I said, “So, unless she was hit by an invisible car that somehow drove into a basement, someone choked the living shite out of her.”
“This,” Cooper informed me, waving Rosie’s hyoid bone in my direction, “is in many ways the most fascinating aspect of the case. As we noted previously, it appears that our victim was aged nineteen. In adolescents, it is rare to find the hyoid broken, due to the flexibility of the bone—and yet this fracture, like the others, is clearly perimortem. The only possible explanation is that she was strangled with extreme force, by an assailant with some physical strength.”
I said, “A man.”
“A man is a more likely candidate, but a strong woman in a state of intense emotion certainly cannot be ruled out. One theory seems most consistent with the full constellation of injuries: the attacker caught her by the throat and slammed her head repeatedly against a wall. The two opposing forces, from the wall’s impact and the attacker’s momentum, combined to fracture the hyoid and compress the airway.”
“And she suffocated.”
“Asphyxiated,” Cooper said, giving me a look. “So I believe. Detective Kennedy is in fact correct that the injuries to the head would have resulted in death in any case, due to intracranial hemorrhage and damage to the brain, but the process could have taken anything up to a few hours. Before that could occur, she was quite probably dead of hypoxia caused either by manual strangulation itself, by vagal inhibition due to manual strangulation, or by obstruction of the airway due to the fractured hyoid bone.”
I kept hitting the mental switch, hard. For a second I saw the line of Rosie’s throat when she laughed.
Cooper told me, just to ensure he fucked up my head as thoroughly as was humanly possible, “The skeleton shows no other perimortem injuries, but the level of decomposition makes it impossible to determine whether there were any injuries to the soft tissues. Whether, for instance, the victim was sexually assaulted.”
I said, “I thought Detective Kennedy implied she had clothes on. For whatever that’s worth.”
He pursed up his lips. “Very little fabric remains. The Technical Bureau team did in fact discover a number of clothing-related artifacts on or near the skeleton—a zipper, metal buttons, hooks consistent with those used in a brassiere, and so forth—which implies that she was buried with a full or near-full complement of clothing. This does not, however, tell us that this clothing was in place at the time of burial. Both the natural course of decomposition and the considerable rodent activity have shifted these items enough to make it impossible for anyone to say whether they were buried on her or merely with her.”
I asked, “Was the zipper open or closed?”
“It was closed. As were the brassiere hooks. Not that this is probative—she could have re-dressed herself after an assault—but it is, I suppose, indicative to some degree.”
“The fingernails,” I said. “Were they broken?” Rosie would have put up a fight; a hell of a fight.
Cooper sighed. I was starting to bore him, all these standard-issue questions that Scorcher had already asked; I needed to get interesting or get out. “Fingernails,” he said, giving a dismissive little nod at a few brownish shavings beside Rosie’s hand bones, “decompose. In this case, they, like the hair, were partially preserved by the alkalinity of the environment, but in a severely deteriorated form. And, as I am not a magician, I am incapable of guessing their condition prior to that deterioration.”
I said, “Just one or two more things, if you’ve got the time, and then I’ll be out of your way. Do you know if the Bureau found anything else with her, apart from the clothing artifacts? Keys, maybe?”
“It seems probable,” Cooper said austerely, “that the Bureau would have more knowledge of that than would I.”
His hand was on the drawer, ready to slide it shut. If Rosie had had her keys, either because her da had given them back or because she had nicked them, then she had had the option of coming out the front door that night, and she hadn’t taken it. I could only think of one reason for that. She had been dodging me, after all.
I said, “They would, of course—it’s hardly your job, Doctor—but half of them are one step up from trained monkeys; I wouldn’t trust them to know what case I was talking about, never mind give me the correct info. You can see why I wouldn’t want to play the monkey lottery on this one.”
Cooper raised his eyebrows a wry fraction, like he knew what I was doing and didn’t care. He said, “Their preliminary report lists two silver rings and three silver stud earrings, all tentatively identified by the Dalys as consistent with jewelry owned by their daughter, and one small key, compatible with a low-quality mass-produced lock, that apparently matches the locks of a suitcase found earlier at the scene. The report lists no other keys, accessories or other possessions.”
And there I was, right back where I had been when I first set eyes on that suitcase: clueless, catapulted into zero-gravity dark without one solid thing to grab hold of. It hit me, for the first time, that I might never know; that that could actually happen.
Cooper inquired, “Was that all?”
The morgue was very quiet, just the temperature control humming to itself somewhere. I don’t do regrets any more than I do drunk, but this weekend was special. I looked at the brown bones spread out naked under Cooper’s fluorescents, and I wished from the bottom of my heart that I had backed off and let sleeping girls lie. Not for my own sake; for hers. She was everyone’s, now: Cooper’s, Scorcher’s, the Place’s, to pick at and finger and use for their own purposes. The Place would already have started the leisurely, enjoyable process of digesting her into just one more piece of local gore-lore, half ghost story and half morality play, half urban myth and half just the way life goes. It would eat her memory whole, the same way its ground had eaten her body. She had been better off in that basement. At least the only people running their hands over her memory had been the ones who loved her.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was all.”
Cooper slid the drawer shut, one long shush of steel on steel, and the bones were gone, honeycombed in tight among all the rest of his question-marked dead. The last thing I saw before I walked out of the morgue was Rosie’s face still shining on the light board, luminous and transparent, those bright eyes and that unbeatable smile layered paper-thin over rotting bone.
Cooper walked me out. I did my most charming arse-licking thank-yous, I promised him a bottle of his favorite wine for Christmas, he waved bye-bye to me at the door and went back to doing whatever disturbing things Cooper does when he’s left alone in the morgue. Then I went around the corner and punched the wall. I turned my knuckles into hamburger, but the pain was brilliant enough that just for a few seconds, while I was doubled over clutching my hand, it seared my mind white and empty.