Page 53 of Murder on Charity Lane

Maybe she shouldn’t worry so much about CJ moving in. Maybe the Marigold Cottages would have another romance instead of murder.

27

VERNON

The medical examiner’s report about Frank DeYoung’s death contained no surprises. Blunt force trauma, injuries consistent with falling down the stairs.

“So what’s all this?” Vernon asked the ME, tapping the addendum.

She adjusted her reading glasses. “Medical conditions, previous procedures, medications. DeYoung was well looked after.”

“He had six doctors?”

“At his age and income bracket, that isn’t so uncommon.”

“Huh. How long did he have to live?”

“Life expectancy? No idea. I’m not an actuary, Enible. Five years, maybe.”

“So nothing here is acute?”

“Only the blunt force trauma. His blood was at point-oh-four, just a little tipsy. But interacting with tamsulosin, that’s his prostate medication, alcohol can lead to dizziness and fainting.”

“Huh.” Vernon flipped to a photograph of the dead man’s naked back, a stretch of papery skin scattered with moles and white hairs. “Now talk me through this.”

“Bruises on his lower back,” she said, pointing to smudges on the corpse’s fish-belly white skin.

“Those are bruises?” he asked, though of course he’d already read the full report. He’d learned to talk to specialists in person despite what he thought he understood—sometimes they’d drop an opinion that they knew was factual but were unwilling to commit to paper.

“Yeah.” She spread her fingers and pressed them into the desktop. “The pattern is not inconsistent with a handprint. Thumb there, the dark mark, and forefinger there.”

“Pinkie there.” He pointed.

“No, that’s unrelated discoloration.”

He grunted. “What else can you tell me about the hand?”

“I don’t even know it is a handprint, Enible. The only reason it’s there at all is the decedent’s propensity to bruise. Could be from the chair he sat on, or he fell against a towel rack the day before.”

“How long premortem did it happen?”

“I can’t tell that, either.”

“If it is a hand, what’s the gender of the pusher?”

“Sex,” she said. “There’s no way to tell. A small hand with spread fingers looks like a large hand.”

“Can you match them against the people of interest?” Vernon asked.

“No. Except if it’s a hand, it’s a right hand. So nobody without a right hand.”

“That narrows it down,” he said. “What makes someone bruise that easily?”

“A dozen things. Blood thinners, Cushing’s disease, vitamin deficiencies. And age. Mostly age.”

On his way out, Vernon tugged his shirtsleeves down to hide the bruise on his forearm from where he’d knocked into his car door. Even the ME was a goddamn kid these days. He reread the reports at his desk. There was nothing there except for the eyewitness who insisted it was homicide. And that eyewitness had just inherited a massive fortune from her dead husband, so he wasn’t about to ignore her.

He grabbed lunch at Hamburger Habit before taking La Cumbre Road to Hope Ranch. When he parked at the DeYoung mansion, he wiped his face with a paper napkin and realized that his hands still smelled of ketchup. Not the best impression, so he dug around for the lavender hand sanitizer that his wife made him keep in the glove compartment.