Killing Hour - Lisa Gardner [41]
Special Agent Kaplan frowned at that and made a gesture with his hand. Dr. Corben snapped off the minirecorder in his hand. “What do you mean, a large-bore needle?” Kaplan asked.
“Different needle gauges have different thicknesses. For example, in the medical community, when we give injections we use an eighteen-gauge needle, which slides very easily into a vein. Administered correctly, it can be done with relatively little bruising. Now, this injection site has a great deal of bruising. And not just of the muscle area. This center spot where it’s red and swollen—that’s where the needle punctured the skin. The size of the aggravation leads me to believe that either it was a needle wielded with a fair amount of force, really, truly stabbed into the thigh, or it was an abnormally large needle.”
Kaplan narrowed his eyes, considering the possibilities. “Why would someone use a bigger needle?”
“Different-sized needles are used for a variety of different procedures.” Dr. Corben’s brow furrowed. “Sometimes to inject large amounts of a substance at a faster rate, you need a larger-bore needle. Or when mixing substances, you would use a larger needle. Now, here’s something interesting. The second injection site, the arm. Note the relatively small amount of aggravation we see here. Just the slightest swollen spot. That’s more like what we would typically see—consistent with a standard eighteen-gauge needle. Granted, the limited amount of bruising is also due to the fact she died shortly thereafter. But either way, this injection is clearly more skillfully done. Either it’s two different needles, or it’s two very different approaches toward intramuscular injections.”
“So first she’s injected in the hip,” Kaplan mused slowly. “Forcefully and/or with a very large needle. Then, later, she’s injected in the arm. But more controlled, more carefully. How much time occurred between the two?”
Dr. Corben frowned. He resumed studying the first bruise with his fingers. “Given the large size, it had time to develop. But notice the coloring is all purple and dark blues? None of the green and yellow tinges that happen later. I’d say twelve to twenty-four hours between the hip puncture and the injection into the arm.”
“Ambush,” Kimberly murmured.
Special Agent Kaplan turned on her. He had the hard stare again. “Come again?”
“Ambush.” She forced herself to speak up louder. “The first bruise . . . If it could be caused by more force, then maybe it’s from an ambush. How he gains initial control. Later, when she’s already subdued, he can take more time for the final injection.”
She was thinking of what Mac had said about the Georgia murders. How the girls found first always had bruises on their hips, plus a fatal injection mark on their upper left arms. She’d never heard of such an MO before. What were the odds that two different killers were using it in two different states?
Dr. Corben had the recorder back on. He rolled the body onto its back, noted the absence of bruises and contusions, then finished his initial exam by narrating the condition of the mouth. Nitsche handed him some kind of standardized form, and he quickly and efficiently sketched each one of the external injuries he’d noted in the protocol.
They moved on to her hands. They had been bagged at the scene. Now Nitsche pulled off the paper bags and both prosecutor and diener leaned close. Dr. Corben scraped beneath each nail. Nitsche collected the samples. Next Dr. Corben swabbed around each nail bed with a Q-tip, testing for traces of blood. He looked up at Kaplan and shook his head. “No signs of defensive wounds,” he reported. “No skin, no blood.”
Kaplan sighed and resumed leaning against the wall. “Not my lucky day,” he murmured.
As the