Bunny was suturing the body closed when Highway Patrol showed up. She led the two troopers to the back area, where Jenner was laying out the decedent’s clothes to be photographed. He recognized Cooper and Martin from the hallways; Cooper was the stocky fireplug, Martin blond and etiolated. Neither looked delighted to be summoned to the morgue.
Jenner said, “Thanks for coming down—I have a couple of questions about the investigation, and there’s something you need to see.”
Cooper looked at Jenner with a concerned expression and said, “You okay, doc? You look kind of tired.”
Jenner shook his head, slightly confused. “No, I feel fine.”
“Late night? Because you look kind of pale.”
“Not really.”
Jenner walked toward the body; behind his back, Cooper winked at Martin. “Oh, okay, good. So what do you think? Intox’d? Unlucky? Both?”
“There’s a few strange things. First off, this guy is no migrant worker. High-quality dental work, hands that have never seen a day’s work, no tan, no foreskin—I don’t think he’s from around here.”
Martin looked up from his notebook and said, “Any tattoos or identifying marks?”
Jenner shook his head. “His head’s in good shape, so once we have a tentative it’ll be an easy photo ID. There’s a scalp laceration, but the skull isn’t fractured, and there’s no brain trauma or intracranial bleeding. In fact, the rest of him isn’t too bad either. The impact busted his arm and leg, but from his injuries I’d say he wasn’t so much hit as run over…”
Cooper said, “Well, the kid driving the SUV swears he didn’t see him—says they felt a bump then the car suddenly skids out. I guess that makes sense.”
“Did the driver touch the victim? Approach him, stand over him or anything? Was the driver injured?”
“He says he didn’t. He went over to the body, but says he didn’t touch it. And nope, no injuries on the driver—they basically just skidded to a stop, they didn’t hit anything else.” He glanced at Martin writing away. “Why do you ask?”
“Did the victim say anything? Was he moving?”
Cooper shook his head. “Nope. Didn’t say anything, wasn’t really moving. He was making noise, moaning, though.”
“Well, if he was alive after the impact, he was alive before it.” Jenner shook his head.
He looked at the body on the table again. “Did they notice anything else while they were waiting for EMS?”
Cooper said, “Not really. Just moaning. And drooling—they said he was just laying there moaning and drooling.”
“Drooling?” Jenner shrugged. “I don’t know what that’s about.” Probably some weird effect of the head injury.
He glanced over at the X-ray again, at the immaculate fillings and the perfectly executed implant.
“This isn’t adding up, sergeant. You’ve got a guy who’s lying on the road, alive, hit by a car. His injuries are bad enough to eventually kill him, I guess, but I can’t understand why he died so quickly—according to EMS, he died in the ambulance minutes after being hit. I’ve seen people die from shock and pain from tissue damage, but he’s young and healthy, so…It’s just…weird.”
He looked at the clothing on the table in front of him. The shirt, cut open by the paramedics during resuscitation, lay roughly reassembled, the cut margins held together with adhesive tape.
“Okay.” Jenner shrugged. “There’s something important I want to show you.”
He lifted the shirt and turned it to the cops. “The front of his shirt is soaked in what looks and smells a lot like red wine. And that’s fine—maybe he is just some poor bastard who has too much to drink and passes out on the road. But…”
He turned the shirt around to show them the back, holding the arms wide-open, as if the boy had been flying.
“You’ve got smeared blood here at the top of the left shoulder; this stain lines up pretty nicely with the cut in his scalp. Big deal.
“Now look all the way down here…” He gestured to the back of the shirt. “Down here in the low back, near the tail of the shirt, you have droplet spatter, little droplets of blood, some of which are quite fine.”
Martin said, “So, what does that mean?”
“The blood pattern doesn’t fit with his wounds.” Jenner laid the shirt carefully down onto the photo stand and plugged in the cord to the stand lamps.
He turned to face the officers.
“Basically, I don’t think this is his blood down here.”
He smoothed away the ridges of the shirt on the photo stand, picked up the camera, and turned on the tungsten lights. “And we know it’s not the driver’s blood. It looks like it was dripped onto him, with these tiny droplets here maybe coughed onto him.”
He paused, then looked them in the eye.
“Let me spell it out for you: there’s someone else out there you need to find. Another victim, possibly. But also, maybe an assailant…”