“A while,” Livia said. “I’ll come to the lab when I’m done. No doubt?” she asked.

“Not a shred. Come see me when you’re finished.”

Livia watched Ted leave the suite, and then went back to work. Her mind wandered with possibilities, but she refused to pay them any attention, refocusing her thoughts instead on the case in front of her. She took just over an hour to complete the exam before she handed her table over to the tech who would close and return the body to the cooler for transport to the funeral home. She spent another hour completing notes on the case, confirming that the patient had indeed bled to death due to a large esophageal laceration with blood deposition into the lungs and peritoneum. Cause of death: exsanguination. Manner of death: therapeutic complication. In layman’s terms: The doctor killed her.

Livia typed the last of her notes, signed the death certificate, and hurried to the ballistics lab.

*

The ballistics lab was located on the second floor of the OCME. It was where techs analyzed everything from shoe imprints to glass shards, determining who walked through a crime scene in which type and size of shoe, to which direction a bullet penetrated a window. Ted Kane ran the ballistics department and Livia had delivered to him earlier in the morning the scrap of green cloth she had taken from Nicole’s evidence box on Friday.

Livia walked into the lab and found Ted Kane in front of his computer.

“Ah, good,” he said when Livia entered. He swiveled his chair and wheeled to a cluttered desk to his right. He handed Livia a piece of paper containing the fiber analysis completed on Casey Delevan’s clothing from weeks before. Ted poked his eye into the microscope.

“Here’s what we know. Spectral analysis tells us it’s the same material. Same twine of cotton. Same fiber thickness. Same grade. The only difference is that the analysis on the clothing that came from your body was caked in clay.” He looked up from his microscope. “This sample you gave me here is clean. Not a speck of clay on it.”

“Otherwise?” Livia asked.

“They came from the same shirt. Exact match.”

Livia had no time to contemplate the implications of this discovery. She thought briefly about the fact that a torn scrap of Casey Delevan’s shirt was found under Nicole’s car. But only fleetingly. Ted Kane was literally on a roll. He pushed himself away from the cluttered desk and his wheeled chair skated back to the glowing computer monitor.

“But this is better. Check it out,” he said as he settled in front of the computer, which depicted the three-dimensional scan of Casey Delevan’s skull that Dr. Larson—the neuropathologist—had obtained during her examination.

The image, taken by a scanning electron microscope, was one of the most impressive things Livia had witnessed during her training. Since the machine imaged the skull from both the outside and inside, it was able to extrapolate points to offer a “virtual tour” of the skull and the inner casings of the bone. Specifically, Ted Kane was interested in the twelve tunnels in Casey Delevan’s skull.

When Livia found the evidence collected from Nicole’s car, and the barbecue tool set in particular, it clicked immediately. When she saw the empty spot where a fork had once rested, her mind connected the tines of that missing fork to the mysterious holes in Casey Delevan’s skull.

She spent the weekend perusing barbecue tools at various home improvement stores and learned the set found in Nicole’s car had been discontinued. But Weber produced it, and with help from a nice young man at Burke Brothers Hardware, Livia obtained a model number for the out-of-date product. She brought it to Ted Kane earlier in the morning for tool analysis.

“So I went back to the original autopsy photos of the skull and the piercings,” Ted said. “Then took some measurements based on extrapolated data. At first, we all thought these were twelve random holes through the skull. Now, as I examine them with your theory in mind, I see they’re actually a group of six twin piercings. Look here.” Ted moved his mouse and circled each pair of holes on the screen. Then he superimposed a computer-generated measuring protractor over the skull. “Each pair of piercings is exactly the same distance apart—one and a half inches. One point five four, to be exact. No variability. The pattern of distribution of each pair is random, but the pairs themselves are identical.”

He pointed to the screen. “So check it out. I’m going to take you for a ride through one of the piercings.” He moved the mouse and the image on the screen responded by shifting so that Livia’s view was straight through one of the holes in the skull. Then the 3-D view shifted and Livia watched as though a small camera were moving through the channel in the bone. It reminded her of the hundreds of endoscopies she witnessed in medical school, as the probe’s camera moved down the trachea.

“So a few things we can ascertain,” Ted said. “Every channel is the exact same width, so we suspect they were all produced by the same instrument. But once we look beyond the width and analyze the actual walls of these channels, here’s what we find.” He pointed to the screen. “See this?”

Livia squinted her eyes at the monitor. “What am I looking at?”

“A small groove in the wall of the canal. It tells me the instrument used had a defect on it. It wasn’t smooth. So probably during the lifespan of the fork, it was dropped or otherwise abused—wear and tear. It’s significant because every pair of holes has a single channel—the left-side channel—with the exact same aberration. So beyond a doubt, all the piercings came from the same tool. This is important to the Homicide guys in case we recover that fork. We could match it beyond a reasonable doubt. But here’s the money shot. This is what you’ll be interested in.”

Ted clicked through some other screens until the animated view of Casey Delevan’s skull was again visible. “There were twelve piercings. Six sets of two, right? Each pair was exactly 1.54 inches apart. So we have the width of the tine, and the distance they are apart from each other. I did some research through our tool analysis database. We have a comprehensive list, and we have measurements on the fork you’re interested in—based on the serial number you provided.”

Ted clicked the mouse and again the 3-D image spun and then entered the burrow of one of the piercings.

“Every single channel pierced the full thickness of the skull. So, every one went from the outside of the skull, all the way through to the dura mater.” He looked at Livia. “Except one.”

He pointed to the screen where the image brought them into a channel and then to a dead end.

“There is one piecing that did not fully penetrate the skull. It simply lanced the bone and was then removed. This single channel gives us a great deal of information. Specifically, it shows the exact contour of the fork’s prong. The contour, width, shape, angle of the tine’s point, and the exact length of the tip of the tine. The angle of the point is key, because it is unique to the brand, design, and line of the product. It matches the fork you’re interested in identically. So,” Ted said, tapping the keyboard to produce a new image on his screen, “the missing fork from that barbecue set is what killed your floater.”

*

Livia fumbled with her keys minutes later in the parking lot, started her car, and began the long drive east toward Emerson Bay. It consisted of two hours of solitude where her mind ran wild with speculation. It was past eight p.m. when she pulled into her parents’ driveway. Livia walked to the garage and pushed through the side door, flicking the light switch as she entered. The car was parked in shadows. Livia’s mind flashed back to Friday afternoon when she looked at pictures of this car from Nicole’s case, doors and trunk open wide for the photographer to capture every detail from every angle. Now, it sat quietly in her parents’ garage, seldom used since Nicole went missing.

From the workbench, Livia retrieved a tape measure. Crouching down, she ran the tape from the ground up to the bumper. Twenty-seven inches. The same height as Casey Delevan’s femur fracture.

Livia let the tape measure snap back into place. She closed her eyes.

“What the hell, Nicole?

CHAPTER 32