Lauren Parry knelt on the floor beside the victim, and as she filled in each box in her report, the medical examiner recited to Nikki, “OK, so we have a John Doe, late forties, approximately two-fifty to two-fifty-five.” The ME pointed to her nostrils. “Obvious smoker, definite drinker.”
It was always tough with the Does, thought Nikki. Without a name to go on, you were hobbled at the starting gate. Precious time in the investigation would be spent just figuring out who he was.
“Preliminary TOD . . . ,” Lauren Parry read the thermometer and continued, “. . . eight to ten &P.M.&”
“That long ago? You sure?” Heat’s friend looked up at her from the clipboard and stared. The detective said, “OK, so you’re sure.”
“Preliminarily, Nik. I’ll run the usual tests when we get him down to Thirtieth Street, but for now that’s a good window for you.”
“Cause of death?”
“Well, you just want every little thing, don’t you?” said the ME with a twinkle behind her deadpan. Then she grew pensive and turned to consider the corpse. “COD could be asphyxiation.”
“The collar?”
“That’s my best first guess.” Lauren stood and indicated the posture collar biting into the man’s neck, drawn so tight by the strapping at the back it caused his flesh to roll over its edges. “Certainly enough to restrict the windpipe. Plus the broken blood vessels in the eyeballs are consistent with choking.”
“Let’s rewind. Best first guess?’ ” asked Heat.
“Come on, Nikki, you know I always tell you first shot is preliminary.” Then Lauren Parry looked back at the body, pondering again.
“What?”
“Let’s just mark it ‘choking’ as a prelim until I do my autopsy.”
Nikki knew better than to press Lauren for conjecture, just as her friend knew not to push her for speculation. “That’s fine,” she said, all the while knowing that her pal from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was mulling something.
Lauren opened a plastic drawer in her kit for some swabs and resumed her testing while Nikki did what she always did at a death scene. She clasped her hands behind her and slowly walked the room, occasionally squatting or bending, eyeing the corpse from all angles. This wasn’t just a ritual, it was a fundamental procedure to clear her head of all conclusions and projections. The idea was to open her mind to impressions, to just let in whatever came in and, most of all, simply to notice what she was noticing.
Her sense of the victim was that he wasn’t a physically active person. The sizable roll of soft fat around his midsection suggested a lot of sitting, or at least an occupation that didn’t involve movement or strength like sports, construction, or other manual labor. As with most people, the skin on his upper arms was pale compared to his forearms, but the contrast wasn’t great; no farmer’s tan. That told her not only that he was indoors a lot, but that he either wore long sleeves most of the time or didn’t likely tend a garden or play golf at a club. Even this long after summer there would be more residual tanning. She stepped close to examine his hands, being careful not to breathe on them. They were clean and soft, underscoring her feeling about his indoor life. The nails were neat but not manicured; she usually saw that among middle-aged men who were wealthy or young urban groomers who were more fit. The hair was sparse up top, befitting the age Lauren had fixed, as were the strands of white mixed in with its dull, iron filings color. The brows were wildly bushy, sometimes an indicator of a bachelor or widower, and his salt-and-pepper goatee gave him an air of academia or arts and letters. Nikki looked again at his fingertips and made note of a bluish tinge that looked to be within the skin itself and not topical like from oil paint or ink stains.