CHAPTER 15

INDECENT EXPOSURE

Seeing Emily’s lifeless body on the cold metal table seemed to really cement the sobering fact that she was truly dead.

Emily had apparently been wearing a baggy sweatshirt, flannel owl-print pants, and UGG moccasins when she’d met her untimely death hanging from the chopper’s landing skid earlier that morning. The clothes themselves were still soggy from her dip in the lake, as was her sandy-blond hair, which was matted, stringy, and strewn across the table in thick clumps that resembled headless snakes.

Only three of the guests had had the stomach to investigate her dead body. Or perhaps that was even more than one would expect. It was difficult to say—it’s not as if there were guidebooks for real-life murder mystery games administered by some psychopath on a remote estate.

Thomas didn’t exactly like the idea of examining a real dead body, but he had chosen to do so assuming that the last known whereabouts and crime scene would offer few clues regarding how she died. After one round, what seemed to him to be the key to playing this game: discovering what had actually killed the victim. Everything else could be reasonably assumed, even with only a handful of the other evidence.

Jacqueline, once again relying on her medical knowledge as a former nurse, assumed she’d be able to learn the most from the body itself. And she also figured that she’d be able to provide insights into the evidence found on the corpse that the others would perhaps miss, not having any medical training themselves. So, in the end, she somehow had felt it was her duty to choose the morgue again.

The third guest to choose the morgue had been Guadalupe. She, like Thomas, wasn’t entirely comfortable with dead bodies, not that she’d ever actually seen one before, outside of her grandmother inside a funeral home a few years ago. But at the same time, she felt that given the nature of the crime, she’d be best served by examining the body herself. She had a gut feeling that there’d be subtle clues down here in the basement that the others might miss. And she’d been quite successful trusting her gut reactions throughout her life, in business and otherwise.

As soon as the door shut behind them as the maid exited, Jacqueline got right to work. She once again took charge, sensing how uncomfortable Thomas and Guadalupe really were now that they were actually face-to-face with Emily’s corpse. It had been much easier to choose the morgue without being in the presence of the body itself.

Jacqueline’s hands were steady as she lifted Emily’s head and felt for any signs of exterior trauma, such as a gunshot wound or evidence of a severe bludgeoning. She found nothing noticeable, aside from the fact that the girl’s neck had obviously been broken by the force of the chopper’s initial lift. The main question they were facing, they all soon realized, was how exactly had the killer managed to string her up on the chopper and then pilot it into the lake while somehow joining the rest of them on the lawn immediately afterward.

“Find anything?” Thomas asked.

“Not yet, other than the obvious fact that her neck is broken.”

“Should we roll her over?” Guadalupe asked.

“That was next on my list, honey,” Jacqueline said. “Help me.”

The three of them carefully flipped over Emily’s body. At first, nothing jumped out at them. But as they looked closer, Guadalupe noticed something unusual about the victim’s heather-gray sweatshirt. It was streaked around the butt and shoulders with a wide variety of faint, bright colors that hadn’t completely washed away in the lake. They almost looked like fresh grass stains, except that most grass didn’t come in hues of bright yellows, blues, and reds. No, not quite grass, Guadalupe soon realized. But something very much like grass that did, in fact, come in those colors: flowers.

She debated momentarily whether to reveal her discovery to Thomas and Jacqueline. This was a game, after all. The worse her competitors performed, the better her chances of survival. But the internal debate soon became moot as they noticed the same markings and eventually drew the same conclusions.

“What are these streaks?” Thomas said, rubbing his finger along one of them.

“They almost look like grass stains, except I haven’t seen grass those colors before!” Jacqueline said.

“It’s pollen,” Thomas said quietly as he sniffed his fingertips. “Definitely from the garden. This bright pink streak here with the almost chunky orange pollen spots?”

Jacqueline nodded as she leaned in.

“Well,” he continued, “they came from a stargazer lily, I’m pretty sure. I’m no florist or anything, but I had this girlfriend once, it was her favorite flower.”

Guadalupe and Jacqueline both stared at him. He didn’t seem like the type to have had many girlfriends in his life. If any. It wasn’t that he was particularly unattractive, so to speak. It was more that he had this gangly and awkward social demeanor typical of bookish, excessively intelligent types like he’d proven himself to be. It almost felt like he might be too intelligent to be able to form normal relationships with other people.

“I saw them in the garden the other day,” he explained further. “So it has to be where these streaks came from.”

“She must have been dragged right through the flower bed by the chopper at some point,” Jacqueline said.

The three of them paused and seemed to consider the implications of the discovery.

Eventually, Jacqueline continued her examination of the body. After the exterior examination, they began undressing Emily to check for other obvious signs of foul play. Thomas wondered briefly, as they pulled off the girl’s sweatshirt, whether he should stay. Was it proper? He wasn’t familiar with autopsy etiquette. He had a hard enough time figuring out normal etiquette rules. And he’d most certainly never seen a naked dead girl before.

But the answer became painfully obvious once the corpse was topless. Death, it seemed, had stolen away every ounce of sexuality Emily had ever possessed. She was no longer a female, but now was merely a dead body. An empty vessel of biological dysfunction.

All three of them noticed the twin burn marks on her side almost immediately. The twin pea-sized red welts were surrounded by a ring of yellow-and-purple bruising and were about four inches apart. They were located on her right side toward her back, just eight inches or so from her right armpit.

“What is it?” Thomas asked. “It almost looks like a snakebite or something.”

“Yeah, maybe if the snake was forty feet long,” Guadalupe said.

“I was just speculating,” Thomas said, maybe too defensively.

“They’re taser burns,” Jacqueline said, ending the argument before it got any further. “I’ve seen them before at the hospital. Every once in a while we used to get people who had just been apprehended by the police. When they resisted, they’d get tased or injured in the process. So then they had to be brought in to the hospital before going to the county lockup.”

“That explains a lot…” Thomas started. But he never got to finish his thought.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

The estate bell chimed, and just like that, their time was up.