Helen sat on the hard bed, fighting tears as she read Dr Khan’s preliminary findings for a second time. The cause of Jordi’s death was clear – cerebral haemorrhage brought on by cardiac arrhythmia. The state of the body after death had suggested a heart attack – the waxy complexion, the profuse sweating – as had the initial bloods, which were high in adrenaline and low in glucose. The internal examination all but confirmed it. Jordi’s heart was grossly enlarged and utterly spent.
Helen shoved the image of a convulsing Jordi to the back of her mind and tried to focus on the details. As Helen had noted previously, there were no defensive wounds on Jordi’s hands and her long nails remained intact. Khan had garnered scrapings from underneath these elegantly decorated talons, but he wasn’t convinced they were significant. Lab testing would provide more information but his instinct was that they were dirt particles, rather than skin cells or hair. More instructive, however, were the samples lifted from Jordi’s teeth. Analysis was pending, but Khan was convinced that he’d found semen residue.
Helen should have been cheered by this discovery. DNA is easy to harvest from semen and would certainly guide the authorities towards the culprit. But actually Khan’s discovery made her sad. Jordi had been trying so hard to clean up her act and had sworn blind she would never prostitute herself again. What had gone wrong? Helen quickly went through the toxicology report. Jordi’s blood samples showed traces of paracetamol and ritalin, but no evidence of heroin or cocaine, which puzzled her. If Jordi had resorted to using sex as currency again, then Helen would have expected hard drugs to be the payoff – she had been struggling for years to kick her habit. There was no evidence of sexual assault, however, according to Khan, so had Jordi succumbed to someone’s advances willingly? If so, who? And why?
There were lots of questions that remained unanswered, but Helen felt sure that the recovered DNA would prove crucial. If the killer was a prison employee, as she was convinced he was, then testing would smoke him out. So far he had proved a devious and elusive adversary, but if Helen’s instincts were right, this cruel phantom was about to be revealed.