Defensive Wounds by Lisa Black

nodded. She’d been to conventions and knew how it went. Throw together a large group of people who’d never met and they would instantly sort themselves out into a decreasing gradient of prestige.
    â€œThey adjourned to the bar after the last session, then adjourned to Morton’s steak house. Don’t ask me who picked up the bill. I’m sure that’s privileged, too. From there they adjourned to the House of Blues, but the music was too loud, and eventually they had to face the fact that none of them are thirty and hip anymore, so they adjourned once again, this time over to the Crazy Horse, where for a fee the girls would pretend they were thirty and hip. Three other guys dropped Britton off at his house in Gates Mills, where I’m betting the missus will vouch for the rest of the night.”
    â€œMaybe not, if she finds out about him and Marie.”
    Neil raised his voice to be heard over the bone saw at the next table. “Married to a guy like Britton? She knows. Or she’s brain-dead, one or the other.”
    Christine and the diener flipped the body over so he could slice open the scalp. Neil Kelly’s color had returned—after the first few organs are removed, it’s not so bad—but now he winced. Again Theresa tried to help. “I forgot to tell you, I looked at the swabs I took yesterday. No sperm.”
    He made a visible attempt to focus on her words and not on the way the diener used a small scraper to peel the flesh off the damaged cranium. “Yeah? None?”
    â€œNone on the oral, vaginal, anal swabs, or her panties. Nothing. Don will run the DNA, see if we get a mixture of epithelial cells. That’s all we can do.”
    â€œSo he knocks her on the head and ties her up in order to do what he wants, and then doesn’t do it,” Neil mused.
    â€œOr never intended to. He only wanted to kill her and staged the sex part to throw us off.”
    â€œBut if sex isn’t part of the equation, why’d she go there with him in the first place?”
    â€œThe only other thing she cared about,” Theresa reminded him. “A case.”
    Christine blotted the broken skull with a towel, then said, “Impressive. He did this with a chair? On a carpeted floor?”
    â€œNice thick carpet, too,” Theresa told her.
    â€œThat was one angry dude.” The doctor pointed out the individual blows and how two of them had crushed the bone into small pieces. Two more had caused hairline fractures and two a deep bruise. “You’d have the weight of the chair working for you but the cushion of the carpet working against you.”
    â€œDid the blow kill her?” Theresa asked, ignoring Neil Kelly’s snort at this question. Often the secondary effects of a blow to the head—blood loss, internal bleeding that put pressure on the brain, damage to the cerebellum—were what actually snuffed out the last hope of life. “There could have been a lot more blood under the body. I think her heart didn’t pump too long after the blows.”
    â€œPieces of broken bone penetrated her brain, where they most likely cut off the nerve system that tells the heart to beat and lungs to breathe. Then she died,” Christine said.
    All three were silent for a moment, watching the photographer document the damage. She took a myriad of photos—of the skull, the macerated brain under the skull, the skull pieces themselves once removed to the plastic “gray board”—all with a small metric ruler next to the significant area. Theresa wondered if the killer had waited, checked Marie Corrigan’s pulse to be sure she’d died, or if he’d stumbled away, frightened by his own violence.
    It probably depended on whether he’d gone there to love her or kill her.

CHAPTER 9
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    Theresa found the toxicologist in open territory for a change. For the most part, Oliver seemed such a fixture in his corner of the tox