“Agreed,” Livia said. “Any suggestions?”

“Not from this. I’ll need to have a look at the skull. Get my hands on it. But one thing I can tell you: He didn’t die recently. The brain is soft and the decomposition is from more than water penetration.”

“The dermis was ninety percent eroded,” Livia said. “How long do you think?”

“Muscle mass?”

“Full and complete, not much erosion. Ligament and cartilage present throughout.”

Dr. Larson held up a sagittal section of the brain, placed it flat on her gloved palm. “I’d say a year. Maybe more.”

Livia cocked her head. “Really? Would the body last that long underwater?”

“In the condition you’re describing? Definitely not.”

Dr. Larson waited for Livia to piece it together. Finally, Livia lifted her gaze to meet Dr. Larson’s. “Someone sunk him after he was dead awhile.”

“Possibly. Any clothing on the body?”

“Sweatshirt and jeans. I put them in the locker as evidence.”

“Smart girl. I’ll go examine the skull, see what I come up with. You might think about involving Dr. Colt.”

Livia nodded. “I’ll head down and let him know.”

*

When Livia entered the autopsy suite with Dr. Colt twenty minutes later, Dr. Larson had the body out of the cooler and was examining the piercings in the skull.

“Maggie,” Dr. Colt said. “I hear we have a complicated case.”

“Intriguing, for sure,” Maggie Larson said through her surgical mask as she stood over the body. She wore loupes that magnified the area of the skull she was interested in. Dr. Colt snapped on latex gloves, tied his mask, and went straight to the broken leg.

“This is not the fracture of a bridge jumper.”

“No, sir,” Livia said.

“Did you measure the height?”

“Femoral shaft fracture, twenty-seven inches from the heel,” Livia said.

“Make sure to include that number in your autopsy report. Homicide will want to compare that to the height of various car bumpers, since I’m quite certain this fracture is from a vehicle-to-man impact.”

Livia filed several things away in her mind. First, to include the height of the leg fracture in this report, and all subsequent ones. Second, horizontal femoral fractures can be caused when a car strikes a standing pedestrian, an impressive conclusion had she come up with it herself. And last, to research other vehicle-to-man traumas so that she never again made the same glaring omission in an autopsy report.

“Got it,” Livia said.

Dr. Colt moved to the abdomen. “Broken ribs?”

“None. And the body was so decomposed, there’s no way it was floating. Abdominal cavity wasn’t able to hold gases.”

“What did the investigators’ report state?”

“Floater, but I believe that was based on the statement of the fisherman who found the body. I think he likely snagged the body off the bottom, hauled it to the surface, and called the police when he saw his catch. The investigators took the word of the cops and the fishermen that the body was floating. Plus, they noticed the broken leg and made the conclusion he was a jumper.”

“So you think he drowned?”

Livia shook her head. “No water in the lungs.”

“So peculiar,” Maggie Larson said from the top of the table. Cradling the skull in one hand while peering through her magnifying lenses, she probed the holes with an instrument Livia had never before seen in the autopsy suite.

Dr. Colt moved to the front of the table and took a spot next to Dr. Larson. “What do we have?”

“Twelve random holes through the skull.”

Dr. Larson extracted the probe she had been roto-rooting through the skull and set it to the side. Livia looked closer and swore the foreign tool was a skewer she’d find in her kitchen drawer. In her two months of fellowship she’d learned that MEs regularly brought personal tools to the morgue, whatever was most comfortable and got the job done.

“Too random to be gunshot pellets, and on different planes. Plus, no foreign bodies found.”

“Drill holes?” Dr. Colt asked.

Maggie Larson pouted her lips. “Morbid, but possible.”

Dr. Larson backed away from the skull and allowed Dr. Colt to take her spot. He, too, pulled surgical loupes from his overstuffed breast pocket and slid them onto his face. He was quiet for several seconds before he let out his characteristic “hmm.” Finally, Dr. Colt removed his loupes and dropped them back into his jacket pocket. He snapped off his gloves and rubber-band shot them into a garbage can across the room.

“Penetrating wounds of unknown etiology through the skull and dura and into the brain. Looking at the rest of the body and with Livia’s autopsy findings, he bled to death from these wounds. The inside lining of the skull is remarkable for left side blood-staining, indicating the victim never moved from a supine position after suffering these wounds. Put those conclusions in your report as well, Dr. Cutty. Make sure it’s detailed. Keep the cause of death as exsanguination. Manner, undetermined.”

“Undetermined?” Livia said. “I thought we were on the same page that this was a homicide.” Livia felt her bragging rights slipping away. The fellows fought each morning for the most interesting cases. A homicide was by far the best any of them had seen in their first two months. “Someone hit this guy with their car, and then . . .” Livia looked at Dr. Larson. “Drilled him in the head, or something. Dropped him in the bay when they were done with him.”

“We provide the facts, Dr. Cutty. The detectives sort them out. ‘Or something’ is not part of our survey or our vocabulary. Get his clothing to ballistics for analysis.”

Livia nodded.

“You did good work, Livia,” Dr. Colt said. “Sometimes, the findings point a strong finger at what exactly happened. Other times, they simply tell us what did not. This guy did not jump from any bridge, that’s what we know for sure. The rest is out of our hands.”

CHAPTER 4

In the following days, with help from the anthropology department, Livia discovered her non-jumper was approximately twenty-five years old. The body had not been vital for at least a year, and it had likely been in the water for only three days before the fishermen jigged it off the bottom. Police dredged the flats of Emerson Bay, a long sandbar popular to striped bass and sheepshead fisherman for the sudden depth change, and found near the site where Livia’s John Doe had been discovered a green tarp that had been tied by rope to four cinder blocks. Fibers from the rope matched evidence samples Livia had collected from the man’s clothing. Dr. Colt had also pointed to postmortem wounds—chafing to the muscles around the ankles and calves that Livia had originally missed. These, he explained, were the likely tie points for whoever tried to sink the body.

With help from the ballistics lab who analyzed the clothing, it was determined that the body had originally been buried. Soil analysis suggested the burial was in a place high in clay content and gravel. Adding weight to the burial theory, Livia described in her report two “shovel contusions”—a term coined by Dr. Colt, who suggested they trademark it—to the left upper arm. According to Dr. Colt’s analysis, the digger had become too aggressive during the excavation and stepped the pointed end of the shovel into the body instead of the dirt.

With no fingerprints available due to the state of decomposition, Livia relied on dental-path to do whatever they could to make a formal identification. It was the middle of October, three weeks after the body came to the morgue, before she heard anything. Livia was in her office completing paperwork on her morning case and preparing for afternoon rounds when Dennis Steers from dental-path poked his head in.

“ID’d your John Doe from last month,” he said.

Livia looked up from her work. “Yeah?”

“Homicide guys worked with Missing Persons and went back month to month. Your guy went missing last year. Reported by his landlord.”

“Landlord? No family?”

“I guess he was a bit of a drifter. MP detectives said his mother lives in Georgia and hadn’t talked to him in years. Didn’t know he was missing until she got the call.”

“That’s sad.”

Dennis dropped a thin file onto Livia’s desk. “Here’s what we have on him. Arrested just once, but had some detailed dental work completed a while back that allowed a positive ID.”

“Thanks, Dennis. I’ll be happy to get this off my desk.”