Primal Fear by Brad Boucher Page A

ready to accept that possibility.
    So what else?
    “A finger mark?”
    “Bingo,” Hughes said.  “A thumb mark.” 
    He stood up straight, motioning for Harry to follow suit.  “Now, place your left thumb in that same position, on the left side of your face.”
    Harry obeyed, raising his hand and carefully laying his thumb in precisely the same spot, eyeing the bruise on Slater’s neck to accurately gage its placement.
    “Where do you fingertips end up?” Hughes prompted.
    “Right over my ears.”  He paused, lowering his hand.  “Are you suggesting those scratches were self-inflicted?  You think Marty did that to himself?”
    “That’s exactly what I think.  Given the positions of those wounds, particularly in the case of the thumb-print, there’s no other way they could have been caused.”
    He clicked on his penlight again, beckoning Harry to lean over the body.  “And look at this.  This is the worst of it all.”  He turned Slater’s head, shining the penlight into the inner ear.
    Harry could make out a deep wound inside the ear, dried blood caked around it, but still identifiable.
    “What the hell is that?”
    It was Hughes’ turn to shrug.  “Puncture wound, so far as I can tell, straight through the eardrum.  From the looks of it, I’d have to say it was made by some kind of blunt object.  A screwdriver maybe, or even a ballpoint pen.  Nothing sharp, though.  It’s much too ragged to have been made by an ice pick or anything along those lines.”
    “Do you think that’s self-inflicted as well?”
    “At first guess I would have said no, only because I can’t imagine anybody subjecting themselves to that kind of pain.  Would have been excruciating.  I don’t know how he would have been able to stand it without passing out.  But then, add in those scratch marks, obviously made with his own hands, and you start to figure that if he did one he very well could have done the other.”
    “You’re talking about a guy puncturing his own ear here, Del.  You said it yourself, the pain would have been huge.  The possibility that someone else did it to him also supports the possibility that Slater’s death wasn’t suicide at all.”
    Hughes surprised him by nodding in agreement.  “Yeah, I thought of that all right.  And when I sampled the blood from the inner ear, I found that it was already clotted.  That tells me the puncture wound was made a good eighteen to twenty-four hours before Marty’s death.  If he was murdered, if someone did this to his ear and then killed him, why would that person wait another full day before finishing him off?  I say he wouldn’t have.  It wouldn’t have made any sense.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Crazy as it sounds, I stand by my diagnosis.  Every wound you see here—from the scratches to the shotgun wound—was self-inflicted.  That’s what I believe, and that’s what I’m putting in my report.”
    Harry let the words sink in, rubbing a cool hand across his dry lips.  He hadn’t meant to challenge Hughes’ professional determination, at least not so directly.  But to openly accept it without discussion, without allowing for other potential explanations, wasn’t in his nature.  He knew Hughes understood this, that he would take Harry’s skepticism as an inherent part of his profession.
    Still, the question remained unchanged: had Marty Slater brought that damage upon himself, or had someone else had a hand in it?  The former scenario raised an ugly question in Harry’s thoughts, but before he could even address it, Hughes put voice to it, as if secretly in tune with Harry’s line of thought.
    “Now, the thing we got to ask ourselves is this: why on God’s green earth would any man do that to himself?”  He watched Harry closely, as if eager for him to shed some sudden light on the entire situation.
    But Harry only shook his head.  “Wish I knew.  We’ll probably never straighten that one out.  I don’t imagine we’ll find