Time for escape into my basic shrink philosophy: When life tosses you lemons, get lost in the problems of other people.
I walked to my office where obligation awaited: a court report summarizing work I’d done on a particularly malignant child custody case. One of those dreary parental jihads where you know the kids will suffer and there’s not a thing you can do to preventit.
I wrote for two oblivious hours. Read, re-read, revised, saved, and printed the hard copy that would go to the judge and enter the official case file. Futility formalized.
Seconds after closing the file, my mind snapped back to the murders.
Sophie.
Martha, Lynne.
When you begin thinking of people you’ve never met by their first names, you’re committed.
Two unrelated strangulations within a week of each other. Followed by a blunt-force trauma.
Something itched the back of my brain but I couldn’t put it into focus.
Then it hit me: the math.
—
Strangulation’s a common cause of death in murders depicted on screens of all sizes. Both fictional homicides and the real-life savagery that gets true-crime bloggers salivating.
But it’s incredibly rare.
I keep yearly FBI homicide reports on file, pulled up the most recent annual summary not expecting the facts to change.
They hadn’t.
Strangulation and asphyxiation combined amounted to less than one and a half percent of murders nationally.
Blunt-force killings were a bit more prevalent but still uncommon: around four percent.
Guns, knives, fists, and feet—in that order—cause the bulk of the deaths people inflict on one another. Mostly guns and like most homicide detectives, that’s what Milo customarily deals with. Yet during a brief interval, he’d picked up three outliers.
He and Villalobos had talked about the rarity of blunt-force homicides but they hadn’t wondered about the total picture. Neither had I, until now.
Because we were all caught up in the details.
Hello, trees; go away, forest.
But whatif?
—
I sat at my desk for a long time but failed to come up with anything that could tie in the death of an office manager in her thirties strangled at her kitchen table and that of an elderly former homicide D choked out in the hoarder’s palace she’d created.
Toss in planted DNA at Sophie’s crime scene and postmortem mutilation in Martha’s case and the differences grew.
Toss in the brutalization of that same detective’s mentally impaired daughter and they ballooned.
But.
The math.
It took another hour of headache-inducing concentration before the giant, fuzzy question mark in my head began to take on sharp angles. Bad headache, as if my brain could take only so much.
I self-medicated with caffeine and that reduced the throbbing to an oddly comforting two-two beat.
