Page 30 of Lost Lake
In the dressing area outside the autopsy suite, El zipped the white protective suit to her chin and pulled on her gloves. She’d attended more postmortems than she cared to count, none of them easy, but this one sat heavier than most. Could be becauseshe didn’t want anything else revealed that would cause Gabe additional pain.
In fact, El would’ve liked time to digest anything she learned before telling him. That wasn’t possible. He’d insisted on accompanying her and was waiting in the lobby, likely driving the receptionist crazy by pacing.
She could picture it clearly.
She’d tried to talk him out of accompanying her. He wouldn’t hear of it. If someone murdered one of his best friends, he’d said, he wanted to understand every detail, not to satisfy curiosity, but to find the killer faster. She understood that, but she didn’t have to like it.
Please help me share whatever I’m about to learn in the best way possible.
Dressed, she pushed through the swinging door with her elbows, to keep her gloved hands free of contamination, to the small, ancient room. The layered smell of chemicals and biological decomposition left a queasy feeling in her stomach.
Dr. Faye Briggs and her assistant, Theo, stood at the single autopsy table beneath a circular overhead light. El had expected to arrive in time for the initial Y-cut. She hadn’t. Faye had already worked well past it and several organs rested in a bowl or on the nearby scale.
Faye looked up, scalpel in hand, her N95 masking most of her face. “Detective. Good. I started earlier than scheduled. Figured by the time you arrived, I’d have more to tell you.”
“I don’t mind missing the first cut.” El moved closer. “Time and cause of death?”
“Little has changed from my initial assessment. Death occurred between seven and nine p.m. The cold continues to complicate determining a narrower window.”
El had expected this answer, but was glad to have it officially confirmed. “And cause of death?”
Faye set her scalpel on the tray, her eyes steady on El. “The body tells a different story than drowning. The lungs are dry. No frothy edema fluid in the airways, no water aspiration into the alveoli. Also, microscopic algae from the lake aren’t embedded in her lung tissue like they would be if she’d inhaled water while alive. I’m certain she was dead before she hit the lake. Someone staged it to look like a drowning, probably to buy time or mislead us. Or even hoped to hide the body in the lake.”
El stepped closer to the table, peering at the neck under the harsh lights. “Strangulation, then?”
“Yes, manual strangulation.” Faye pointed to the Y-incision she’d made across the neck. “Bruising shows thumb and finger marks around the throat with deep muscle hemorrhaging and petechiae confirming it. No hyoid or thyroid cartilage fractures. She was killed on land, then dumped. Cause of death is asphyxia from vascular compression, and manner is most definitely homicide.”
Thank goodness the doctor had determined the cause of death, but El didn’t much like thinking about the terrible way Kenna had lost her life. “Does this mean the blood on her shirt is a separate matter?”
“I found no wounds on her body to account for that quantity of blood on the shirt.”
“The blood’s likely from her attacker, then.”
“It could belong to the child.” Faye drew her eyebrows together. “Sorry. I hate to go there, but it could be a reality in this investigation.”
El’s stomach dropped. “Would that volume of blood loss on the shirt be dangerous for a child her age?”
“I can’t determine an exact volume from the shirt. It’s just a visual estimate, and stains absorb unpredictably. I’ve bagged it for the lab if you want serologists to quantify the blood. Even fifty to a hundred milliliters could be life-threatening for achild that small, but that’s speculative until results confirm the source.”
“We’re working with the Veritas Center expert.”
“They can handle the shirt and estimate the quantity of blood at the abduction site. At her age, losing just fifteen to twenty percent—about two to four hundred milliliters—is dangerous. At twenty-five to thirty percent, it’s life-threatening without immediate treatment, and over thirty to forty percent is often fatal, since kids decompensate much faster than adults.”
The image of the dark, wet ground near the van moved through El’s mind. She had confidence in Sierra’s skills, but oh, how she desperately wanted answers now. “Our forensic expert is working that scene right now.”
Please. Let the blood belong to the attacker.
“The blood on the shirt looks like less than half a liter, but if there’s more at the abduction site?—”
“There is.” El forced herself to say it plainly when if it fit the quantity for a male attacker, it was more than enough for Lucy to be in great danger. “We’ll know more once Sierra finishes the scene.”
“It’s all speculative until then.” Faye looked down at the body, her gloved hand hovering near the neck. “I also ran a high-resolution CT scan before I started. It shows internal hemorrhaging in the throat muscles. Deep intramuscular bleeds that don’t fully align with the external bruising pattern.”
“Meaning what?”
“The injuries suggest prolonged or multistage compression.”
“I’m not familiar with that,” El said.
