Cause of Death (Det. Annie Avants Book 1)

by Renee Benzaim

  Both Tom and Annie cringed as the odor of cleaning agents and death assaulted them.

  "Do you think it's possible to get used to the smell?" Annie asked Tom, as she wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  "Probably not," Tom said. "However, I knew someone who lost his sense of taste and smell after an unfortunate surgery," Tom said. "For him, smell isn't an issue. Think about this - what if each law enforcement agency hired someone with this condition and trained them to be the expert autopsy viewer?"

  Annie thought about it for a minute. "He or she could view the procedure for the investigating officers. Combined with the dictation, photos, and videotape from the pathologist, they'd have the complete picture," Annie said.

  "That sounds like a good idea," Tom said. "Feel free to suggest it to the Sergeant when we do our update."

  * * *

  A couple of minutes later, Jesse Greyeyes, along with Deputy Coroner Schillings, arrived. Deputy Schillings verified that it was the same body he had signed over to the morgue the day before and he checked her toe tag. When that formality was taken care of, the four suited up.

  Joseph positioned the body on a slightly tilted stainless steel table so any fluids would drain off away from the body. The table had raised sides so no fluids could leak onto the floor.

  The victim lay on her back and Annie, Deputy Schillings, Tom, and Jesse stepped back so the forensic lab assistant in charge of x-rays could get the x-rays done and leave to have them processed.

  Doc looked up and greeted everyone. "You all know Joseph Al-Fassi. He will be assisting me today and Joelle Marchand will videotape the procedure as we progress. Manny Espinosa, our forensic photographer, will be in charge of taking the photographs.

  "The body is that of an unembalmed, well-developed, mal-nourished, dehydrated Hispanic female between the ages of 25 years and 30 years. Her weight is 120 pounds and she is 64 inches in length. The scalp is covered with very long dark brown hair with lighter brown streaks that have been chemically added. The eyes are dark brown with an amber streak in the left eye. The Deputy Coroner reports that she was found supine in a vineyard at approximately 5:30 AM yesterday morning, 13 August 2012. She was nude and the Deputy Coroner documented that rigor mortis was evident down to the lower legs, but has since dissipated. She was pronounced at 5:50 AM.

  "When the body was found, the ambient air temperature was approximately 85 degrees F. Deputy Coroner Schillings used an external thermometer to take her body temperature and it was within a few degrees of the ambient temperature.

  "There is no noticeable trauma to her nose, scalp, forehead, chin or neck. There is some residue on her cheeks and above her lips, possibly from tape. Her external auditory canals are not remarkable.

  "Her ears are each pierced in two places, but only one earring was found, which was in her right earlobe. It was removed, bagged, and tagged for evidence."

  He stopped for a moment while Joseph removed the bags that encased the victim's hands. He picked up her left hand and examined it closely.

  "There is dirt under her fingernails. The fingernails are broken and there are abrasions on her fingertips."

  He scraped samples out from under her nails and gave them to Joseph to bag and tag. He repeated the procedure with her right hand and made the same comments.

  "Her wrists are unbound; however, there are impressions in her skin that resemble common nylon rope. No fibers from the rope are to be found on her wrists. There is not a lot of trauma to her wrists."

  Doc walked down to the mid-torso area.

  "The neck shows no signs of trauma and moves freely. The upper torso is unremarkable. Between the lower torso and the front of her thighs are eleven individual insect bites that appear to be in varying stages of progression.

  "Her lower legs, feet, and toe nails show no obvious trauma, with the exception of rope impressions similar to those found around her wrists."

  The x-ray technician returned with the developed film and clipped it to a light board against the wall. Doc studied the x-ray for several minutes. "The x-rays show nothing unusual," he said to the group.

  Doc looked towards Joseph who was standing by in readiness. "Joseph, let's turn her over now and finish our visual."

  He continued,

  "There are fibers consistent with t-shirt material stuck to her skin. No other indicators of clothing are found on the body. There is a lot of debris in her hair and stuck to her skin, as well as dried feces and urine. Samples of these have been bagged.

  "Small pieces of leaves are stuck to her older feces. These have been bagged for analysis.

  "Fixed lividity is noted in the back, buttocks, and lower legs.

  "There are two spider bites on her right buttock. I find a horizontal scar, approximately four inches in length, above her left ankle that appears to be several years old."

  He turned off his microphone and Joelle finished videotaping the back of the body. Then Joseph thoroughly washed off the backside of the body.

  When Joelle finished, Joseph and Doc turned the body back over so it lay face up. When Joseph had the body positioned, with a wooden block under her head, Doc nodded to Joseph. Joseph washed off the front side of the body and the table then prepared to open the thoracic and abdominal cavities.

  Joseph used a large scalpel and began the incision. He started at the front of each shoulder, curved around the breasts, cut to the bottom of the breastbone, and then down to the pubic area. This was a deep cut that extended to the rib cage on the chest and cut through the abdominal wall below that.

  He then peeled the skin, muscle, and soft tissues off the chest wall with his scalpel. He pulled the chest flap up, exposing the front of the rib cage and strap muscles of the front of the neck.

  Joseph then opened the rib cage with a bone cutter. Once the chest plate was loosened and removed, the upper interior organs were exposed.

  The heart was still covered with the pericardial sac, which Doc cut open, along with the pulmonary artery where it left the heart. He examined the artery for blood clots and then tied it off.

  Joseph then opened the abdomen further by dissecting the abdominal muscle away from the bottom of the rib cage and diaphragm. The abdominal organs were then exposed.

  Joseph removed the organs and weighed them. He put them on the dissection table for Doc. The Doc made thin slices and the samples were mounted on slides for later examination.

  Specimens of blood, urine, vitreous humor, stomach contents and bile were obtained and labeled.

  Doc incised several skin sections around the spider bites and Joseph mounted them on a wallboard. Once they were dry, Doc would examine them further.

  Joseph began the cranial incision that began behind one ear, passed across the top of the scalp, and stopped behind the opposite ear. Next, he pulled the front portion of the scalp down over her face and the rear portion of her scalp over the back of her neck. This exposed the top of her skill.

  With a Stryker Saw, he cut through the skull. Annie always cringed at the sound of the saw blade biting into bone, but this was life (or death) and investigating detectives were required to attend the autopsies of their victims.

  Joseph reached in, cut the brain loose, and gently lifted it out so Doc. could examine it.

  "It looks like this young lady suffered from an aneurysm," he said. "It appears she suffered what's known as a 'subarachnoid hemorrhage' caused by the rupturing aneurysm, which is a result of a weakness in the wall of the aortic blood vessel."

  "What causes an aneurysm to rupture" Tom said.

  "A most common cause is extreme high blood pressure, which could lead to intracranial bleeding. I'll have to look for other signs that her blood pressure was high before we can determine the cause of the aneurysm. Drug use could also be a contributor."

  Joseph suspended the brain in a jar of formalin so it could be further researched when it wasn't so soft.

  "Now, here's what's interesting. As you can see, there are many - we counted thirteen - bites
on her lower body. They appear to be spider bites. On the wall behind you, I posted a photograph of the spider bites of the black widow, Latrodecius mactans. It shows the appearance of a typical bite at different times from 15 minutes to six months, as well as the symptoms that the person bitten would most likely experience. The condition of the bites on her body indicate that she may have been bitten over a period of seven to ten days.

  "Deputy Coroner Schillings reported that a dead black widow spider was found stuck in her hair and Laine DelMonte reported that another dead black widow spider was found on the ground under her body after it was moved.

  "Some thoughts that occurred to me as I did the visual is that the lack of trauma to where her wrists and ankles were bound indicates that she didn't struggle, so she may have been unconscious, or semi-conscious, most of the time. Also, the fact that she wasn't wearing any shoes or stockings, yet her feet weren't dirty, could indicate that she probably wasn't moved once she was stabilized wherever she was placed.

  "I'm particularly interested in all these bites on her body that appear to be spider bites. Also noteworthy is the fact that I found no other insects, or insect bites, on the body. This indicates that the body hadn't been there very long, maybe even less than an hour. Wherever it was since time of death must have been a place with no other insects except the spiders. This is strange.

  "I'm going to examine the bites and use the tissue samples I took to try to determine how long ago they were inflicted.

  "I thought black widow bites are lethal," Tom said.

  "They can be, of course, especially in children and the elderly, but many of them aren't," Dr. Richards said. "The pain and symptoms are very painful and one of the results of a black widow spider bite is extremely high blood pressure. We're talking here about a single bite. This young lady suffered thirteen. I can't even begin to imagine the pain she went through or how long she survived. Hopefully, further investigation will give us more answers."

  When Doc was finished, he turned and thanked Joseph for his assistance. Joseph returned the organs to the body and deftly stitched up the Y-incision.

  Annie, Tom, Deputy Schillings, and Jesse had seen enough, so they turned to leave, taking with them all the marked and packaged samples to send to the tox lab.

  "Thank you, Doctor," Annie said. "Give us a call as soon as your preliminary report is ready. In the meantime, we'll follow up with the Technical Investigation team and see what else they discovered."

  As Annie and Tom returned to their vehicle, a puzzled frown creased Annie's brow. "What do you make of the spider bites, Tom?"

  "Well, she was definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time. What puzzles me is, as the doctor said, there are no other signs of insect infestation on the body. And she was nude. Blow flies, for instance, can smell 'death' from as far away as ten miles and can infest a body within minutes of death. It's August, there are bugs everywhere. But, no blow flies on the body. My question is, where was she kept? She didn't die very long before her body was dumped, but there's not going to be any easy way to determine the postmortem interval with the evidence we have. Her body temperature was the same as the ambient temperature, which tells me she was probably being kept somewhere with no heating or air-conditioning.

  "I haven't seen many autopsies that yielded so little initial information," Tom said as they got into his vehicle.

  CHAPTER TEN

  "What do you mean, she's not here? Where is she?" Carmen's mom said to Julio when she and her husband returned from Modesto at 10:00 AM and found out Carmen hadn't come home the night before.

  "She walked to the market and never came back," Julio said. "I went out looking for her, and didn't find her. I talked to AnaMaria who said she saw Carmen at the market when she arrived and when Carmen left to return home. I thought she took off with some friends, so I bought my own food. I expected her to be here when I got back, but she wasn't. So, I ate and then fell asleep on the couch."

  "God in heaven! You know she wouldn't do something like that! Roberto, call the police and say she's gone missing." Carmen's mom covered her eyes with her hands and sobbed. "Something terrible has happened to her, I just know it. She doesn't do things like this."

  When Roberto returned from making his phone call, he told Julio and Alana what he found out.

  "The officer I talked to, Officer Jose Rubio, said he will be over this afternoon to take a missing persons report. C'mon, Julio, let's go out and see if we can find her."

  * * *

  Officer Rubio arrived around 4:00 PM. Julio opened the door and invited him in. Carmen's parents sat on the couch in the living room, trying to keep their composure. Mrs. Gutierrez wrung a shredded tissue in her hands and her red-rimmed eyes searched the face of the officer for some sign of hope. Mr. Gutierrez and Julio found no trace of Carmen when they went out driving around the area.

  "I'm sorry that your daughter appears to be missing. I will ask the standard questions first so I can put the information in the missing person's database, and then you can tell me more about her. Do you have a fairly recent photograph of Carmen you can give me?"

  Mr. Gutierrez got up and went over to the sideboard. He picked up a framed photograph of an attractive young woman, took it out of the silver frame, and handed it to Officer Rubio.

  "Thank you," Officer Rubio said. He took down the basic information on Carmen and then turned back to the family.

  "Now, when is the last time any of you saw Carmen?"

  Julio spoke up. "She left last night about 8:00 PM to go to La Mexicana Market to get some burritos for our dinner," Julio said. "We were going to do some shopping earlier in the day, but didn't want to go out in the heat. By evening, we started to get hungry, so Carmen decided to walk over to La Mexicana. I was watching a program on TV, so she went alone. She likes to take walks by herself sometimes."

  "Then what happened?" Officer Rubio asked, as he took notes.

  "By 9:30 PM I became concerned because she wasn't back yet. My first thought, of course, was that she was gossiping with some friends she met in town. I wasn't worried, but I was hungry. So, I decided to walk to town and see if I could find her.

  "I saw her friend, AnaMaria DelaFuentes on the street and asked her if she happened to see Carmen. AnaMaria said Carmen had been to the market, finished her shopping, and headed off east on Bear Mountain Road to come home."

  "Is that the way she normally would walk home?" Officer Rubio asked.

  "Mostly, she walked up C Street to 4th Avenue, then over to Derby. But, hey, sometimes we like a little change, so I didn't give it much thought."

  "I followed the route AnaMaria said Carmen took and returned to our house. I expected to find her here, and it came as a surprise that the house was still empty."

  "I bought some other food to eat when I was in town, so I just let the matter go and continued watching television until I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up this morning, she still wasn't here and that's when I started to worry. Before I could do anything about it, my parents returned from their trip to Modesto."

  "Do you have a phone number or address on AnaMaria?" Officer Rubio asked the family.

  "She just lives down N. Derby, the third house north of Arvin Avenue. It's a small house tucked back from the road, but you can't miss it. I think she has a day job, but one of her parents should be home and can tell you where to find her," Julio said.

  "Is Carmen employed?"

  "Yes," Mr. Gutierrez said. "She works part-time at Arvin Lumber., but she was off yesterday. One of the first things I did this morning was contact Arvin Lumber to see if she showed up for work, but they said they hadn't seen her and she didn't call in, which is unusual for her."

  "OK," Officer Rubio said as he stood up to leave. "I'm going to talk to Miss DelaFuentes, and as many other people as I can, to see if we can get an idea of where she might have gone. If you see officers in the neighborhood talking to the neighbors, that's perfectly normal in this type of situation. Here's my card w
ith my cell phone number on the back. If you hear from her, or receive any other information about her whereabouts, please give me a call." He handed the card to Mr. Gutierrez and returned to his patrol car.

  * * *

  Officer Rubio arrived at the home of AnaMaria DelaFuentes a few minutes later and knocked on the door. An older woman answered. The surprise of seeing a police officer on her porch showed on her face.

  "Good morning. I'm Officer Jose Rubio from Arvin PD and I was wondering if I could speak briefly with AnaMaria DelaFuentes?"

  Puzzled, the woman frowned and said, "Why? Is she in trouble?"

  "No, I want to ask her about her friend Carmen Gutierrez. Is Miss DelaFuentes here?"

  "No, she's at work. She works at Grimmway Farms and will be home after 5:00 PM. You can come back then and talk to her."

  "Thank you, I'll do just that. Here's my card. If she happens to come in sooner, please have her give me a call."

  * * *

  Later that evening, when Officer Rubio met with AnaMaria, he learned nothing new. He went back to the police station and wrote up his report. I don't have a good feeling about this disappearance, he thought. We need to canvass the town thoroughly to see if anyone has a clue as to the whereabouts of Carmen Gutierrez.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Tuesday, 14 August 2012, 1:30 PM

  "Arvin Police Department, Officer Orlando Lamantia, how can I help you?"

  "Hello, this is Detective Thomas Weston with the Kern County Sheriff's Office, Robbery/Homicide Unit. Are you aware of the murder victim we found yesterday near Lamont?"

  "Yes, we sure are. Terrible thing."

  "I'm calling because our victim is still a 'Jane Doe'. We're checking with all the Police Departments in Kern County to see if there are any reports of a missing person who fits the victim's description, but the report may not be in the FBI databases yet."

  "When I heard about your case, I went through our reports, but didn't find anything recent or relevant. All of our missing person's reports are in the FBI database but, if anything new comes up, I'll give you a call."