nodded. Sheâd been to conventions and knew how it went. Throw together a large group of people whoâd never met and they would instantly sort themselves out into a decreasing gradient of prestige.
âThey adjourned to the bar after the last session, then adjourned to Mortonâs steak house. Donât ask me who picked up the bill. Iâm sure thatâs 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 Iâm betting the missus will vouch for the rest of the night.â
âMaybe not, if she finds out about him and Marie.â
Neil raised his voice to be heard over the bone saw at the next table. âMarried to a guy like Britton? She knows. Or sheâs brain-dead, one or the other.â
Christine and the diener flipped the body over so he could slice open the scalp. Neil Kellyâs color had returnedâafter the first few organs are removed, itâs not so badâbut now he winced. Again Theresa tried to help. âI forgot to tell you, I looked at the swabs I took yesterday. No sperm.â
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. âYeah? None?â
âNone on the oral, vaginal, anal swabs, or her panties. Nothing. Don will run the DNA, see if we get a mixture of epithelial cells. Thatâs all we can do.â
âSo he knocks her on the head and ties her up in order to do what he wants, and then doesnât do it,â Neil mused.
âOr never intended to. He only wanted to kill her and staged the sex part to throw us off.â
âBut if sex isnât part of the equation, whyâd she go there with him in the first place?â
âThe only other thing she cared about,â Theresa reminded him. âA case.â
Christine blotted the broken skull with a towel, then said, âImpressive. He did this with a chair? On a carpeted floor?â
âNice thick carpet, too,â Theresa told her.
âThat was one angry dude.â 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. âYouâd have the weight of the chair working for you but the cushion of the carpet working against you.â
âDid the blow kill her?â Theresa asked, ignoring Neil Kellyâs snort at this question. Often the secondary effects of a blow to the headâblood loss, internal bleeding that put pressure on the brain, damage to the cerebellumâwere what actually snuffed out the last hope of life. âThere could have been a lot more blood under the body. I think her heart didnât pump too long after the blows.â
âPieces 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,â Christine said.
All three were silent for a moment, watching the photographer document the damage. She took a myriad of photosâof the skull, the macerated brain under the skull, the skull pieces themselves once removed to the plastic âgray boardââall with a small metric ruler next to the significant area. Theresa wondered if the killer had waited, checked Marie Corriganâs pulse to be sure sheâd died, or if heâd stumbled away, frightened by his own violence.
It probably depended on whether heâd 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
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