Ronnie has gotten Larsen fixed up and I have her give the phone to Davis. I don’t want her to get too close to the body until they have cleared the scene. Larsen gives Davis directions where to point the phone. Davis moves the phone around to different angles and up closer, then farther away. Larsen says something about very little blood and tells Davis to gently feel around the victim’s neck and head. He does.
“There’s a knot on the back of her neck, Jerry. Feels like the bone is sticking through the skin. I’d have to move her to tell you more.”
“Lift the face up a little and hold the phone so I can see it.”
Her long red hair is partially covering the face. Davis smooths some of it away and gently lifts her head. He holds the phone close to her face.
Her lips are deep blue, her eyes open. Davis cants her head to the side. She is younger than me.
Open contusions on her cheeks and chin and several big splits on her lips mar what was once a pretty face. If she washed ashore, the rocks might account for almost every injury. However, it can’t account for the dark blue ligature mark around her neck or the positioning of the body.
She was strangled and deliberately posed.
Six
I have no doubt this is murder. Larsen agrees, although he won’t say it officially until he examines the body in person. Crime scene techs lay out a black body bag. It takes Floyd, Captain Marvel, and Deputy Davis to wrestle the victim into the bag and then onto the floor of the inflatable. She can’t weigh much, but it’s awkward carrying a body. Ronnie and I ride back to the boat ramp with them.
The only thing worse than being in a small boat made of rubber is being on the same boat with a dead body.
At the ramp, Floyd jumps out and pulls the front of the boat up on the concrete. He ties the front line off, and he and Captain Marvel lift the body bag out of the boat and lay it on the ramp. Larsen wheels a stretcher up to the top of the ramp. Next, Captain Marvel and Floyd each take an end of the body bag. Ronnie and I take a side to help carry her to the stretcher.
I watch as Larsen unzips the bag and inserts a rectal thermometer into the victim. Her core temperature is 71.5 degrees. After death, a body generally cools one degree an hour until it reaches the temperature of its surroundings. The outside temperature is in the high sixties. Larsen lifts one of the victim’s arms to test for rigor mortis. I see that Crime Scene bagged her hands to protect evidence: broken fingernails, skin under the fingernails, blood. Her arm moves freely. Rigor mortis, or stiffening of the muscles, sets in about two to four hours after death. It can last from twenty-four hours to four days. She has been dead for three or four days. Any longer than that, seagulls would have started snacking on her body.
Larsen uses his thumb and forefinger to spread the eyelids open. Broken blood vessels are etched into the whites of the eyes.
“Petechiae,” Ronnie says. “She’s been strangled.”
“That’s quite observant, Deputy,” Larsen says, and she swells up like a pufferfish.
Larsen turns the victim’s head to the side. The crunching of bones is audible. “Not just strangled.”
“Broken neck?” I ask.
He looks in my direction for a split second. “Can’t say. Probably.” His gaze returns to the body. “Help me roll her to her side. I want to look at her back.”
Captain Marvel and Floyd roll her on her side until Larsen holds up a gloved hand.
“Okay,” he says. “You can lay her back down.” He zips the bag down as far as it will go and looks at her legs and the bottoms of her feet. He examines the skin on her knees. He lifts her arms up one at a time and looks at the backs of her elbows. Then, quietly and solemnly, he zips her up.
Larsen has a windowless white van that he uses to transport bodies to the morgue near Bremerton, an hour away. It is rigged like an ambulance and will accept the stretcher and lock it down. A pathologist will perform the autopsy. Possibly Dr. Andrade, whom I’m familiar with.
I know Larsen saw what I saw.
“The marks on her wrists and ankles,” I say. “Were they made by handcuffs?”
“Can’t say that for sure. Could have been a rope or a cable. I’d rule out electrical wire, though.”
“What about her throat?” It doesn’t look like a manual strangulation. There would have been fingermarks, thumb marks in the skin under the chin where the thumbnails cut into the flesh.
He doesn’t answer.
“But you agree she was tied up? Rope? Cuffs?”
“I don’t want to guess, Megan. I can tell you this: it wasn’t a rope. Rope would have left burns in the skin. Abraded the skin.”
I didn’t have to guess. I am almost certain the marks on the wrists were made by something narrow and metal. I saw deep impressions in the skin but no cuts like wire would make. I have seen this before. Up close and personal. The mark around the neck was something different. It was not as wide as a belt, but the edges were defined.
A collar?
“Can you give me a guess on the time or cause of death?”
Larsen is shaking his head and peering up at me beneath his snowy eyebrows. “More than twenty-four hours. Strangulation, most likely, but I can’t rule out drowning or some other preexisting medical condition. I think her neck is broken. Maybe some ribs too. She was beat all to hell.”
He leaves with the body and promises to have a preliminary report ready for me in the next few hours. I will have to wait for the post mortem results as well.
Wearing a wet suit, Deputy Floyd searches the water off the cove for fifty yards out from where the body was found. I call Sheriff Gray to update him, and he dispatches a Jefferson County deputy to relieve MacDonald.
Captain Martin takes Ronnie and me back to the boat ramp, where we get in my car.
“Before we go back, can we look at the pictures of the scene again?” I ask.
“Sure.”
We trade phones. She set my phone to record the video of Larsen’s remote viewing of the scene. I watch and listen to her video interview of Robbie Boyd. She set the phone up in such a way that it caught him from the waist up. I can see most of his movements and expressions as he answered her questions. She asked good questions.
We finish about the same time and exchange phones again.
“Any questions?” I ask.
“Lots of them. This is my first crime scene.”
I can tell, but she handled herself pretty well. She didn’t throw up on the body, or run screaming out into the cove, or start crying like the fire chief did when he saw the charred remains of someone’s beloved pet.
I start. “What do you think we should do next?”
“Me?”
“Yes. What would you do next if it was your investigation?”
“Well, I would try to identify the victim.”
“Okay. How do you do that?”
“Missing persons. Circulate her picture,” she says, stopping for a moment. “No, that won’t work. She’s pretty messed up.”
I intend to circulate the picture of her face, messed up or not. Someone in law enforcement may recognize her.
“How about give a face shot to all the law enforcement in the area and then get a forensic sketch to put on the news media?”
“That’s smart.” I smile. “While we’re waiting to identify her, what do we do?” I ask.