A Flame in the Wind of Death
Page 9
Kiko gave a little shiver. “The whole idea freaks me out. I understand the genetics of it and the pathways that cause the tissue replacement, but I can’t mentally disconnect from the damage done. It would be a nightmare to know that you’re slowly dying of such a horrific disease.”
“Think about it from his mother’s point of view,” Juka pointed out. “What would it be like to know that you were going to watch your child suffer and die, and you were helpless to stop it?”
“And it sounds like she was a good mother,” Matt said. “As he said, no effort or expense was spared to try to cure him. And that was twenty odd years ago when they didn’t even know what caused the disease. They’ve identified the mutation now, but there’s still no cure.”
Leigh blew out a breath. “Okay, I guess I can see why he caught your eye. But how did you know it was FOP?”
“It was an educated guess—the bony outgrowths on his left arm gave it away. He’s got good motion in his right arm, but the left is nearly frozen. I suspect a fall as a child to do one-sided damage like that. Either way, he’s not in good shape. He’s not steady on his feet either. He’ll be in a wheelchair soon.” He closed the book and set it on a nearby benchtop. “Are we good now?”
“Yes.” Leigh glanced over her shoulder. The gurney on the other side of the lab held a single set of human remains. All that was left was the skeleton; the flesh had been stripped away. “Is that our vic?”
“Yes.” Matt slid his fingers around the curve of her elbow and guided her toward the gurney.
“You worked fast.”
“We started on Monday just as soon as Rowe finished the autopsy. Even with all three of us, it still took a day and a half to strip the bones by hand, both the human victim and what I can now confirm was a dog.” He indicated the metal tray on a nearby counter that held the small canine skeleton. “We moved the remains here late last night once all the tissue was removed and we didn’t need full ventilation anymore.”
“Have you had a chance to examine the remains?”
“That’s what we were doing this morning.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ve got information for you, but are you sure you want to do it now?”
“I’m here now, so let’s do it.”
“Then get out your notepad. You’re going to want to write this down.”
CHAPTER TEN: CHAR BLISTERING
* * *
Char Blistering: bubbles or raised, cracked segments of carbonized material formed on the surface of charred or burned wood.
Wednesday, 6:08 p.m.
Boston University, School of Medicine
Boston, Massachusetts
Matt and Leigh joined the students grouped around the gurney. Leigh stood at the foot, taking in the neat skeletal arrangement, laid out in anatomical formation. This wasn’t her first experience with skeletal remains—after their first case, she’d seen enough for a lifetime—but this was her first burn victim. Instead of the uniform, smooth ivory she was used to, these bones were a charred and shattered jigsaw puzzle. Seemingly random areas of bone were smudged with char, and long bones were spider-webbed with lengthy stretches of cracks and chips.
“How do you know where to start?” she asked. “It looks to me like she was beaten to death, but I know a lot of this must be fire damage. How can you tell which injuries happened before the fire?” Matt opened his mouth to speak, but Leigh interrupted him. “I know how much you’d love to turn this into a detailed three-hour lecture, but try to just hit the highlights for me, okay? Put the extra detail in the—”
“Written report, I know,” Matt said, resignedly. “We’ll need more time to complete the analysis, but we have some solid preliminary data on fracture and char patterns. First, we know death occurred due to sharp force trauma.”
“Finding the knife in the victim was kind of a giveaway,” Paul quipped.
“Just a bit,” Matt agreed. “But you need to know more than what the murder weapon was, you need to know how she died. All that information is here. First of all, look at the angle of entry. Here are the kerf marks left by the knife strikes.” He pointed out the four defects in the ribs and sternum. “Paul, grab a probe and show Leigh.”
“Sure.” Paul picked up a straight, stainless steel probe from a nearby tray. “It’s easiest to show on the sternum.” He slid the probe carefully into the nick in the heavy bone, holding it almost vertically. Leigh leaned in for a closer look. “Do you see this slight angle? This means the knife strike came from slightly below the contact point.”
Leigh straightened in surprise. “From below? DMV records report her height as five foot five. That’s kind of short for the blow to have come from below.”
“And the angle’s wrong for an upward thrust. Here, let me show you. Kiko.” Matt crooked his fingers in a “come here” gesture, then he clapped a hand down over her shoulder to hold her in place. “If I was going to stab Kiko from below, the angle would be more like this.” Matt mimed driving a knife into Kiko’s ribs from below at a steep upward angle. “That would work, but it’s not what we’re seeing here. The angle is more like this.” He mimed a second blow, holding the invisible knife palm down and coming across in an awkward attack, almost parallel to the floor. “That doesn’t make any sense, especially when you’re looking at multiple strikes in an area where there’s a lot of bone resistance so additional force would be required.”
Leigh circled Matt and Kiko, her eyes locked on Kiko’s mid-section as she ran through the demonstration in her head. “Wait, I’ve got it. She was on the floor.” Squatting down on the balls of her feet, she mimed driving a knife straight down into the torso of a supine victim. “She was stabbed while on her back. That would allow multiple strikes from the same angle with the required amount of force.”
“Bingo.” Matt held out a hand and pulled Leigh to her feet.
“But then the question is—why was she on the floor?”
“We think we know. But first, you need to understand the difference between fractures in wet and dry bone so you can tell perimortem fractures from postmortem fractures. I know you’re familiar with kerf marks and how a solid object passing through bone leaves an imprint behind. In the same way, heat-induced fractures leave their own microscopic and macroscopic signatures. Using these signatures, we can reconstruct both what happened and the order in which the injuries occurred. The challenge in this case is the conformational changes that occur in bone exposed to extreme heat—it changes shape so you can’t simply fit the pieces back together cleanly. But the crucial point is that once there is an existing first fracture in a bone, a second break can’t cross it. That’s how you can map the order of injury.”
“Handy,” Leigh said. “But can you tell if a break was there before the fire?”
“Yes. Heat fractures are only formed under specific circumstances—the bone dehydrates causing it to warp and shrink. When that stress becomes excessive, it results in an abrupt break similar to a sharp force trauma fracture.”
“Doesn’t that cause problems, then? How can you tell between fire damage and sharp force trauma?”
“It’s a challenge,” Matt agreed. “But wet bone behaves differently. First, heat-induced fractures only happen in dry bone— bone that’s charred black or calcined. Normal bone doesn’t fracture from heat stress because the moisture content gives it too much resilience.”
Leigh swiveled to stare at the bones on the gurney. “So if there’s a fracture in uncharred bone, it happened before the fire.”
“Exactly. Now, what you really need are some answers. These guys were busy while we were gone today. Kiko was working on the skull, and the guys spent time on the electron microscope looking at fracture patterns. I don’t even know the results yet.” He eyed the boys. “Let’s start with you two. How’d you do on the EM?”
“Good,” Paul said. “Our biggest concern was the location of the knife strikes and fractures caused by the wardrobe.” He circled the table and pointed to the right femur. The head
of the femur was cleanly separated from the shaft of the bone. “This intertrochanteric fracture is from the wardrobe falling. The victim was on her left side, so when the wardrobe burned and collapsed on the body, the force of the blow landed on the victim’s right side. This break, as well as the fractures in ribs seven, eight and nine, are all a combination of heat-induced and blunt force trauma.”
“Postmortem versus perimortem?” Matt asked.
“Yes,” Juka said. “I went back and looked at the 3D scans to confirm. There was no tissue infiltration at those locations—the victim was already dead. Put it in context of the wardrobe collapse and everything lines up. Except for the four sharp force trauma kerf marks we’ve already identified from the knife, all bone injury below the neck is postmortem and mostly fire-related.”
“Good work.” Matt turned to Kiko. “But I bet things will get more interesting with the skull. Am I right?”
“I haven’t started the reconstruction yet, but I spent a lot of time studying the fragments.” Kiko donned a pair of gloves and walked to the head of the table. “The skull is in pretty poor shape, but we were lucky that we were able to recover all of it.” She picked up the skull, the top ragged, a gaping chasm where the forehead should have been. The jagged edges were ashen gray, but charcoal black outlined the empty eye sockets and crept down to smudge the midsections of bone. “We’ve got these pieces here.” Kiko pointed to a metal tray that held a dozen or so shards of varying size. “They make up the top of the cranial vault. All of those fractures are clearly heat-induced. However . . .” Kiko turned the skull sideways, extending it toward Leigh. “There are several fractures here, in the squama just above the supermastoid crest—above and behind the ear. As you can see, this is unburned bone and the fracture pattern clearly suggests blunt force trauma.”
“Someone bashed her in the head and knocked her to the floor,” Leigh stated. “She was incapacitated and then stabbed. Would she have been conscious?”
Matt moved to Kiko, carefully slipping the skull from her hands to study it himself. “Hmmm . . . maybe. She took a good hit, but she may have only been stunned. I guess the other question is would the murderer have waited for her to regain consciousness? Did the murderer simply want her dead or did he want her to suffer through that death?”
“You say ‘he,’ ” Paul commented. “What if it was a woman?” He turned to Leigh. “You said that the victim broke from her coven. Aren’t they usually mostly women?”
“Not always, but this was an all-female coven. You’ve got a good point though. A woman might not have the strength to hold someone still while she stabbed them. She’d need them to be restrained or incapacitated somehow.” Leigh patted Paul on the shoulder. “Nice catch.”
He grinned in return, warmth at her praise coloring his pale cheeks.
Leigh turned back to Matt. “Was there any sign that the victim was restrained? Any trace of rope or cloth? Chains? Wire?”
Matt shook his head. “Nothing. And we went through the area under the body with a fine-toothed comb looking for bone fragments and the disarticulated hand bones. If there had been something, we would have found it. Now, rope or cloth could have burned away when the hands fell apart. You can sometimes find traces of something like that in a fire if it’s in a protected area of the body. The wrists weren’t. But because of final body positioning, I don’t think she was restrained. The head injury was likely all the advantage the killer needed.”
Leigh made a few notes. “I’ve gone through the list of coven members Elanthia Wakefield—the owner of Draw Down the Moon—provided. So far, I’ve got nothing. Moira left the coven because of an argument with another Witch about their charitable work in the community. I tracked her down—she’s out on the West Coast on a business trip. She’s been away for the past two weeks and won’t be home for another week. I confirmed her alibi with the hotel management, so she’s in the clear. Of the other members, all but three have alibis for the time of the murder. Several commented that they knew Moira was badmouthing the Circle of the Triple Goddess to anyone who would listen, but they brushed it off as simple spite because she didn’t get her way.”
“That’s what they say, but would they actually act on it?” Kiko said.
“That’s where the alibis are important and most of them alibi out. Of the three that didn’t, one joined the coven after Moira left and never met her. Another is old enough to be my grandmother and wouldn’t have the strength needed to overpower a woman forty years her junior. If she did it, then she needed someone else’s help. The third is Elanthia Wakefield herself.”
Matt cocked his head, watching her. “And you don’t think she did it?”
“I don’t. She’s a true member of the Craft and strikes me as holding very firmly to the rule to harm none. I can’t definitively take her off the suspect list, but I have no evidence linking her to the crime, and I don’t feel it in my gut. Now, as far as physical evidence goes, I checked with the owner of the antique shop and he confirmed he’d never seen the athame before and it wasn’t part of his inventory.”
“Hang on a second,” Matt said. “Mentioning the shop owner reminded me—what do you think about the fact that Flynn Simpson’s partner had access to the shop where his mother died?”
Leigh’s lips flattened into a tight line. “I don’t like coincidences. Or believe in them.”
“Wait,” said Kiko. “You’ve lost us. How did the victim’s son’s partner have access to that shop?”
“When I spoke to the shop owner yesterday, he mentioned the store had been up for sale for a few weeks.”
“The store,” Juka repeated. “Meaning the contents?”
“Both the physical space and the inventory. The owner was aiming to retire within six months. That deadline has moved forward now that he has no stock. Aaron Dodsworth, Flynn Simpson’s partner, was the realtor.”
“In alibiing himself,” Matt said, “Simpson alibied his partner too. They were in bed together on Saturday night when the murder occurred.”
“And so far, there’s no motive or evidence pointing at Dod-sworth.”
“What about money?” Paul asked. “The greatest of all motivators. Moira Simpson was rich.”
Leigh tapped her notepad against her palm, deep in thought. “Normally, family members are the first people we look at, especially when there is a lot of money at stake. If money’s the issue, we should be looking at Flynn.”
“I’m not sure you fully understand the extent of his disease,” Matt cut in. “Imagine someone like him during a struggle. If anything happened, he wouldn’t just be bruised and battered, he’d be seriously injured with life-threatening or, at the very least, life-changing consequences. He’d be crazy to take that chance. And we saw him. I certainly didn’t spot any fresh injuries.”
“Good point. Simpson also speaks about his mother as if the woman was a saint. She gave him all her time—and he needed a lot with his disorder—and no expense was spared. So if you look at it that way, if Dodsworth killed his partner’s mother for her money, he’d risk losing that partner forever if he found out. He’d be wiser to keep the golden goose happy and keep her purse strings loose if money was what he was after.”
“But what if that partner was dying?” Kiko said. “That greatly decreases the likelihood that he could benefit.”
Leigh rounded on Matt. “How long has Simpson got?”
Matt shrugged. “In his current condition, assuming no catastrophic accidents to dramatically shorten his lifespan, maybe another ten to fifteen years? And I’m not sure why Dod-sworth would commit murder this far in advance. Who knows what might have happened to Moira Simpson in the next decade.”
“Dodsworth runs his own business,” said Juka. “Maybe he needs money right now.”
“Yeah.” Paul drew the word out slowly. “Maybe he wanted to speed up the timeline, so he killed the mother and then once the son inherits, he planned to push him down the stairs and then watch him calcify and die.”
“A wand?” Paul asked. “Aren’t those usually made out of wood?”
“Usually. But the point of a wand is to conduct energy, so both wood and metal are used. Many in the Craft have more than one wand of different materials and styles.”
“And once again, Moira went for the best with an original art piece,” Matt said.
“Unique and showy, yes. Her wand was custom-crafted of interwoven threads of metal so it looked like it was made out of an intertwined web. The metalsmith said he’d send me a picture as he photographs all his original art to post on his website. Also, he said they were unique pieces and he’s made nothing else like it, so the murder weapon is definitely her knife.”
“Speaking of showy, there’s the dog.” Matt turned to the small bones laid out of the tray. “We found the remains of a microchip, but it was so close to the surface that it was fried by the fire, so no help in ID there. We tried to confirm that it might be a Pomeranian, since we know that was what Moira owned. Size and skeletal structure certainly matches and we’ve also got the X-rays, which showed a partially collapsed trachea.”
“A collapsed trachea? From the fire?”
“No. Apparently it’s a common problem with Pomeranians. Makes them cough like a two-pack-a-day smoker. But knowing Moira and her love of expensive accessories, I’d guess that the dog was a purebred, which means that DNA would probably be able to confirm the breed, if you need to go that far.”