‘Here,’ she said, her head tilting in the direction of the metal crypts. ‘Let me show you.’
Hunter and Garcia followed Dr. Hove over to the theater’s west wall and waited while she opened the door to compartment 3C, before rolling out the body stored inside it. It lay inside a white, plastic body bag. Dr. Hove pulled the zipper from head to toe, splitting the bag open to reveal the body in its entirety. ShaunDaniels had been an average man in height, but a little slight in weight.
Live and up close, his facial lacerations were even more shocking than how the pictures that Hunter and Garcia had looked at just over an hour ago had shown. The body’s left eye socket seemed to be out of level with its right one – a little deeper and certainly fractured. His nose, completely twisted out of shape and scraped down, had also clearly been broken. Despite the body having been found days ago, his face, hands and feet still showed signs of swelling. His skin looked rubbery and porous, but instead of ghostly white, it had taken on an odd shade of purple, which made it harder to see the large number of bruises that graced most of his body.
‘I wasn’t supposed to have been the ME in this post-mortem,’ Dr. Hove explained. ‘Seemingly apparent CODs, like hit-and-runs, bullet to the head, suicide and so on, are always assigned to one of the several advanced classes we run in conjunction with UCLA forensic pathology degrees. These types of corpses often go to students, but due to some paperwork error at the university, it ended up here. I was supposed to have been in a meeting all morning today, but the meeting got canceled. To help out with the backlog of autopsies, I took a couple on this morning.’ She nodded at the body on the slab. ‘This was the second one.’
Dr. Hove stayed quiet for a moment, allowing both detectives to quickly study the body in front of them. Hunter was the first to pick up on something odd.
‘He’s missing four of his toenails on his left foot,’ he said, frowning at the doctor, who smiled back at him.
‘Good eye, Robert,’ she said, with a nod. ‘That was one of the clues that something about this hit-and-run didn’t feel quite right.’
Garcia, who was still studying the victim’s facial lacerations, quickly moved his attention to the corpse’s feet. ‘What the hell?’
Hunter thought back to the photos that he and Garcia had looked at in their office. It took him just a second to remember.
‘He was wearing sneakers,’ he said, his gaze settling on Dr. Hove. ‘On the photos in the file you sent us, Doc, he was wearing sneakers.’
Dr. Hove nodded in silence.
‘Do you have them?’
‘In the storage room,’ she confirmed. ‘His nails weren’t inside it, if that’s why you’re asking.’
‘This can’t be a consequence of being hit by a car, Robert.’ Garcia shook his head.
‘I know,’ Hunter accepted. ‘The reason I asked is because there’s no way that he was walking around wearing sneakers, with no toenails on his left foot. Too painful.’
‘He wasn’t,’ Dr. Hove confirmed. ‘He was dead before he got to the spot where he was found.’
Hunter scratched his chin. ‘How long before? What’s the time of death?’
The doctor quickly reached for her notes. ‘According to the traffic incident report, his body was discovered by the side of the road at around 5:10 a.m., on Sunday, June 16th. That’s four days ago.’
‘That’s correct,’ Hunter confirmed.
‘Well,’ Dr. Hove continued. ‘He was dead at least six to eight hours before that time, but not longer than eighteen.’
‘So he died sometime on Saturday afternoon/evening,’ Garcia queried, ‘not on Sunday morning?’
‘That’s right.’
A couple of silent seconds followed the doctor’s revelation.
‘But according to the LAPD Traffic Division,’ Garcia again, ‘andyour autopsy report, his injuries are consistent with a pedestrian being run over by a car at speed.’
‘They are indeed.’ The doctor nodded at the detectives.
‘OK,’ Garcia countered. ‘But there’s no way that he was run over by a car sometime on Saturday evening and no one saw thebody lying there, by the side of the road, until 5:10 a.m. on Sunday morning. Lake Hughes Road might not be the busiest of roads, but it’s busy enough. It links Santa Clarita to Lancaster through the Sierra Pelona Mountains. Traffic might die down late at night and in the early hours of the morning, but you would still get cars crossing over every couple of minutes or so.’
‘Like I said,’ Dr. Hove insisted. ‘The compound fractures, together with all the bruising, the damage to the cranium, the scraped skin and the torn clothing, are all consistent with him being struck by a car at speed, but…’ Her eyebrows arched again.
‘But the accident could’ve been staged to mask the state that the body was already in.’ Hunter completed the unfinished sentence. ‘And by “staged” I mean – there was no accident at all. The perp could’ve easily created the skid marks on the road, using his truck, and simply left the body there.’
‘Very much so,’ Dr. Hove agreed. ‘The assumption of a hit-and-run accident here was purely circumstantial – the body was found on the road, at a location that showed some pretty hard-braking skid marks against the asphalt. The distance between the body and the skid marks were consistent with the pedestrian being hit by a vehicle traveling at around fifty miles per hour—’
‘But that can be easily calculated.’ Garcia, this time.
