Faithless

“Christ,” Lena said. “Who the hell did he piss off?”

CHAPTER TEN

Sara shifted her weight, feeling dead on her feet. She had started the autopsy of Charles Do

She tapped the Dictaphone back on, saying, “Extraperitoneal rupture of the bladder caused by downward blunt force trauma. No pelvic fracture is visible.” She told Jeffrey, “His bladder was empty, that’s the only reason it didn’t rupture. He may have gone to the bathroom before going to his room.”

Jeffrey wrote something down in his notebook. Like Sara and Carlos, he was wearing a mask and safety goggles. When Sara had first entered the house on Cromwell, she had nearly gagged at the smell. Do

“Transverse fracture to the sternum, bilateral rib fractures, ruptured pulmonary parenchyma, superficial capsular lacerations to the kidneys and spleen.” She stopped, feeling like she was going through a grocery list. “The left lobe of the liver has been amputated and crushed between the anterior abdominal wall and the vertebral column.”

Jeffrey asked, “You think this took two people?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “There aren’t any defensive wounds on his arms or hands, but that could just mean that he was taken by surprise.”

“How could one person do this to somebody?”

She knew he wasn’t asking a philosophical question. “The abdominal wall is slack and compressible. Normally, when something hits it, it readily transmits the force to the abdominal viscera. It’s like slapping your palm against a puddle of water. Depending on the force, hollow organs like the stomach and intestines can burst, the spleen is lacerated, the liver is damaged.”

“Houdini died like that,” Jeffrey told her, and despite the circumstances, Sara smiled at his love of mundane history. “He had an open challenge to anyone in the world to hit him in the stomach as hard as they could. Some kid caught him off guard and ended up killing him.”

“Right,” Sara agreed. “If you tighten your abdominal muscles, you can disperse the impact. If not, you can get yourself killed. I doubt Do

“Can you make a guess about what killed him yet?”

Sara looked at the body, what was left of the head and neck. “If you told me this kid had been in a car crash, I would absolutely believe you. I’ve never seen this much blunt force trauma in my life.” She pointed to the flaps of skin that had been rubbed off the body from sheer impact. “These avulsive injuries, the lacerations, the abdominal injuries…” She shook her head at the mess. “He was punched so hard in the chest that the back of his heart was bruised by his spinal column.”

“You sure this happened last night?”

“At least in the last twelve hours.”

“He died in the room?”

“Definitely.” Do

Jeffrey asked, “So, what killed him?”

“Take a number,” she said. “A dislocation at the atlanto-occipital junction could have transected the spinal cord. He could’ve had a subdural hematoma caused by rotational acceleration.” She counted off the possibilities on her hand: “Cardiac arrhythmia, transected aorta, traumatic asphyxia, pulmonary hemorrhage.” She gave up counting. “Or it could have been just plain old shock. Too much pain, too much trauma, and the body just shuts down.”

“You think Lena was right about the brass knuckles?”

“It makes sense,” she allowed. “I’ve never seen anything like these marks. They’re the right width, and it would explain how someone could do this with their fists. External damage would be minimal, just whatever the force of the metal against the skin would do, but internally”-she indicated the mess of viscera she had found inside the body- “this is exactly what I would expect to find.”

“What a nasty way to die.”

She asked, “Did you find anything in the apartment?”

“No fingerprints but Do

“Sounds about right,” she said, wondering when she had stopped being surprised at the amount of pornography men consumed. It was getting so that if a man didn’t have some sort of pornography at his disposal, she was instantly suspicious.

Jeffrey said, “He had a gun, a nine-mil.”

“He was on parole?” Sara asked, knowing the gun violation would have sent Do

Jeffrey didn’t seem bothered by it. “I’d have a gun if I lived in that neighborhood, too.”

“No sign of Rebecca Be

“No, no sign of any girl, for that matter. Like I said, there were only the two sets of fingerprints in the room.”

“That could be suspicious in and of itself.”

“Exactly.”

“Did you find the wallet?” After they’d cut the pants off, Sara had noticed that Do

“We found some loose change and a receipt from the grocery store for some cereal behind the dresser,” Jeffrey told her. “No wallet, though.”

“He probably emptied his pockets when he got home, went to the bathroom and then his room, where he was blindsided.”

“By who, though?” Jeffrey asked, more of himself than Sara. “It could be some dealer he screwed over. A friend who knew he had the Baggies, but not where he kept them. A thief from the neighborhood looking for some cash.”

“I would assume a bartender kept cash around.”

“He wasn’t beaten for information,” Jeffrey said.

Sara agreed. No one had stopped in the middle of attacking Chip Do

Jeffrey seemed frustrated. “It could be somebody co

“It didn’t look as if there were signs of a struggle,” Sara said. “The place looked ransacked.”

“It didn’t look that ransacked,” Jeffrey disagreed. “Whoever was looking for something wasn’t doing a very good job.”

“A junkie can’t exactly maintain focus.” She contradicted herself by saying, “Of course, anyone that strung out wouldn’t be coordinated enough for this kind of attack.”

“Not even with PCP?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Sara admitted. PCP was a volatile drug and had been known to give users unusual strength as well as vivid hallucinations. When she had worked in Atlanta ’s Grady Hospital, she’d admitted a patient to the ER one night who had broken the weld on the metal bedrail he was handcuffed to and threatened one of the staff with it.

She allowed, “It’s possible.”

He said, “Maybe whoever killed him messed up the room so it’d look like a robbery.”

“Then it would have to be a person who came there specifically to kill him.”