“What’s interesting?” asks Frankie.
“The aorta appears intact.”
“Is that a surprise?”
“A five-story fall onto concrete usually results in far more intrathoracic trauma than I’m seeing in here. When a body hits the ground at that velocity, the heart jerks against its ligaments, and that can tear the great vessels, but I don’t see any large-vessel rupture here. Probably because she was only twenty-two. People that young have much more elastic connective tissue. They can bounce back.”
Frankie looks at the glistening heart of Taryn Moore and thinks about the trauma from which young people sometimes don’t bounce back. A father who abandons you. A boyfriend breaking up with you.
“So it’s the head injury that killed her?” says Mac.
“Almost certainly.” Fleer turns and calls across the room to his assistant, who is setting up the instrument tray for the next autopsy. “Lisa, can you pull up Taryn Moore’s skull x-rays so they can take a look?”
“What are we supposed to see there?” says Mac.
“I’ll show you. To fracture a skull takes only five foot-pounds of force. You can get that much force just by falling three feet onto your head, and this was a five-story fall.” Fleer crosses to the computer monitor, where Lisa has pulled up the skull films. “Based on these AP and lateral views, it appears she hit the ground, bounced, and hit the ground a second time. The initial impact caused this compression fracture of the squamous part of the temporal bone. The second impact fractured the frontal bone and resulted in the facial trauma. Using Puppe’s rule, we know the sequence.”
“Puppe’s rule?” says Mac. “Does that have something to do with dogs?”
Fleer sighs. “It’s called Puppe’s rule after Dr. Georg Puppe, the physician who first described the principle. It simply states that a fracture line will be stopped by any previous fracture line. And here, on this x-ray, you see where the bone has caved in? Based on the location, near the temporal fossa, I’d say there was very likely a rupture of the middle meningeal artery. When we open up the cranium, we’re almost certainly going to find a subarachnoid bleed. But let me continue with the thorax.” Fleer returns to the autopsy table and picks up a scalpel. He excises the heart and lungs, sets them in a basin, and moves on to the abdominal cavity. Swiftly and efficiently he removes stomach and bowel, liver and spleen. Frankie turns away, nauseated, when he slits open the stomach and empties the contents into a basin, releasing the sour stench of gastric juices.
“The last meal she ingested was . . . red wine, I’d guess,” he says. “I don’t see any food.”
“She had macaroni and cheese in her microwave,” says Frankie.
“Well, she never ate it. There’s no solid food in here.” Fleer sets aside the sectioned stomach and turns his attention to the hollowed-out abdominal cavity. The viscera he’s removed so far are undiseased, the organs of a healthy young woman who should have outlived everyone around this table. Yet here they are, Fleer and Mac and Frankie, still alive and breathing, while Taryn Moore is not.
“As soon as I finish the pelvis, we’ll open the cranium, and you’ll see just how much damage a five-story fall can . . .” He pauses, his hands deep in the pelvic cavity. Abruptly he turns to Lisa. “Make sure you include a serum HCG in her blood work. And I’ll want to preserve this uterus in formalin gel.”
“HCG?” Lisa approaches the table. “Do you think she’s—”
“Let’s have Dr. Siu look at the uterine sections.” He reaches for a syringe. “And we’ll need to collect DNA from these tissues.”
“DNA? What’s going on?” Mac says.
Frankie doesn’t need to ask; she already understands the reason for the DNA collection. She looks down at Taryn Moore’s exposed pelvic cavity and asks: “How far along was she?”
“I don’t want to hazard a guess. All I can tell you is her uterus is abnormally large, and it feels soft, almost boggy, to me. We’ll preserve it in formalin and have a pediatric pathologist examine the sections.”
“She was pregnant?” Mac looks at Frankie. “But her boyfriend said they broke up months ago. You think it’s his baby?”
“If it isn’t his, we’ve just opened up a whole new can of worms.”
Fleer uncaps the syringe. “DNA is the answer to all life’s mysteries.”
“So now we know the reason she killed herself,” says Mac. “She finds out she’s pregnant. Tells the ex-boyfriend, who refuses to marry her. He says it’s not his problem; it’s hers. She gets so depressed she takes a flying leap off the balcony. Yeah, it all makes sense.”
“It certainly seems like a logical scenario,” says Fleer.
Mac looks at Frankie. “So are we finally satisfied this was suicide?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“It’s that goddamn cell phone, isn’t it? It’s still bothering you.”
“What cell phone?” Fleer asks.
“The girl’s cell phone is missing,” says Frankie.
“You think it was stolen?”
“We don’t know. We’re still waiting for her wireless carrier to produce the call log.”
“Okay,” says Mac. “Just for the sake of argument, let’s say this wasn’t a suicide. Let’s say someone pushed her off the balcony. How the hell are we ever going to prove that? We have no witnesses. We have no evidence of a break-in. All we know is she ended up dead on the sidewalk with a fractured skull.”
A skull with two different fractures. Frankie crosses back to the computer, where Taryn Moore’s x-rays still glow on the monitor. “I have a question about these separate fracture lines, Dr. Fleer.”
“What about them?”
“You said she hit the ground, bounced, and hit it again. How do you know that?”
“I told you, it’s based on Puppe’s law. The compression fracture of the temporal bone came first. The second impact caused the fracture of the frontal bone.”
“What if she didn’t bounce? What if she only hit the ground once? Is it possible the first fracture happened before she even fell off the balcony?”
Fleer’s eyes narrow. “You are suggesting two separate traumatic events.”
“The x-ray doesn’t exclude the possibility, does it?”
He is silent for a moment as he considers her question. “No, it doesn’t. But if what you propose is what actually happened, that would mean . . .”
“This wasn’t a suicide,” says Frankie.
CHAPTER 17
FRANKIE
They sit at Mac’s workstation, where a photo of his wife, Patty, tanned and wearing a smile and a bathing suit, is prominently displayed. At fifty-two, Patty is still trim and bikini-worthy, and that photo never fails to annoy Frankie because she herself has never felt bikini-worthy. Also because it smacks of bragging: I’ve got a hot wife; what’ve you got? Which seems more than a little insensitive since half their colleagues in the unit are divorced or on the verge of it. Still, she can’t fault a man for being proud of his wife.
Frankie avoids looking at smoking-hot Patty, even though the photo is hanging right above the desktop computer, and she focuses instead on the video that’s playing on Mac’s monitor. It’s footage from the surveillance camera mounted on the building across from Taryn Moore’s apartment, and while her balcony is too high to be in the camera’s field of view, this recording should have captured footage of her plummet to the ground, as well as the moment the Lyft driver discovered her body. Frankie dreads viewing the first event, that final split second between life and death, and her shoulders are tense as Mac fast-forwards the video and the time code rapidly advances from midnight to 12:30 to 1:00 a.m. A storm blew in from the west that night, and falling rain obscures the camera’s view. Suddenly there is the body, magically materializing on the sidewalk. It is little more than a formless dark lump beyond beads of falling rain.
“Back up,” says Frankie.
Mac rewinds to 1:10. The body is not there. They both lean forward, watching in
tently as the video now plays at normal speed.
“There she is,” says Mac. He rewinds, frame by frame, and freezes the image.
Frankie stares at what is captured on the screen at 1:11:25. Taryn’s falling body is merely a dark smear suspended in midair. They can make out no details of her face; they only know that they are looking at the last split second before she slammed onto the concrete.
“I don’t see her cell phone anywhere,” says Frankie.
“Maybe it fell somewhere out of frame.”
“Let’s see if anyone walks by. Picks it up.”
Once again, the time code advances. At 1:20, a car drives past without stopping. At 1:28, another car. It is raining hard, and the drivers are no doubt focused on the road ahead as they peer through the water sheeting down their windshields. Car after car passes without stopping as Taryn Moore’s body lies there unnoticed, slowly cooling. Considering the foul weather and the late hour, it is not surprising that no pedestrians walk past.
At 3:51, a black sedan glides into the frame. This vehicle does not drive past as the others did. Instead it slows down and stops, blocking the camera’s view of the body. For a few seconds the sedan idles at the curb, as if the driver cannot decide whether to brave the rain and investigate or to simply drive on as everyone else has done before him. At last the car door swings open, and a man steps out. He circles around to the sidewalk, where he crouches out of view. Seconds later, he scrambles back into his vehicle.
“The nine-one-one call came in at three fifty-two,” says Mac. “So this is our Lyft driver, right on schedule.”
“He’s being a very good citizen. I can’t imagine he’d steal her phone. So what happened to it?”
“You and that phone. Look, there’s nothing here that changes our conclusion. We now know the exact time of death was one eleven. At three fifty-one, the Lyft driver finds her body and calls it in. Suicide’s still at the top of the list.”
“Let’s see what the front-door camera shows.”
The entrance to Taryn Moore’s apartment building is around the corner from where her body landed, and the only available surveillance footage is from a camera mounted three feet above the front-door intercom. The camera is old and the video quality grainy, but it would have recorded everyone who entered the building.
Mac starts the playback at 9:00 p.m. At 9:35, they spot Taryn’s neighbor Helen Ng, her hair plastered down by rain. It was Friday night in a college neighborhood, and as the clock advanced toward midnight, tenants continued to straggle home.
“There’s gotta be at least eighty, ninety people living in that building,” says Mac. “We gonna try matching names to every one of these faces?”
“Let’s just keep watching. Maybe we’ll get lucky and pretty boy Liam will show up.”
“Still won’t prove he killed her.”
“It’ll prove he’s lying about the last time he saw her. And that’s a start.”
“Only a start.”
At 11:00 p.m., a couple appears, shaking off the rain. The young woman nibbles on the man’s ear, and as they step inside, he’s already pawing at her breasts.
“That was not my college experience,” says Mac.
At 11:45, two young men stumble to the door, obviously drunk.
At 12:11, a weary-looking Domino’s Pizza deliveryman trudges in from the rain, holding an insulated delivery bag. Five minutes later he exits the building, carrying his empty bag.
Then, at 12:55, an umbrella appears. Unlike that garish paisley umbrella that Mac brought to the death scene, this one is black and anonymous, indistinguishable from a million other umbrellas, and the nylon dome hides whomever is holding it. Umbrella Person walks into the building without ever revealing his—or her—face to the camera.
Frankie leans closer. “Now this might be significant.”
“It’s just someone with an umbrella.”
“Look at the time, Mac. It’s just sixteen minutes before Taryn Moore’s body hits the sidewalk.”
“It might be another tenant coming home.”
“Let’s see what happens next.”
For the next thirty minutes, not much does happen. As the time stamp advances, no one else appears in the entranceway. The only movement captured on video is the occasional splatter of gust-driven rain blowing in. Everyone in the building, it seems, is home for the night.
No. Not everyone.
At 1:25 a.m., someone exits the building. It’s Umbrella Person. Once again, Frankie cannot see the face, cannot even determine the gender. Shielded by that dome of black nylon, he or she moves unseen past the camera and slips away into the night.
“Go back,” says Frankie. “Ten seconds.”
Mac rewinds the video, and Umbrella Person is sucked backward into the building. Frankie scarcely dares to draw a breath as the video once again advances, but in slo-mo this time, frame by frame. The umbrella stutters into view. Just as it’s about to move out of the frame, Mac freezes the image.
“Hey,” he says. “Look at that.” He points to the black bulge that peeks out behind the umbrella, a bulge whose glossy surface reflects a splash of light from the entranceway lamp. “I think that’s a trash bag,” he says.
For a moment Frankie and Mac are silent, focused on the screen, where the video is now paused at 1:26 a.m. At that moment in time, Taryn Moore lay sprawled on the sidewalk around the corner, her skull shattered, her blood mingling with the rain.
“Maybe there’s no connection,” says Mac. “Even if there is, it’s gonna be hard for us to prove.”
“Then we’d better get to work.”
CHAPTER 18
FRANKIE
The apartment’s ancient elevator seems even slower tonight, wheezing as it carries its four passengers and their boxes of forensic equipment up to the fifth floor.
“At least this time we’ve got an elevator that works,” says one of the crime scene techs.
“Last week, Bree and I had to haul this gear up a rickety ladder to get to a death scene. It was up on the roof.”
“Well, tonight, ladies,” says Mac, “I’m here to assist you.” His gallant offer seems to impress neither Amber nor Bree, who respond with polite millennial smiles. Except for Mac, it is an all-woman team working the crime scene tonight, a sign of feminist progress that Frankie never imagined when she joined Boston PD over thirty years ago. It delights her to see so many young women like these two now patrolling city streets or arguing cases in the courtroom or gamely lugging heavy camera gear to crime scenes. Time and again, Frankie has told her twins that girls can do anything they put their minds to, as long as they work hard and stay focused and don’t let boys distract them.
Someday, maybe they’ll listen.
When they reach the fifth floor, Amber and Bree hoist up the two heaviest boxes of gear and carry them out of the elevator, leaving Mac to carry the lightest box.
He sighs. “I feel more obsolete every day.”
“We’re taking over the world,” says Frankie. “Get used to it.”
They all pause in the hallway to pull on latex gloves and shoe covers before stepping into Taryn Moore’s apartment. Since Frankie’s previous visit, nothing has been removed, and the Medea textbook is still lying on the kitchen counter where she last saw it, the woman’s wrathful face glaring from the front cover.
Bree sets down her Igloo container of chemicals and surveys the room. “We’ll start in here. But before I mix the luminol, let’s give the place a once-over with the CrimeScope.” She points to the box Mac has just set down. “The goggles are in there. You might want to put on a pair.”
While Amber and Bree set up the camera and tripod, Frankie pulls on goggles to protect her eyes against any damaging wavelengths of light from the CrimeScope, which will be used for the initial survey of the room. While the CrimeScope will not detect occult blood, it will reveal fibers and stains that might warrant closer inspection.
Amber closes the drapes against the city glow and says, “Can y
ou kill the lights, Detective MacClellan?”
Mac flips the wall switch.
In the abrupt darkness, Frankie can barely make out the silhouettes of the two young women who stand near the window. The CrimeScope’s blue light comes on, and Amber sweeps the beam across the floor, revealing an eerie new landscape where hairs and fibers now glow.
“Looks like your victim wasn’t much of a housekeeper,” Amber observes.
“She was a college student,” says Mac.
“This place hasn’t been vacuumed in a while. I see a lot of dust and hair strands. Did she have long hair?”
“Shoulder length.”
“Then these hairs probably belong to her.”
The blue light skims toward the coffee table, illuminating a landscape of detritus shed by the apartment’s now-deceased occupant. Long after Taryn’s belongings are removed, after her body is laid to rest in a grave, traces of her presence will still linger in these rooms.
The CrimeScope beam zigzags across an area rug and up the back of the sofa, where it comes to an abrupt stop. “Hello,” says Amber. “This looks interesting.”
“What is it?” asks Frankie.
“Something’s fluorescing on the fabric.”
Frankie moves closer and stares at a glowing patch that seems to float untethered in the darkness. “It’s not blood?”
“No, but it could be a body fluid. We’ll test it for acid phosphatase and swab for DNA.”
“You’re thinking semen? Her vaginal and rectal swabs showed no evidence of recent sexual activity.”
“This stain could be weeks, even months old.”
“Hmmm. Semen on the back of the sofa?” says Mac.
“We’re talking college kids, Detective,” says Amber. “We can give you a long list of all the weird places we’ve found semen stains. And if you think about it, if a couple does it while they’re standing up, the stain would hit the sofa right about at this height.”
Frankie doesn’t want to think about it. She doesn’t want to think about girls her daughters’ age having sex in any position. “Can we move on to the luminol?” she asks. “I’m more interested in finding blood.”
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