Indelible

  “Slick,” Hoss said, addressing Jeffrey. “Don’t think I mentioned this last night—Reggie’s Marty Ray’s boy.”

  “That so?” Jeffrey said, without much interest. Still, he offered the other man his hand. Reggie seemed reluctant to take it, and Sara wondered again why the deputies were so cagey around him.

  Hoss said, “Got Robert’s statement this morning,” and Sara saw the surprised look on Jeffrey’s face. “Neighbors pretty much backed up his story.”

  Sara waited for Jeffrey to ask what Robert had said, but he stared at the floor instead.

  After a few moments of awkward silence, Deacon White indicated a door behind Sara. “We keep our protective clothing in the storage room. You’re welcome to anything we have.”

  “Thank you,” Sara told him, getting a solemn nod in return. She wondered if the man was annoyed she was taking over. Grant County’s funeral director had been a childhood friend of Sara’s and more than happy to relinquish the responsibility of town coroner, but Deacon White was a lot harder to read.

  She walked over to the storage room, which was little more than a glorified closet. Still, she shut the door. The moment she did, the men started talking. She could hear Hoss’s deep baritone mixing with Paul’s. From what she could gather, they were discussing a recent basketball game at the high school.

  Sara opened a surgical gown and slipped it on, feeling foolish as she spun like a dog chasing its tail trying to tie the back. The gown was huge on her, obviously meant for Deacon White’s pronounced midsection. By the time she had slipped on a pair of paper shoes and a hair protector, Sara felt like a clown.

  She put her hand on the door, but did not open it. Closing her eyes, she tried to block out all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Focusing on her belief that Robert’s wound was self-inflicted might shadow her findings during the autopsy, and Sara wanted to make certain she only went with known facts. She was not a detective. Her task now was to give her professional opinion to the police and let them decide how to proceed. The only thing she could control was how well she performed her job.

  The men grew quiet as she walked back into the room. She thought she saw a smile on Paul’s face, but he looked back down at his notebook, writing something with a well-chewed nub of pencil. Deacon White stood by the body, and Jeffrey and Hoss both leaned against the wall with their arms crossed over their chests. Reggie was by the sink, his camera gleaming in the light. An air of expectancy filled the room, but despite this, Sara got the distinct impression that this was merely a case of going through the motions.

  Still, she asked, “Where are the X rays?”

  Deacon exchanged a look with Hoss before saying, “We don’t normally do X rays.”

  Sara tried to cover her shock, knowing how it would look to come into their backyard and start treating them like a bunch of yokels. X rays were standard procedure for an autopsy, but they were especially important when dealing with a head wound. The bullet punched out bone as it entered the skull, and X rays of bone chips would provide conclusive evidence of the path the bullet had taken. Excising the wound could distort the path or even create false tracks.

  She asked, “Have you found the bullet?”

  “From his head?” Reggie asked, sounding surprised. “I got two twenty-twos out of the walls. I didn’t find anything near his head except for…head.”

  “The bullet could still be in there,” Sara told him.

  Hoss cleared his throat politely before saying, “Maybe ol’ Reg here missed it on his sweep through the room. I’m sure we’ll find it when we look again.”

  Reggie seem to bristle a bit at this, but he had regained his composure by the time Hoss looked his way. He gave the sheriff a slight shrug as if to say it could happen.

  Sara tried to phrase her words carefully. “Sometimes, brain tissue can slow a bullet down enough so that it has insufficient velocity to exit the skull.”

  Hoss pointed out, “The right side of his head has been blown out.”

  “That could be from a fracture.” Knowing the policeman’s ammunition of choice, she made an educated guess, asking Reggie, “We’re talking a nine-millimeter hollow-point, I would assume?”

  He flipped back through his notebook, reading, “The Beretta had twenty-two long rifle, the Glock had hollow-point.”

  Sara said, “That could exert enough force to fracture the bone out through the scalp.” She did not add that an X ray would easily show this.

  Hoss said, “All right.”

  She waited for him to say more, but when he did not, Sara pulled back the sheet. She should not have been surprised to find the body faceup, and hoped she managed to hide her irritation. Livor mortis had shifted to the back of the head, which meant blood could have seeped into the soft tissue of the scalp. Any evidence of confluent bruising would be difficult to tell from antemortem bruising. Unless there was a laceration or some sort of pronounced abrasion in the scalp, it would be almost impossible for Sara to tell whether the bruises came from the man’s own pooling blood or from someone hitting him in the head.

  Rigor mortis had set in, fixing the body in a casketing position. Swan’s hair was plastered to most of his face with sweat and blood. Still, she could see his mouth and eyes were slightly open, and there was a purple-blue cast to the side of his face where it had rested on the carpet. His chest was narrow, his ribs pronounced. The waistband of his pants gaped at the top as if he had recently lost weight. His hands had not been bagged to preserve evidence from the scene, such as gunpowder residue or any fibers he might have clutched in his hand—and “clutched” was the right word in this case; Swan’s right hand was in a tight fist.

  Reggie said, “I tried, but I couldn’t get his hand open.”

  “That’s fine,” Sara said, thinking that if she was able to find gunshot residue, there would be no proving whether or not it came from Reggie’s or the dead man’s hands. “Do you have photographs of the scene yet?”

  He shook his head no. “I’ve got my drawings here,” he said, taking a folded mailing envelope out of his pocket. Inside were three sheets of paper with crude diagrams of the crime scene. He seemed apologetic when he showed them to Sara. “I was gonna do ’em up better this morning.”

  “That’s fine,” she repeated, smoothing out the papers on a table by the sink. The bed and armoire were two lopsided rectangles across from each other. Luke Swan had been reduced to a stick figure with two X’s for eyes. His right hand was under his body, the other out to his side. She asked, “He was lying on his right hand?”

  Reggie nodded again. “Yeah. It was stuck like that when we turned him over.”

  Deacon added, “Rigor mortis was extremely pronounced.”

  “What time did you get there?”

  “About two hours after the accident,” he said, and Sara tried not to dwell on the fact that the man who would have performed the autopsy was already calling it an accident.

  “Did you have trouble moving him?”

  “We had to break the rigor to get him on the gurney.”

  “Arms and legs?” she asked, and he nodded yes. Rigor mortis generally started in the jaw and worked its way out to the extremities. The body would take anywhere between six and twelve hours before it became fixed.

  Jeffrey spoke for the first time, saying, “Maybe he panicked. Maybe he was high on something that got his heart rate going.”

  “We’ll do a tox screen.”

  Hoss broke in with strained politeness, “Wanna explain that for those of us who didn’t go to college?”

  Sara told him, “Rigor mortis can be brought on more quickly by strenuous exercise before death. A depletion of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, would cause the muscles to stiffen more quickly.”

  The sheriff nodded, though she could tell from his expression that he had not absorbed the information.

  Sara opened her mouth to explain again, but something about Hoss’s posture told her it would do no good. He was so much like her
grandfather Earnshaw that she caught herself smiling.

  Reggie said, “These’re the casings from the bullets,” indicating a line he had drawn near the door. Two more were marked beside the victim. “The twenty-twos were here and here. The nine-mil is here by the door.”

  Jeffrey cleared his throat, seemingly reluctant to speak. “Did you fingerprint the casings?”

  Reggie let his rancor show this time. “Of course I did.” He added, “And the guns. We traced the Glock back to Robert. It’s his service weapon. The Beretta had the serial number shaved off.”

  Hoss nodded, tucking his hands into his pockets.

  Sara asked Deacon, “Gloves?” and he took a box down from the cabinet by the sink. All the men watched Sara as she pulled on two pairs of surgical gloves, one over the other. Deacon rolled over a mayo tray, and she glanced down at the instruments, relieved to find a breadloafing knife, scissors, scalpels, and the other requisite tools for autopsy.

  Deacon said, “I’ll help you with this,” and together he and Sara folded back the sheet covering the lower half of Luke Swan’s body. His jeans and underwear had already been removed, which meant she could only guess by the lack of blood spatter from the head wound as to where the pants had been on the body.

  Swan was a small man, probably no more than five seven and around a hundred sixty pounds, his body containing none of the grace his last name implied. Though he kept his blond hair long to the shoulder, he was far from hirsute, with a sparse patch of pubic hair around his groin. His penis was slightly tumescent, the swollen testicles showing signs of petechiae. His legs were spindly, and a large scar ran down the side of his left thigh. Sara guessed the wound had come during childhood. At the time it must have been a significant injury. For some reason, she thought of the scar on Jeffrey’s back, and wondered what had been going through Jeffrey’s mind when his father had hit him.

  She asked Paul, “Do you mind taking notes for me?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, turning to a fresh page in his notebook.

  “He’s how old?”

  Paul said, “Thirty-four.”

  She nodded, thinking that fit the man in front of her. She called out her findings so far, pausing to give Paul time to write. Back in Grant, she used a Dictaphone for her reports, and she was not used to having to pause the natural cadence of the exam.

  “Skin is slightly dry, probably due to lack of nourishment,” she said, running her hand down his arm. “Track marks, probably a few years old, along the right arm.” On a hunch, she examined the area between his toes, saying, “Fresh needle marks.”

  “What’s that?” Hoss interrupted.

  Jeffrey explained, “He was using the area between his toes to shoot up to try to hide the fact that he was using.” To Sara, he said, “That would explain the ATP.”

  “Depending on what he was using, it might.” She asked Deacon, “Have you taken blood and urine?”

  The man nodded. “It’ll take a week or two to get it back, though.”

  Sara held her tongue, but Jeffrey said, “Can we get a rush on that?”

  Hoss said, “It’ll cost.”

  Jeffrey shrugged, and Hoss gave a slight nod to Deacon, indicating it was okay.

  Sara examined the surface of the body, finding nothing remarkable other than a star-shaped scar below the right ankle.

  She asked Deacon, “Can you help me open his hand?”

  He put on a pair of gloves, and as they all watched, Deacon tried to pry open the fingers. The hand would not give, and he adjusted his footing, giving himself a wide stance as he tried to press his thumb into the small opening between Swan’s thumb and index finger. When he put his shoulder into it, the finger broke open. The next was easier, and one by one he broke back the fingers and thumb. The snaps sounded like twigs breaking.

  “Nothing,” Deacon said. He was leaning over the hand, and he moved out of the way so that Sara could see. Fingernail grooves cut into the meaty flesh of Swan’s palm, but it appeared empty.

  Deacon asked, “Death spasm?”

  “Those are very rare,” Sara answered, looking back at the chest where the fist had been. “He was lying on his fist. The weight of his body could have closed the fingers and the rigor fixed it in place.” She looked around, finding a rolling lamp in the corner. “Do you mind getting that so I can take a closer look?”

  He did as he was asked, unwrapping the cord and getting Paul to plug it into the wall socket. The bulb flickered a few times but easily illuminated the empty palm.

  Using the sharp edge of the tweezers, she scraped under his fingernails, removing dry skin as well as some larger, unidentifiable flakes. She put them in a specimen bottle, along with some nail clippings, and watched Paul seal them with a strip of bright green tape.

  While Reggie took photographs, Sara held a ruler next to the scars and other identifying marks she had found. They progressed to the head, and she used her fingers to pick out pieces of skull and gray matter before pushing the hair back off Swan’s face and exposing the entrance wound on the left side of his head.

  Jeffrey had been quiet through all of this, and when he said, “Powder tattooing,” his voice was so low Sara was not sure if he had spoken the words or she had heard them in her own head.

  He was right. There was a scatter-shot of reddish brown lesions surrounding the entrance wound where hot powder grains from the gun had burned the skin. Sara held the ruler as Reggie took photographs. She lightly combed her fingers through the hair and checked the surrounding skin for telltale markings. Finally, she said, “There’s no soot that I can see.”

  “Did he bleed it off?” Jeffrey asked, standing beside her.

  “Not from this side,” she told him, feeling slightly relieved. The head was a mess, but she could see it clearly under the light now. Powder tattooing with the absence of soot most likely indicated an intermediate-range wound, meaning Robert was standing at least eighteen to twenty-four inches from the man when Swan was shot.

  Jeffrey asked, “What’d he have in the Glock again?”

  Paul was thumbing back through his notes. “Federal, one-fifteen grain.”

  “Ball powder,” Jeffrey said, with palpable relief. He told Hoss, “Ball powder travels faster. That puts Robert anywhere from two to four feet away.”

  “Goes with what he said this morning,” Hoss told them. “Had a hangfire when he pulled the trigger.”

  “Hangfire?” Sara repeated, though not because she did not understand the word. A hangfire meant there was a delay between Robert pulling the trigger and the bullet being fired from the gun.

  Jeffrey asked, “Did he say how long it took?”

  “He wasn’t sure,” Hoss answered. “Maybe half a second or so.”

  Jeffrey looked at Sara, and she wondered if her own expression of disbelief mirrored his. There was no scientific way to prove or disprove how the gun had fired or when. Bullets did not come with a time stamp, and whether or not the gun had in fact had a hangfire was impossible to prove with any scientific accuracy.

  Sara turned her focus back to the head, combing through the hair for debris and setting it aside on the tray for collection. She tried to keep her mind on the task, but all she could think was how quickly excuses were being made for every question the evidence raised. If the situation had been reversed and Robert was lying on the table in front of her, she knew that all the men here would track down Luke Swan like a rabid dog.

  As if he knew what she was thinking, Jeffrey asked Hoss, “Where’s Robert now?”

  “He’s with Jessie at her mama’s,” Hoss provided. “Why?”

  “I thought I’d check in on him. See how he’s doing.”

  “He’s fine,” Hoss said, looking at his watch. “This is running a little later than I thought it would. I need to step out for a meeting.”

  Jeffrey asked, “Do you want Paul to take our statements?”

  Hoss seemed to have forgotten about this, but he answered, “No, I’ll do that. Let’s me
et back at the station around three.”

  Jeffrey told him, “We were planning on leaving before then.”

  “That’s fine,” Hoss told them, giving Jeffrey a hard pat on the back. “Y’all drop by the station on your way out of town. I’m sure it won’t take long.”

  Paul waited for his boss to leave before saying, “I need to get back to some paperwork myself.” He gave Sara a polite nod, then left the room. Deacon White was next, making an excuse about a lunch appointment. Sara wondered if he noticed the clock in the room read ten.

  Reggie put down his camera and leaned against the sink, his expression plainly stating he had nowhere to go and even if he did, he did not trust Jeffrey alone in the room with the corpse.

  Jeffrey made it worse by asking Reggie, “What did Robert’s statement say?”

  Reggie shrugged. “Why are you so curious?”

  Jeffrey returned the shrug.

  Sara did not know how Reggie would handle this, but still, she told Jeffrey, “I don’t want to dig around for the bullet. We need X rays first or I’ll destroy any evidence.”

  Reggie said, “There wasn’t another bullet in the room. I checked. It was just the two twenty-two LRs in the walls and casings on the floor like I drew.”

  Jeffrey seemed cautious, like he was feeling Reggie out. “What did Robert carry for backup?”

  Reggie stared without answering.

  Sara added, “A twenty-two would have less velocity than a nine-mil. It would be more likely to stay in the skull.”

  Reggie’s chin dropped slightly. His eyes went from Jeffrey to Sara. “I think we should find that bullet.”

  Jeffrey nodded his agreement, saying, “Yeah.”

  Sara changed into a fresh pair of gloves, thinking she hardly had the authority to do this, but also knowing that this was the only way to find the truth. Carefully, she probed around the exit wound in the skull with her fingers, not wanting to use the forceps because they could scratch or change the markings on the metal.

  “Nothing,” she finally said. “It could be deeper in.”