Carved in Bone - Jefferson Bass [50]
“What would a bigger section tell you?”
“Maybe nothing, but maybe—if we got really lucky—it might have included traumatized tissue. Which might have lent credence to his stabbing theory—or might have shown what a completely idiotic idea that was.”
She leaned closer, practically inserting her head into the cavern that had once housed the rubbery heart and spongy lungs, and played her headlamp over the interior. “The soft tissues inside the body cavity show signs of advanced decomposition,” she dictated, “however, the parietal pleural membrane appears to be intact, showing no sign of a penetration wound on the posterior wall of the chest cavity.” She lifted her foot from the Dictaphone’s pedal. “You wanna help me roll him over?”
We rolled the corpse onto its stomach, or what was once its stomach, so she could examine the back. A ragged gash, roughly two inches long and an inch wide, punctuated the lower left side of the back, just above the hip. Jess teased it open with the tip of a probe. As she worked the probe around inside the wound, a muffled grating sound emerged from the corpse. “Hark,” she said, eyes dancing above her mask. “Do you hear what I hear?” I nodded. “Let’s see what we’ve found.”
Trading the probe for a scalpel, she cut gently at the top and bottom of the wound to widen it slightly, then inserted a small spreader to open it. Something glimmered dully deep within the rotting flesh. Reaching in with a pair of forceps, Jess grasped and pulled, wiggling gently to help tease the object from the tissue. “Come to Mama,” she murmured as she worked it free, then, “Eureka.” It was a shard of glass, a quarter-inch thick and two inches long. The end she held in the forceps was perhaps an inch across; the piece tapered, over its two-inch length, to a wicked point. “That had to hurt,” she said.
“Meacham said that Ledbetter had collapsed onto a glass-topped coffee table. That’s got to be a piece of it. Could it have killed him?”
“Don’t see how—not right there. It’s completely lodged in the erector spinae—the main group of muscles of the lower back—so even though it’s a bad puncture wound, it wouldn’t have severed any major blood vessels. Eventually he might have bled out or died of infection, but he didn’t. For all his sloppiness in this case, Dr. Hamilton did get the cause of death right: it was a pulmonary hemorrhage that killed him. What he got badly wrong were the cause and the timing of the hemorrhage. This glass was just icing on the cake. In fact, this guy might have already been dead, or close to it, when he hit the coffee table.”
“So there’s no evidence of a knife wound, Jess?”
“Well, you never know. Maybe the guy stabbed him and then stuck this in there to cover his tracks. Sounds far-fetched, but I still get surprised once in a while. You’re gonna check for knife marks on the bone, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I wasn’t trying to get out of the work. Just trying to make sense of what we’re seeing here.”
She wrapped up her dictation with a matter-of-fact notation that the remains had been transferred to forensic anthropologist William Brockton of the University of Tennessee for further examination, to ascertain whether the spine or ribs had sustained trauma, then switched off the recorder. “Bill, you want me to save you a little time?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant. “What do you mean?” I asked. Reaching to one side of the instrument tray, she picked up a long, straight-bladed knife that must have measured eighteen inches from stem to stern. I vaguely recalled seeing its twin one morning in Panera Bread, where a baker deftly dissected a cinnamon-raisin loaf into perfect slices. “Looks like a kitchen knife,” I said.
“Oh, please,” she said. “It’s a highly specialized implement with a precise medical name: bread knife.” Her arm extended and