Her face was beginning to droop, but it was largely intact. Her front teeth were snapped, as I’d expected, from the abrupt kick of the shotgun barrel, but the skin of her face was unbroken. The undertaker who’d arranged the body in the casket—Montgomery himself, he confirmed when I asked—had propped the head in an approximation of a normal resting position. To do that, he’d used a small cylindrical pillow to fill the space formerly occupied by the base of the skull and the back of the neck. That pillow, like the bigger, rectangular one beneath it, was damp with blood and body fluids. I leaned down and turned the head gently to one side with my gloved hands. It flopped easily; the base of the skull and much of the cervical spine had been blasted away, and what remained of the head was attached to the body only by the soft tissue of the throat.
The only sounds were the groans of the building and the whoosh of the fans, but I was acutely conscious of Angie beside me, as motionless but as tense as a bear trap primed to snap with bone-crushing force. I stepped aside to give her a moment. I’d expected her to be overwhelmed with grief, but instead she seemed to draw strength from the sight of her sister’s body. It seemed as if she grew taller and stronger, somehow; her eyes glittered with anger, and her mouth twitched with what I’d have sworn was a grim smile. “I’d thought it’d be hard to see Kate’s body,” she said, “but this isn’t my sister anymore. This is just evidence now.”
After a moment she nodded, and then she, Montgomery, Maddox, and I lifted the body out of the casket—Chumley begged off helping, citing a bad back—and shifted it onto a metal gurney. Next I retrieved the soggy pillows and repositioned them beneath the head and neck.
Angie had brought a camera, and she began taking photos—wide shots, medium shots, close-ups, dozens of them—documenting the damage done by the blast. Carefully I tilted and rotated the head, then rolled the body onto its stomach so Angie could capture the wound from all angles. I’d found streaks of lead on a few of the bone fragments I’d recovered from the cleanup company’s biohazard boxes, but the exposed edges of the bones of the skull and neck—portions of the third cervical vertebra and the top of the fourth vertebra—showed no signs of lead. That didn’t surprise me; I knew from other gunshot deaths I’d worked that the shotgun slug itself would punch straight through, but the force of the air pressure and burning gases would create a wider cone of destruction. After Angie had thoroughly photographed the wound from every possible distance and direction, I placed the body faceup again, replicating how she’d lain on her sofa the night she died. Maddox kept quiet, but he watched closely; Chumley, meanwhile, had excused himself to “check in with the dispatcher”; evidently checking in was a detailed procedure, because the deputy never reappeared.
We had brought with us a wooden dowel, three feet long by an inch in diameter, as a standin for the shotgun. Angie had suggested bringing an actual gun, but I managed to dissuade her, on the grounds that it would be physically harder to handle than the dowel. I’d stopped short of adding “emotionally harder, too”; that, I felt sure, went without saying. I threaded the dowel through the jaws and out the back of the head, positioning the end—the “muzzle” of the dowel, so to speak—on the pillow directly at the center of the circle of missing flesh and shattered bone. Assuming the slug and explosive gases had emerged from the gun barrel in a symmetrical pattern, centering the end of the dowel would show us the angle of the gun when it was fired.
I checked and rechecked the position, and turned to Angie, who was taking more photos. “Does that look centered to you?” She lowered the camera, crouched to study the dowel’s position on the pillow, and adjusted the angle by a fraction of a degree. Then she frowned and put it back exactly where I’d had it.
During the past twenty years, I’d examined three shotgun suicides. In all three cases, the barrel had been angled upward, at roughly a forty-five-degree angle, with the butt of the stock down around waist level. But unless I’d badly misjudged the geometry, in this case the gun had intersected Kate’s body at a ninety-degree angle, and the shot had been fired from straight on: an unnatural and awkward angle.
Suddenly one of the death-scene photos—the ones taken by the sheriff’s deputy the day Kate had died—sprang unbidden to my mind. I turned to Angie. “You brought in the folder you’ve been keeping on your sister, didn’t you?”
She nodded at the end of the workbench. “Got it right here. Why?”
“Let’s take another look at the photos the deputy took.” She set down the camera, opened the file, and slowly flipped through the handful of pictures. I looked over her left shoulder; Maddox looked over her right. “That one,” I said, when she reached the next-to-last photo. It was a close-up of the business end of the shotgun. I laid the dowel on the gurney and peered at the picture, wishing I had a magnifying glass. “There,” I said, pointing a purple-gloved pinky at a small metal peg jutting up from the gun barrel. “What’s that?”