her first instinct was strangulation, but she thought about the method of his suicide, the hydrogen sulfide, and the reaction he might have had to suddenly being unable to breathe. People sometimes brought their own hands to their throat as if they could claw an airway open from the outside. It was suspicious, but not entirely unheard of. Sam looked closely at his eyes and under the edge of his upper lip, saw the red pinpricks of petechial hemorrhage. That was to be expected in the case of asphyxiation.
He’d also bitten his tongue, a deep black wound caused by his incisors. The injury would have bled profusely, and she had seen no evidence of blood on his clothes or his body. She tucked that fact away, but felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. Someone had cleaned up Mr. Savage, after all. The police? Or someone else?
“Take a vitreous fluid, would you, Regina?”
“Sure.” She expertly drew the fluid from his eye with a syringe as Sam finished the rest of the external exam. “Let’s flip him.”
They manhandled the body so it was facedown, and Sam gasped. The upper part of Savage’s back was covered in tattoos. Spirals and triangles and stars, what seemed to be a type of Celtic love knot. No faces, no names, just strange symbols, arranged in what looked to be a repeating pattern.
“Take a photograph please, Regina.”
The girl hopped up on the autopsy table and motioned for Sam to hand her the camera. She snapped off a few shots. “Pretty.”
“You think?”
“Absolutely. Here, look at the shot from above. They’re arranged in a triskele. Do you know what that is?”
“Never heard of it.” She looked at the photos and could see now what Regina was talking about—the multiple symbols formed a clear pattern of three interlocked spirals.
“A triskele is Celtic, and it’s ancient. It was a pagan symbol, the power of three—maid, mother, crone or land, sea, sky. Any triad, really, but once Christianity came into the land, it morphed into a trinity symbol. Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
“How do you know this?”
She smiled, and Sam was reminded of a pixie. “I studied Comparative Religion and the Classics at Randolph College. I was considering entering a convent for a while, then decided I could be of better service to my Lord by helping discover what causes death. I’m considering pathology, but med school is so very expensive.”
It was a strange way to phrase it, what causes death, instead of the more common forensic phrase, cause of death. But Sam didn’t pursue it. She looked at Savage’s back again.
“It must have taken years to get all of these tattoos,” she said. “Did you know Savage, Regina? Or his son, Henry? Where he went to church, or anything else about him?”
“No, I didn’t. Then again, Lynchburg’s a bigger town than you might think.”
“I was told Henry went to Randolph College, too.”