Sidney nodded as she moved closer to the table.
“This strike was with the broad end of the oar,” Dr. Cutty said, holding Damian’s skull in her hands. “The first thing you’ll notice is that this type of trauma, blunt-force trauma, caused from a broad, flat object, didn’t penetrate the skull. Fracture it? Yes. But actuallypenetratethe bone? No. Instead, as you see, it caused a nondepressed fracture that radiated away from the site, but which also stresses the suture lines and often times separates the skull along these margins—the sagittal suture on top of the skull, the coronal and lambdoid sutures in front and back. This wound is much different from the one documented in Julian’s autopsy photos, where the skull is caved inward, or depressed, to a specific diameter and depth—three centimeters deep, seven centimeters wide, as measured by the St. Lucian pathologist—which is what defines a stellate fracture. We will repeat this many times on the Synbone model, with slow motion and still shots, to demonstrate that the flat end of the oar could not have caused Julian Crist’s skull fracture.” Dr. Cutty looked at Sidney. “So that leaves the edge of the oar.”
Dr. Tilly and Dr. Schultz moved to the cadaver named Martha and positioned her with straps in a similar fashion as they had Damian until the body was sitting upright. When her cohorts were safely out of the way, Dr. Cutty approached again and lifted the oar, careful to rotate the handle so thatthe sharp edge of the blade was in the striking position. She lifted the oar over her right shoulder, Hank Aaron–style, and cracked it against Martha’s head. The sound again reverberated in the corners of the morgue and gave Sidney a jolt. The autopsy suite was nothing but metal and tile, neither of which did much in the way of absorbing sound. Dr. Tilly again moved in to photograph the damage.
“You can see right away,” Dr. Cutty said, “that using the blade side of the oar produced a scalp laceration. In future demonstrations, we’ll use Synbone models and, with the help of our ballistics team and their contraptions, we’ll vary the speed of the oar to the slowest velocity possible that will still produce a lacerationanda skull fracture, just in case I swung harder than the assailant. But for our initial demonstration on the cadaver, you can see the scalp laceration that has been produced. So, if the oar was used to strike Julian, because of the laceration found, the blade of the paddlehadto be the part of the oar that made contact with his head. So let’s look at the fracture.”
Dr. Cutty peeled away the scalp from a premade crowning incision.
“As you can see, a very different fracture pattern as compared to Damian’s, where the flat side of the paddle was used. This one is deeper, as the oar penetrated the bone and caused a depressed fracture. This is a classic stellate pattern, with multiple linear fractures radiating from the impact site. But the shape of this fracture is completely unlike the fracture caused by the flat side of the oar. It’s longer, deeper, and more isolated since the source of the trauma—the edge of the oar—is much more compact than the broad side of the oar. And using the thin side of the oar, because the energy is so compacted, doesn’t cause the separation of the suture lines.”
Dr. Cutty went back to Julian Crist’s autopsy photos, handing them to Sidney. In the pictures, Julian’s scalp, too, had been husked away to reveal bare cranium.
“Even an untrained eye can see that neither of the fractures we’ve just produced, either from the flat paddle or the blade, match what was found on the back of Julian Crist’s skull. And since we’ve determined that the flat side could not have caused the laceration, we have to assume the blade caused it. And this assumption can be easily dispelled by simply measuring the length of the fracture,” Dr. Cutty said. “Remember, Julian’s skull fracture was measured to be three centimeters deep and seven centimeters wide. No matter how many times we repeat this experiment, which we’ve done on four different cadavers, as well as multiple times on a Synbone model, the length of the fracture when using the blade of the paddle has never been less than four inches, or, ten centimeters.” Dr. Cutty looked at Sidney as Derrick zoomed in on her face. “Bottom line? There isno oar on this planetthat could possibly have caused Julian’s skull fracture.”
Sidney was silent as she stared at the ten-year-old photos from an autopsy that helped convict Grace Sebold.
She looked up from the photos. “If you can say for certain, in your medical opinion, that the paddleboard oar didnotcause Julian’s skull fracture, do you have an opinion on what did?”
Dr. Cutty shook her head. “Not on the actual object, but I can make a conclusion about that object. It was much smaller than a boat oar, and it was wrapped in organza.”
“Organza?”Sidney asked.
“It’s a type of nylon.”
Dr. Cutty pulled Julian Crist’s autopsy report from an empty table and flipped through it, then handed the earmarked page to Sidney. She ran her finger down to the middle paragraph. “The pathologist in St. Lucia documented that organza fibers were discovered within the scalp wound. No wood fragments, incidentally, which would be expected if a wooden oar had been used. Instead, nylon fragments.”
Sidney blinked a few times. “So whoever struck Julian did so with an object wrapped in what? A nylon bag?”
“That’s a much stronger conclusion than a wooden oar. Oh, yeah,” Dr. Cutty said, picking up the paddle again. “Grace Sebold is listed as being five feet three inches tall, so to cause a fracture on this part of Julian’s skull, who was listed as six-two, she would have had to grow a few inches or be standing on top of something in order to produce the angle of the fracture.
“And one more thing. Grace is documented to be left-handed.” Dr. Cutty held the oar over her left shoulder. “Since Julian’s skull fracture was on the right side of his head, no matter what she used as a weapon”—Dr. Cutty switched the oar to her right shoulder and made a show of reversing her hands so her right fist was now on top of her left—“Ms. Sebold is a helluva switch hitter.”
CHAPTER 24
Friday, June 16, 2017
SHE FLEW FROM RALEIGH TO HARTSFIELD-JACKSON ATLANTA INTERNATIONALAirport. Her return to New York had been open-ended, not knowing exactly what Dr. Cutty would reveal during her experiments. The conclusions, however, were a damning condemnation of the boat oar theory that had been used to convict Grace Sebold. Sidney sent Derrick home to New York to compile the footage they had recorded in Raleigh. Leslie would take the amassed recordings and trim the fat. By Monday, when Sidney planned to return, the hours of footage recorded during her time with Dr. Cutty and the ballistics team at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina would be condensed to four hours of useable material. Sidney would then edit those hours down to the most important forty minutes, work with the writers to create her voice-over material, and cut episode four with the tech team in time to screen it to the network executives for their approval to air next Friday. If she were able to present Dr. Cutty’s experiments with enough intrigue, it would be the most explosive installment of the season.
She touched down in Atlanta and rented a car, careful to use her personal card. Today’s travel could not be expensed to the network. In fact, she wanted no one at work to know about her trips to Baldwin State Prison. Least of all Luke Barrington, who would hold her in contempt for the fact that her birth father, with whom Sidney had never had a meaningful relationship—besides during a brief window of her childhood—was serving a life sentence for murder.
She came to the now-familiar setting of low buildings strung out across the open land, contained by a tight perimeter of barbed wire and latticed chain link, a common theme no matter which jail Sidney visited. She spoke with the gate guard and waited while the fencing slowly parted and allowed her to pull into the complex. Prison visits were never fast, but Baldwin was longer than most. The screening was worse than any airport, and the waiting was on par with a bad layover. Eventually, an hour after she arrived, the guard called her name and led her past the thick door and into the visitation booths. There she took a seat and waited another fifteen minutes until her father appeared on the other side of the glass.
She did not know the man sitting across from her. Not well, at any rate. Memories of him came from when she was ten years old and her family life was still somewhat normal. Those still images and short clips of her family, just the three of them, were created before her father killed a man. Before her mother uprooted her from the Atlanta suburb, where every friend Sidney had ever made lived, and replanted her haphazardly in Sarasota, Florida. Sidney never created the same friendships in Sarasota that she had enjoyed her whole life in Atlanta, and the new life her mother attempted to forge in Florida was lessnewand mostly justdifferent.Can life really be started over? Can you simply turn the page in the notebook of life that has recorded your history and start writing a fresh story? If so, Sidney and her mother did itincorrectly. They either wrote the wrong story, or an unoriginal new story, or one that didn’t properly allow them to forget the pages that had come before. The failure was evidenced by the fact that Sidney sat waiting at a penitentiary to see her father more than two decades after he’d scribbled all over their original notebook—deep, crevice-producing gouges that ruined so much.
It wasn’t until college that Sidney steered her life back on track. Even then, though, the identity of her murderous father, who was locked away in an Atlanta penitentiary, was a well-kept secret. None of her college friends knew about her father; and the further her life progressed from his conviction when she was ten years old and in fifth grade, the less she thought about him. Thirty-six now, Sidney had spent more than two-thirds of her life without her father being part of it. Only the arrival of an unexpected letter had sparked the idea of a reunion. In it, Neil Ryan made a simple request to his daughter:Can I see you?
She still struggled, even after three years of clandestine meetings, to view her father through anything other than the prism of a ten-year-old girl. It was how she remembered him. Ingrained in her mind was the image of her dad taking her to the deli after Sunday church service, and riding on his shoulders as they walked through the amusement park. With just the three of them, roller coasters always left an odd man out. Although Sidney dutifully divided her riding time between her parents, secretly she loved riding the coasters with her dad. She always felt safer with him. Now, as she stared through the glass at the man in an orange jumpsuit, no feelings of safety or comfort came from his presence. No feelings at all, really. Not anger or resentment. To Sidney, Neil Donald Ryan was a stranger much more than he was a father.
He picked up the phone and his voice rang in her head as Sidney pressed the receiver to her ear.
“Hey, kiddo.”
“Hi, Dad.”
“I watched last week. I’ve got most of the guys in here hooked on it. I’m real proud of you.”
Sidney smiled. “Thanks.”
