We don't have profilers. When we really need one we bring one over from England, but most of the time a lot of the Murder guys just use Cassie, on the dubious basis that she studied psychology at Trinity for three and a half years. We don't tell O'Kelly this-he considers profilers to be one step up from psychics, and only grudgingly lets us listen even to the English guys-but I think she's probably fairly good at it, although presumably this is for reasons unrelated to her years of Freud and lab rats. She always comes up with a couple of useful new angles, and usually turns out to be quite close to the mark.
Cooper took his time thinking about it, to punish her for interrupting. Finally he shook his head judiciously. "I consider that unlikely. Had she been moving when this blow was struck, one would expect peripheral grazing, but there was none. The other blow, in contrast…" He tilted Katy's head to the other side and hooked back her hair with one finger. On her left temple a patch of skin had been shaved to expose a wide, jagged laceration, splinters of bone poking out. Someone, Sam or Cassie, swallowed.
"As you see," Cooper said, "the other blow was far more forceful. It landed just behind and above the left ear, causing a depressed skull fracture and a sizable subdural hematoma. Here and here"-he flicked his finger-"you'll observe the peripheral grazing to which I referred, at the proximal edge of the primary impact point: as the blow was struck, she appears to have turned her head away, so the weapon skidded along her skull briefly before achieving its full impact. Do I make myself clear?"
We all nodded. I glanced covertly across at Sam and was heartened by the fact that he looked like he was having a hard time, too.
"This blow would have been sufficient to cause death within hours. However, the hematoma had progressed very little, so we can safely say that she died of other causes within a short time of receiving this injury."
"Can you tell whether she was facing towards him or away from him?" Cassie asked.
"The indications are that she may have been prone when the harder blow was struck: there was considerable bleeding, and the flow was directed inwards across the left side of the face, with some pooling apparent around the central line of the nose and mouth." This was good news, if I can use the term at all in this context: there would be blood at the scene, if we ever found it. Also, it meant we were probably looking for someone left-handed, and, while this wasn't Agatha Christie and real cases seldom hinge on that kind of thing, at this point any tiny lead was an improvement.
"There was a struggle-prior to this blow, I may add: it would have rendered her unconscious immediately. There are defensive wounds to the hands and forearms-bruising, abrasions, three broken fingernails on the right hand-probably inflicted by the same weapon as she warded off blows." He lifted one of her wrists between finger and thumb, turned over her arm to show us the scrapes. Her fingernails had been clipped off short and taken away for analysis; on the back of her hand was a stylized flower with a smiley face in the middle, drawn in faded marker. "I also found bruising around the mouth and toothmarks on the insides of the lips, consistent with the perpetrator pressing a hand over her mouth."
Outside, down the corridor, a woman's high voice was giving out about something; a door slammed. The air in the autopsy room felt thick and too still, hard to breathe. Cooper glanced around at us, but nobody said anything. He knew this wasn't what we wanted to hear. In a case like this, the one thing you can hope for is that the victim never knew what was happening.
"When she was unconscious," Cooper said coolly, "some material, probably plastic, was placed around her throat and twisted at the top of the spine." He tilted her chin back: there was a faint, broad mark around her neck, striated where the plastic had buckled into folds. "As you see, the ligature mark is well defined, hence my conclusion that it was put in place only when she had been immobilized. She shows no signs of strangulation, and I consider it unlikely that the ligature was tight enough to cut off the airway; however, petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes and on the surface of the lungs indicates that she did in fact die of anoxia. I would hypothesize that something along the lines of a plastic bag was placed over her head, twisted at the back of the neck and held in place for several minutes. She died of suffocation, complicated by blunt-force trauma to the head."
"Hang on," Cassie said suddenly. "So she wasn't raped after all?"
"Ah," Cooper said. "Patience, Detective Maddox; we're coming to that. The rape was post-mortem, and was performed using an implement of some kind." He paused, discreetly enjoying the effect.
