The autopsy took place in the county health building, a few blocks east of the police station. The morgue was dank and chilly, full of dripping pipes and mechanical sounds. Coroner Barry Fishbeck was a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, a man possessed of country humor and shrewdness. In his midsixties, he was stooped and dignified-looking with a silver goatee and a bulbous nose.
Daisy’s clothes had been bagged and sent to the state lab for testing. Her body lay on a chrome table in the autopsy suite, and it shocked Natalie all over again to see her lying there dead. Daisy was slender and pale, with a dusting of freckles over her elfin nose, and she looked younger than her thirty-six years. There was a slight baby bump above her pubic bone, as well as evidence of meticulous grooming—manicure, pedicure, leg wax, bikini wax. Natalie recognized the faded, red and black starfish tattoo above her left breast—Grace had an identical tattoo. They’d gotten them when they were seventeen and stupid, and showed Natalie the results, giggling and drunkenly insisting, “Don’t tell Deborah! Don’t tell the Momster!” Natalie never did.
She’d learned to suppress her emotions during an autopsy, but this one was tough. Daisy Forester used to live down the street from them—a galloping girl with curly red hair and Kewpie doll eyes who liked to sing “Baby, I Love Your Way” on karaoke nights. Grace and Daisy were best friends forever. In the eighth grade, they’d worn identical overalls and black pullover sweaters. In the ninth grade, they joined the girls’ swim team and developed deep tans, strong arm muscles, and cheerleader smiles. In the tenth grade, they dabbled in the occult—looking for their future husbands in a crystal ball and casting spiteful curses on their frenemies. In the eleventh grade, they got identical tattoos—the brittle star had a talent for regrowing its limbs. It was a powerful symbol of hope. It meant that happiness could regenerate over time. In the twelfth grade, they went a little wild, smoking pot and sleeping with boys. They were so close at times, some of the girls at school called them conjoined twins.
Barry Fishbeck made a show of removing his jacket and putting on his white coroner’s coat, his surgical mask, and latex gloves, like an athlete preparing for the big game. Natalie could barely breathe. She hated the autopsy room’s foul chemical smells. Here the cadavers were studied, X-rayed, and cut open, before being stacked in a forty-degree cold room, where you could see their waxy feet through the clear plastic body bags.
Daisy’s head was turned sideways, and part of her scalp had been shaved so that the wound behind her right ear was exposed. Natalie couldn’t stop staring at it. It held a peculiar fascination. The geography of the human body never ceased to amaze her. The cast-iron skillet had impacted the right parietal bone, approximately five inches from the top of the skull, resulting in a deep laceration with ragged, swollen edges. Were it not for this grotesque head wound, Daisy would be teaching her fourth-period humanities class right about now. Natalie struggled to comprehend how she could be walking around in her own skin, while this person she’d known her entire life was gone.
Now Barry clipped a digital recorder to his belt, slipped on his headset, and chose from an assortment of tools. “Victim’s name is Daisy Forester Buckner,” he began, while Luke took out a roll of Peppermint LifeSavers, popped one in his mouth, and offered one to Natalie.
“Thanks.” Only human blood had that sharp, coppery odor that invaded your psyche and lingered for days. Everything Natalie had touched last night—body fluids, blood spatter, unknown substances—all those scent molecules had clung to her skin and clothes. Despite this morning’s shower, despite the extra laundry detergent she’d poured into the washer, the smell of last night’s crime scene would die a slow, hesitant death. As a homicide detective, you risked carrying a whiff of decay around with you wherever you went. To counter this effect, the guys in the unit wore cologne, and sometimes the office smelled like an air-freshened graveyard.
“Okay, now for the coronal mastoid incision.” Barry picked up a scalpel and made an incision across the top of the head. He peeled back the scalp and exposed the cranium, which was fractured like an egg.
Natalie’s stomach seized, and her nostrils flared with revulsion at the raw smells. Human beings weren’t meant to be cut open and exposed for all the world to see. The dead were supposed to be honored, laid out in their absolute finest, and mourned by candlelight. The Victorians had it right.
A memory pulsed before her. Natalie and her friends used to hold their breath whenever the school bus drove past the graveyard. You had to hold your breath until there were no more headstones left to see, and when Natalie couldn’t hold her breath any longer, she would pretend. She was pretending now.
She reached for the roll of LifeSavers on the counter, popped another mint in her mouth, and crunched down hard. Daisy’s skin was flawless, except for the starfish tattoo above her left breast and … wait. What were those marks on her wrist?
Natalie carefully lifted Daisy’s left arm and examined the faded old scars on her inner wrist—three small irregular scars, each about an inch in length, parallel and close together. They looked like three baby earthworms.
“Hesitation marks from a failed suicide attempt,” Barry explained. “Although there’s no mention of it in the medical records.”
“Really? Her family doctor kept it a secret?” Natalie said, surprised.
“Or else Daisy kept it secret. Those wounds are superficial. They could’ve healed on their own. This wasn’t a serious attempt, but it was enough to leave scars.”
“I never noticed before,” she admitted, gently placing Daisy’s arm back on the chrome table. It explained some of Daisy’s fashion choices. She favored wrist cuffs—lace, wrap, leather—or long sleeves year-round. “How long ago did this happen?”
“Well, from the looks of it … raised and faded keloidal scarring means the scar tissue continued to grow larger over time, until the overgrowth eventually became larger than the original wound. Probably late teens, early twenties, but I’m guessing.”
Natalie vaguely recalled some drama when Daisy was eighteen—there were rumors about a bad breakup, something to do with a boy, but she couldn’t remember the details. Brandon had come into the picture around the same time. It was sort of an abrupt transition from Grace to Brandon, as if they’d handed Daisy off like a baton.
Now the harsh overhead lights exposed the radial cracks in Daisy’s cranium. The fractures reminded Natalie of a hawk’s talons, gripping the glistening white skull, with dark blood folded into the most severe cracks. On the counter, a few feet away from the chrome table, was the murder weapon—the medium-size cast-iron skillet, bagged and tagged, lying on a fresh clean towel. Preliminary results were in. The skillet contained traces of type A-positive blood. Daisy’s blood was A-positive. Further DNA testing was being done at the state lab, but it would take a couple of weeks to get the results back. Still, the preliminary findings were significant. Even though type A-positive was fairly common, it was clear to everyone in the room that the skillet was the murder weapon.
Now Barry removed the calvarium and the brain, then stripped the dura away from the cranial cavity and examined the interior of the skull, tracking the weapon’s trajectory. “See here … where the bones are shattered in a curved pattern?” He pointed at the site of impact with his scalpel. “This pattern has the same characteristics as the edge of the skillet.” He picked up the skillet and did a side-by-side comparison. “They match almost exactly.”
Luke leaned forward and studied the exposed skull as if it were a piece of sculpture, while Natalie shuddered, no weight in her stomach.
“Method of death?” Luke asked the coroner.
“MOD would be impact with a heavy object,” Barry said, “resulting in the underlying dislocation of the skull. Projectiles of bone fragments penetrated into the brain, causing massive damage. Proximate cause of death is acute blunt-force trauma, resulting in complete and instantaneous disability and death.”
At least it was quick and painless. Small comfort.
Luke crossed his arms. “So a single blow to the skull with a medium-size skillet killed her? How much strength would that require?”
“Upper body strength? Not a lot,” Barry said. “An injury to the back of the skull is statistically more lethal than a blow to the front of the head. Which means, if the skillet was swung with great speed, then speed beats size. Not a lot of strength would’ve been required. I’ve seen this type of injury before in crimes of passion. All it takes is one blow.”
“What’s your TOD?” Natalie asked.
Barry picked up the chart and flipped through the fluid-stained pages. “By the time I arrived at the scene last night, around nine o’clock … the skin was waxy and translucent. Purple striations over the lower extremities. Eyes not yet milky—that usually occurs eight to ten hours after death. Body temperature was incrementally lower. Rigor mortis was just beginning. Limbs were flaccid. Stiffness of the jaw. Clear signs of postmortem lividity throughout the body. I’d say … three to five hours before my arrival.”
“So then … between four and six o’clock?” she clarified.
“I can’t pin it down precisely—nobody can—but that’s my best estimate.” Next he performed the Y-incision and removed and weighed each organ, dissecting the stomach contents and recording his findings. “A few partially digested pecans … the remnants of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich…” He paused with his instruments hovering over the victim’s pelvic cavity. “Okay,” he said softly. “Now for the fetus.”
The room grew still.
Daisy’s face was disturbingly peaceful.
Forgive us our sins.
The sorrow was stuck in Natalie’s throat like a handful of sand. When they were young, Daisy’s favorite CD was The Monkees Greatest Hits. She was a no-BS kind of girl. She used to give Natalie beauty makeovers. “Hey-ho, future movie star. Get ready for your close-up!” She’d curl Natalie’s long hair with a flat iron and let the little rug rat ask her a ton of pesky questions. But shortly after Daisy and Grace formed a coven with Lindsey Wozniak and Bunny Jackson, they no longer wanted the nine-year-old tagging along. They became supersecretive. Grace even put up a sign on her door that read “Gnats (that means you Natalie) Not Allowed.”
But none of that mattered anymore. Death was final.
The coroner made his first incision into the abdomen.
All of a sudden, for Natalie, it made perfect, haunting sense. One blow. Impulsive. Disorganized. A crime of passion. Sexual problems between Brandon and Daisy. The Breakup Bible. Manicure. Pedicure. A bikini wax.
“We need to confirm who the father is,” she said.
Barry looked up. “Why? Do you think she was having an affair?”
“I’m beginning to suspect it.” She couldn’t help feeling, deep in her gut, that Brandon wasn’t the father. She told Barry, “You’ll be running a DNA test on the fetus?”
Luke nodded. “Good point.”
“It’ll take a few weeks to get the results back from the lab,” Barry said.
For the second time that day, she felt as if she’d betrayed someone close to her. What did the dead think of us? What if they haunted the living out of spite?