Channing cleared his throat. ‘Call me Elliott,’ he offered.
Kate smiled. ‘Thank you, Elliott, and of course, you must call me Kate.’
‘This isn’t a social gathering,’ I said flatly. ‘Can we get to the corpse?’
‘She’s grumpy because an ogre killed him,’ Channing murmured in a conspiratorial aside to the ME.
‘Yes,’ Kate agreed, ‘that does put some extra pressure on her. We’ll have to see what we can do to help.’
‘I’m right here!’
Kate winked. ‘So you are. Come on then. Let’s get you back into your happy place. Let’s talk death.’
Kate had Lord Marlow laid out on a metal gurney. He had a small modesty sheet over his groin, but the rest of him was laid bare. She’d done some restoration work. After weighing all the organs, she’d put his entrails back where they belonged and performed some neat sutures to tidy up the body. It still looked like an unholy mess, but markedly less so.
His tidied-up body made me think of the map of scars I carried. My scars didn’t look so different from his – except I’d been lucky enough to survive them. Various lines of thick puckered skin decorated my whole body, less neat, less artfully stitched, and far more inconvenient to explain on first dates.
‘Fast work,’ I commented.
‘Some pressure on me for this one too,’ she explained. ‘Politically, with Lord Marlow being a Symposium member, we’re going to want to achieve some results, fast. And even without that pressure, the wife is coming to identify the body shortly, and I wanted him as presentable as possible.’
‘You’ve done a great job,’ Channing offered. ‘If you draw the sheet up, you’d hardly know he’d died screaming.’
‘Yes,’ Kate said faintly. ‘Thanks for that, Elliott.’
‘What have you got for us?’ I asked, impatiently interrupting the niceties.
‘Well, it was as you noted in your report – good work by the way, Channing.’
‘If we can cut through the mutual appreciation society and get to the point?’ I grumped.
Kate grinned at me, unrepentant and unfazed. ‘You got it, Stacy. As you suggested, Marlow’s diaphragm and lungs were pierced. There was a massive haemorrhage with aortic involvement. Death came quickly.’
‘The murder weapon?’
Kate grimaced. ‘Well, as Elliott said in your report … ogre’s tusks. It’s very distinctive from other types of gouges.’
I’d known it, but it still sucked to have it confirmed.
‘Time of death was likely between 4 and 5am,’ Kate continued. ‘No defensive wounds, nothing under the fingernails. Marks on the ankles and wrists are consistent with being restrained, but there are no abrasions, suggesting the restraints weren’t worn for a prolonged period. I’ve sent the blood to Dave in toxicology, but I don’t think you’ll get any hits there. I’ve run a histology test, and there’s evidence in his muscle tone that he was tasered, and you noted the entry wounds on his torso. I agree with your assessment that a short burst was used to disorient him. The discharge was delivered from a distance using prongs – no direct-contact application and no burns or damage from the barbs are evident.’
All of this I’d suspected, and while it was good to have confirmation, I really needed something more. Something new. ‘Nothing else for me to run with?’ I pressed.
‘I didn’t say that.’ Kate’s eyes gleamed and she led us over to an area with some petri dishes and a microscope. ‘Take a look,’ she suggested.
I did so, not quite sure what her point was. The slides showed some dead cells. I said as much.
‘Yes!’ Kate said excitedly. ‘But not newly dead cells. The cells here have been in the grave for a week or more. The nuclei are all but gone. We’re looking at widespread karyolysis.’
‘All right, I’m being dense here. Youjustsaid the time of death was 4 to 5am.’
‘Right.’
‘But you have cells that have been dead longer than that?’
‘Exactly!’
‘Vampyr cells?’ Channing suggested.
