Closer Examination

Bob paused as if noticing a change in the atmosphere in the room. Andrea waived for him to continue before he started asking if she was okay again.

He lifted one of her… one of the body's arms and turned it over, revealing the inside of the wrist.

"Now these ligature marks are distinctive of improvised restraints, probably some kind of thick woven cord. I don't believe that any were found on the body when it was discovered, but between the ligatures and the blood pooling, I can confidently say that they were in place at the time of death."

Andrea blinked. "I'm sorry, restraints… you mean she was tied up when she was killed?"

Bob nodded. "That's right. Given the bed where she was found, I would say a rope tied from each wrist to the bedposts. There is also a complete lack of defensive wounds on the hands or arms as there often are in a knife attack. I am sure she was tied up at the time of death, and I speculate that it is highly probable that she was either unconscious or made compliant by some other means when she was bound."

"Because it didn't look like she fought back?"

"That's right. However, it does look like she fought back against the murder itself. There are bruises, abrasions and minor lacerations on the legs that you would expect from a struggle with someone holding a knife."

Andrea's stomach had been twisting itself in knots, but a thought made it drop completely.

"You don't mean… they didn't…" She couldn't quite bring herself to say the words.

Fortunately Bob understood. He replied delicately, "No evidence of any kind of sexual assault. Whatever reason the murderer had for tying her to the bed, it wasn't that."

Andrea was relieved. As tragic as her final fate still was, at least Beatrix had been spared that indignity.

Something still didn't add up though. "If she was tied to the bed, why did the murderer attack her from the one direction where she could try to defend herself?" she asked.

Bob shrugged. "I can't speak to the killer's thinking, that's a question for the psychological profilers. I can tell you that these slight bruises on each hip here and here indicate that the killer was straddling the victim, pinning her down in order to attack her."

Andrea tried not to imagine what it must have been like in Beatrix's final moments, and didn't fully succeed. When she thought about seeing him holding a knife, preparing to attack her… the image shattered. Her brain rejected it.

She didn't like Kyle. But she didn't want to believe that he was capable of committing this kind of violence.

It felt like there wasn't much more to discuss. "So to summarize, you think that the victim was probably drugged somehow, carried to the bed, tied to the bed, woke up in time to try to fight off the killer as he climbed on top of her, held her down with his legs as he stabbed her all over with a kitchen knife and finished her off by cutting her throat."

Bob held up a finger. "Almost correct. You are right that we do certainly have reason to believe that the slash rather than the stabs were what killed the victim. While the injury to her throat will have made it very difficult for her to breath, the blow severed both the jugular and carotid, and she will have died from blood loss long before she had a chance to suffocate."

Indicating the stab wounds again, Bob said, "These on the other hand were probably made somewhere between one and two hours after the time of death."

Andrea blinked again, momentarily unable to function as she tried to process this new information.

"I'm sorry," she said. "You're telling me that the killer stabbed her AFTER she was already dead?"

Bob nodded again. "The chronology of post-mortem wounds is not as precise, so we can't narrow it down exactly, but there is evidence that is unmistakable. There was a relative lack of blood around the wounds including very limited internal hemorrhaging. The wounds themselves were quite clean, with none of the tearing you'd expect if the victim had been struggling during the attack, even by itself that indicates a post-mortem wound. There is additional enzyme histochemistry that can give us a general timeframe. Suffice to say, it would look very different if the stabs had been inflicted right after death. At least an hour had passed."

Andrea thought back to the police report timeline. The initial call had been in response to hearing screams. The police had arrived at the scene less than half an hour later, and Kyle had been taken into custody shortly after. There just wasn't time for an hour to have passed from the attack…

"How is that possible when the victim was killed less than an hour before the police where there?" she asked. It was too ridiculous to believe that someone had stabbed the dead body once it was part of a crime scene.

Bob's jaw dropped a little. "Oh dear, I do apologize. In my excitement to share my findings, I rather buried the lede. There is no way the victim was killed last night. All evidence indicates that they had been dead somewhere between 24 to 28 hours of the time they were brought in last night. That would put the likely time of death around twenty one hundred hours on Tuesday."

'9pm Tuesday, ' Andrea thought. 'But today is Thursday… Kyle was arrested Wednesday evening… how is that possible?'

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Oh quite sure. When it was brought in, the body was already cold, indicating that it had been at least eight hours since death. Rigor mortis isn't a precise measure, but the progression would indicate at least 24 hours had passed. The spilt blood had dried, lividity was already non-blanchable… no indication of purification as there would have been over a longer time period. A number of other factors make me quite confident of my estimate."

No matter how Andrea tried to turn it around in her mind, it didn't make sense. Either Kyle was the murderer, killed Beatrix on Tuesday… then came to court on Wednesday, had lunch, talked about shopping and went home, all the time with a murdered girl lying dead in his apartment. Or, and this seemed even more ridiculous, someone else had killed Beatrix without Kyle knowing and then left her there, and Kyle somehow didn't notice the whole time.

"And what about the scream?" she said aloud.

Bob nodded again. "It's a puzzler isn't it. Not my department to work that one out, but I shall be interested to hear what they come up with. There is one other detail I'd be interested to see if you can spot about these stab wounds, something you're currently well positioned to see…"

Andrea examined the wounds again. They all seemed to be roughly lined up with each other. After a moment she noticed that there were differences in the angle of each wound, and they all pointed towards her.

She held out her arm and swung it back and forth across the body. Bob grinned and nodded encouragingly.

"These wounds were made from the side, right? If the killer was holding the knife in their hand with the blade towards them, then all the wounds would point towards where they were standing. If they had still been on top, then the pointy ends of the triangles would be pointing down the body."

"Excellent, Andrea! You'd make a fine pathologist. Yet more evidence that the stabbing didn't happen at the same time as the killing blow. That angle would also require a reverse grip for such a directly downwards blow, whereas the neck would have used a forward grip. Furthermore, the pattern of wounds doesn't follow what you'd normally see in multiple stabbings."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Well, when it's a frantic attack, a crime of passion or someone fighting for their life," he said, miming a rapid downward stabbing, "you get overlap, you get a lot of wounds to the same area. These by contrast are very spread out, quite evenly spaced. It suggests that it was done carefully and deliberately."

Andrea shook her head. "What does that mean?"

Bob smiled sympathetically. "I'm afraid I don't know. Might be another question for the psychological profilers."

Andrea took a deep breath, trying to stop her thoughts from spinning as she tried to work out what this all meant.

"Is there anything else you think I should know?"

Bob flipped the sheet back over the body and slid the drawer back into the refrigerator. "That's everything until we get those lab reports back."

Andrea started pulling off her protective gear, eager to get out of the morgue at last. "Thank you for your time, Bob. This has been very useful."

Bob beamed. "No trouble at all, it's been a pleasure talking to you. I hope I see you down here again soon!"

Andrea didn't. Bob was nice, but she would happily never step foot in a morgue again if she could. As she rode the elevator back up, it was like a weight off her shoulders. But the fact remained that it seemed like she was leaving the morgue with more questions than answers.