THE BRIGHT, STERILE odors of stainless steel, formaldehyde, and ethyl alcohol did not mask the morgue’s underlying stench of death.
North and Lloyd Jorgenson, the coroner, were already standing at the autopsy table when Test arrived.
Lloyd, a widowed grandfather, was a humongous man whose gut slung over a tightly cinched belt. He was chronically short of breath, his brow speckled and the underarms of his scrub top stained with sweat.
North nodded to acknowledge Test, but he did not speak. The mood was intense and, somehow, scared. For Test at least, if not for Lloyd.
Test stood beside North at the table.
Jessica’s cadaver was illuminated. The lights radiated an uncomfortable and unnatural heat. The room was preternaturally still. The permanence of death lived in this room. It was bodily. Even the glare of the lights seemed cold and clinical, violating in how savagely it lit Jessica’s corpse, allowing Lloyd to work with scalpel and scissors, saw, cutter and spreader. Acid boiled in Test’s stomach.
Lloyd wandered away, stripped surgical gloves from his hands as he sat on a stool at the back of the room. The light there was poor and shadowed compared to the table’s lights. He sat at a stainless-steel counter that might have been chic in a New York nightclub.
He nodded at Test as he ate a double-decker liverwurst sandwich and washed it down with a liter of orange Crush.
He set the bottle down. Its plastic popped back into shape with a crackle. He put a fist to his mouth, muffled a burp. He set his sandwich down on a piece of waxed paper and wiped mustard from his knuckles onto his cords.
“Junior Detective Test,” he wheezed. “I haven’t finished her yet. But I do have some revealing results thus far.” He picked up a manila folder beside the waxed paper on which his sandwich sat.
He handed it to Test.
“Sorry to be late,” Test said.
Neither man indicated they’d heard her nor cared.
Lloyd pinched his brow. “First. She wasn’t molested sexually. Forced, that is. That’s clear. Thank God for small mercies. Not so much as a superficial bruising or tearing. One tiny nick I determined was from a razor where she’d shaved what little pubic hair she appears to have had. The girls do that these days. At least the ones I’ve had the misfortune to see on my table. She was killed by massive blunt force trauma to the frontal bone of the cranium. This bone was crushed and the frontal lobe of the brain suffered catastrophic injury. What appears to be a hammer drove through the skull into the brain, which also drove sharp shards of bone deeper into the frontal lobe.”
“Detective Test and I were initially under the impression that it was luck more than practice,” North said. “But, with the suspect we have, perhaps it was more an athletic precision.”
“She did not die instantly,” Lloyd said. “But very soon after being struck. However there was no struggle. No scratches on her face or arms, which makes me assume, and this is unofficial, that she was either taken by surprise or knew him. She definitely saw it coming at the last. She was facing whoever it was.”
“Brad,” North said. “The two were having sex since she was fourteen.”
Test held her tongue. Her confidence in Brad as the killer had waned with the dogs being killed. He was still a high probability, but it changed things for her. It would change things for North, too.
Lloyd sniffed. “You never know,” he said. “By the sweet picture of her in the paper, you’d peg her for a good girl.”
Test wanted to know just what that was supposed to mean.
Lloyd coughed. “That leads into my last, but certainly not least, tidbit. She was approximately three to five weeks pregnant.”
“Got him,” North said.
For Test, Brad jumped squarely back into the prime-suspect spot.
“You’re sure?” she said.
“You insult me,” Lloyd teased.
“That locks motive,” North said. “What’s one thing that makes a kid with a bright future risk messing up that future?”
“Trying to get rid of an even bigger risk of that future being messed up?” Lloyd said.
“You should be a cop,” North said.
“I hear he’s a hotshot and a hothead,” Lloyd said. “Struts around like king cock of the barnyard. Though I had a swagger too when I was starting quarterback in the seventies.”
Test felt her jaw drop. She snapped it shut. Her eyes roamed over Lloyd’s massive and soft body, as though she were a sculptor trying to see her David in shapeless stone.
“I know,” Lloyd said. “You’d never imagine it.”
“No, I—” Test said.
“I get it all the time from people I went to high school with, from ‘concerned family.’ Truth is, I have the same appetite now as I did then. But not the workout routine, never mind the metabolism. I loved football but hated the workouts. Add three pounds a year for thirty years . . .” He took hold of his gut, jiggled it and laughed, “See as much death as I do, you better enjoy life a little. We’ll need a DNA cheek swab from the boy,” Lloyd said, switching gears, “to confirm a paternal link.”
“We’ll charge him to make it mandatory,” North said.
“Can we? We don’t have hard physical evidence,” Test said. “His prints are in the house, but their e-mail exchanges confirm he’d been in the house plenty of times.”
Lloyd closed the folder.
North grabbed it. “If we let Brad read this, he may cop without a swab.”
“Still need a swab,” Test said. “Physical evidence to lock it.”
“I’m aware,” North said.
“OK kiddies,” Lloyd said. “Go harass the lad, then give me a jingle.”