Code 61 - Donald Harstad [21]
Those eyes had looked so vital; I'd thought she was still alive. That really startled me. I hadn't been expecting them to look so, I don't know, lifelike, I guess. I took a deep breath, and forced myself to squat back down. I took a shot of the pen in the tub, then gingerly fished it out of the little puddle of reddish muck near the drain. Naturally, it had rolled downhill. I took a second shot, depicting the little depression the pen had made in the drying blood.
Only then did I hold it out, push the hair back again, and take the shot. I didn't look at her eyes. I did, though, make a mental note. With her head lolling forward, her eyes must be in a rolled-up position. That might eventually mean nothing, but I sure as hell wasn't ever going to forget it.
I also got some good shots of the knife. It was a new-looking kitchen knife, with a strong, serrated blade. Black polycarbonate handle. Brass rivets. I shook my head. Brass rivets. Hell, even the knife went with the room.
I did a few shots from as nearly directly above her as I could get. I noticed that she seemed to have several colors of nail polish, both on her fingers and on her toes. Black thumb nails, it looked like, with red on the index finger, dark green on the middle finger, dark blue on the ring finger, and white on the little finger. The same sequence was repeated on her toes. I wondered if it meant anything.
I finished photographing the rest of the bathroom, having to reload the camera again. I started to talk to myself, and to her, about that time.
“Sorry, kiddo, but I gotta reload.” There was, of course, no answer. “A few more shots to go. I'll be done in a second, and then we can leave you to yourself until the doc gets here.”
You do that. Well, I do that. When I'm alone with a freshly dead person. Nerves, I guess. Spooked, or getting that way. That, and it always seems such an intrusion, especially when they're in such a vulnerable position. I always get self-conscious and kind of embarrassed. I have to look at parts of them they'd never let me see if they were alive. And I take photos, to boot. So I try to verbally reassure them.
“I don't know, but I think you maybe might have done this to yourself. No clothes to get into when you get out of the tub, you know? Nothing laid out in the bedroom. Like you had no intention of ever leaving that tub.” It was possible. There were absolutely no signs of a struggle, as they say. None but those bruises, and they might not be contemporaneous with her death. The plastic curtain didn't even seem to be much disturbed, hanging properly inside the rim of the tub. It was awfully difficult to imagine someone creeping up behind her, stabbing her in the neck, and having her bleed to death. I'd seen a couple of very determined suicides before, including one woman who'd stabbed herself eleven times in the abdomen with a hunting knife. That had to have taken a while. You could do a lot of damage to yourself if you were in the right frame of mind.
But it still looked … well, wrong. Especially the bruises. But maybe she'd had a fight with her boyfriend earlier in the day. That was possible.
I remembered that Edith had overdosed on pills, at least once for sure. Only once, as far as I knew, because I'd been a night-shift officer then, and had been assigned to that case. That had been a few years back. Not evidence in and of itself, but a prior attempt was at least an indication that she'd achieved a suicidal frame of mind on at least one occasion. But would that even bear on the fact that we had a knife used this time?
Hmm. I could almost hear the endless discussions generated by that, late at night in the dispatch center. That, and the discussion about the position of the knife. Would she have dropped it on that side? Wouldn't it have landed (insert choice) blade forward, rear, up, down, more to the left, more right? … I almost felt I owed it to the night shift to resolve this one quickly.
There was a voice behind me, out in the bedroom.
“Carl,