Javi nodded. Pathology was always presented as though it were as linear as mathematics, but anyone who’d had to decipher conflicting autopsy reports knew it was half formula and half flair. Mistakes could be made, assumptions influenced decisions, and experience varied. Give a corpse a couple of days in a body of water, and a stab wound and animal predation could be hard to tell apart. A ten-year-old corpse meant things were even more complicated.
“What do you have?” he asked.
She sat back in her chair, which made it creak under her shifting weight, and reached for the mug on top of an anatomy book.
“There’s no evidence of any gross trauma to Bridget Utkin’s body,” Galloway said. She took a drink of coffee, tipped the mug right back for a swig, and grimaced at the taste as it hit her taste buds. “Cold,” she explained as she put it back down in the existing coffee ring. “She had some superficial injuries to her wrists, indicating some form of restraint, and I have sent the trace evidence extracted to the lab. The staining to the occipital bone of the skull also indicates a superficial injury, probably a blow to the head, prior to death. None of those were likely to be the cause of death, though.”
“So what was?”
Galloway folded her lips together and pressed them into a thin, pale line. For a second Javi thought it was uncertainty or an unwillingness to commit to an idea, but it was more like… distaste for what she was about to say.
“I can’t, at this stage, make a definitive statement on the cause of death.” She reeled off the ass-covering disclaimer without bothering to give him time to respond. “However, based on the evidence of autolysis to the organs, discoloration to the lower extremities, and the fact that I found strands of Utkin’s own hair under her nails… I suspect she died of a combination of dehydration and hyperthermia. It’s possible the tissue samples I’ve sent to the lab will contradict that, but… I know the signs.”
She did. There’d been three infant deaths from hyperthermia in Plenty in the last year. Javi had been called in on one of the cases when the evidence mounted that it hadn’t been a mistake. Mostly it was just tragic.
“How long would it have taken?” Javi asked. “Birdie Utkin was a teenager, so her ability to regulate her own temperature would have been established.”
Galloway nodded, picked up her mug again, and grimaced around another gulp of cold coffee. “It depends on where she was being kept. It could have been a couple of hours, or a couple of days.”
With babies it was always cars. Javi didn’t believe in hunches, but he remembered a burnt-out car and the desiccated leather-and-rag remains of a raccoon in the backseat. If their suspect was Birdie’s boyfriend Hector, he’d been living in his car. It would have been the only place he had control of.
“If she were in the trunk of a car?”
Galloway pulled that unhappy face again, got up from the desk, and squeezed around it to get to the coffee machine on the filing cabinet. She topped up her mug with the dregs sizzling in the bottom of the stained glass carafe.
“Under an hour,” she said. “It would have been like being in a crockpot.”
It was the mundanity of the image that made it so macabre, Javi thought. His brain queasily revisited the slow-broiled tilapia he had made last week—the curled edges and wet, slipping flesh. He blocked his imagination from developing the idea any further, not that it needed to, and swallowed the sour acid taste on the back of his tongue.
“After this period of time,” he said. “Would it be still be possible to detect drug residue in her system?”
Galloway raised her pale eyebrows at him, wrinkling her forehead. The gesture seemed to remind her she was still wearing her glasses on her forehead, and she tugged them down. Her fingers left more smudges on the lenses as she settled them on the bridge of her nose.
“Assuming she ingested the substance shortly before death, there might not have been time to metabolize it,” she said. “In that case, for some chemicals, we might be able to find traces. Why? What should I be looking for?”
“Psychotropics,” Javi said. It was possible the killer used the same cocktail in every murder, but if he was also a drug dealer, then it was possible drugs were just a weapon of opportunity. “Mephedrone.”
Galloway gave him a curious look. When he didn’t explain any further, she nodded and squeezed back behind her desk. She drank her coffee absently as she typed one-handed on the computer.
“I can do that,” she said. “I already sent tissue samples, so I can just append these tests for the lab. Anything else?”
Javi shook his head and got up, ready to take his leave. He changed his mind as something occurred to him. It was possible that losing a house and ending up homeless when your family left the area was enough of a trigger for a fragile personality. It removed the constraints of socially encultured behavior and gave a direction for their anger and delusions.
It didn’t feel like the focal point of the crimes, however. The drugs in the bottle Cloister had found weren’t just to disable Drew—or Billy, as the initial target. There was a reason behind them.
“Could you check back in the records ten or twelve years?” he asked. “Any death involving cars, drugs, and a teen male survivor or next of kin.”
Galloway snorted at him. “You don’t want much,” she said. “Lucky for you it’s a slow day.”
“Really?”
She laughed. It was a big, braying sound from a woman who usually looked like she should be on a vitamin drip.
“No,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do, though.”
Javi nodded his thanks. “Forward anything that you find to my office,” he said. “I appreciate it, Doctor Galloway.”
“My birthday’s in a couple of weeks,” she said. “I like Amazon gift cards and coffee.”
