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.” Mike grabbed a flashlight off his desk.“Sorry about the gloom.Half the fluorescent tubes broke, replacements, too, and anyway, no one’s going to give me more power than they have to.Autopsies are not priority after an emergency like this.Everybody figures if someone died, it was the fault of the earthquake.Usually it is.” He walked over to one of the drawers and pulled it open.“By the way, Foster told me not to let you down here.”“So you’re going to break the rules?” Garik had forgotten how much he liked Mike.“I don’t work for Foster.” Mike flipped back the sterile sheet.With a wave, he indicated the decomposing body of Misty Banner.“No matter how beautiful a person is in life, everyone ends like this.”“Every coroner I’ve ever met is a philosopher.” Garik walked around the body, trying to reconstruct Misty as she had been the day she died.“Coroners spend a lot of time alone, except for—” Mike indicated the drawers.“Anyway, that’s the full extent of my philosophy.”“Come to think of it, that’s the same thing I always hear.” The body bore the thin markings of a well-wielded scalpel.“You already did the autopsy?”“A coroner doesn’t get a famous corpse like this on the table often.Besides, it had to be done quickly.Out of the ground, she’s going to decompose rapidly.”“Tell me what you found out.”Mike clicked on the flashlight and used it to illuminate the pale, intact stretches of skin on her face, belly, and legs.“First—no way is she as decomposed as she would be if she’d been buried in the dirt, so she’s been in a container of some kind.”“A coffin.” Garik thought out loud.“The killer took her to the prostitutes’ cemetery, dug up and dumped one of the other bodies, placed Misty inside, and buried her.Then the tsunami struck, lifting coffins, opening them, and spreading the contents up and down the canyon.First Elizabeth found a bone from one of the nineteenth-century prostitutes … then she found the corpse of her own mother.”“Good theory.A coffin would have protected Misty Banner.The killer didn’t kill her with the first blow.” With the flashlight, Mike showed Garik the flesh peeling back from her ribs.“The bones here show skid marks where he slashed at her.The ribs at the back show the same slashing, but more powerfully—he was above her, while she was on her hands and knees, trying to crawl away.There’s a chip off her jawbone, right here on her left side.”Garik examined every site Mike indicated, and leaned closer to see the knick on her jawbone.“Was all the violence done with scissors?”“I think so.”Garik looked up at Mike in surprise.“You think so?”“Don’t give me any shit, Garik.” Mike pointed to a pile of twisted metal and broken glass swept into the corner.“During the earthquake, my one puny piece of cool autopsy equipment jumped off the table and onto the floor.But your intrepid coroner got out his good ol’ magnifying glass and examined the evidence on Misty Banner’s body, and noted that there are double scrapes on the bones.”“The tips of scissors.”“Yep.Banner was in a rage.Which I suppose makes sense when you think that his wife was cheating on him.” Mike viewed the body with mingled disfavor and pity.“Hm.” It was so logical.Charles seemed very pleasant, but the blow to his pride and his manhood must have hurt.Garik liked his theory that her lover was the killer, but why would her lover turn on her so violently?… Unless she had threatened something …To end the relationship? To reveal it?He asked, “Which was the death blow?”Mike shone his flashlight at her throat.“Here.Look at the larynx.The bones are shattered, broken, completely ripped open.He slashed, and slashed again, long after she was dead.”“She said something he didn’t like.”“I think we can assume that—probably that she didn’t love him anymore and she was running away with her lover.”“So he came at her in a rage, grabbed the scissors, and stabbed her in the ribs.” Garik enacted the scene.“She went down, tried to crawl away.He stuck her in the back.She fell.He turned her over and ripped out her throat, nicking her jawbone at some point.”“He dug deep enough, he even notched the number-four vertebra from the front.” Mike handed Garik the flashlight and let him get a good look.“Scissors don’t slice neatly like a knife or a garrote.Look at where he cut off her hair.He got a pretty good chunk of flesh, too.He killed her, then he killed her again.This was a crime of passion and rage.No wonder Elizabeth Banner was traumatized.”“That she was.” Garik indicated the area with the hair.“Foster said there was hair at the crime scene he didn’t report.”“What a dumbshit.” Mike put his hands in his pockets, and shrugged.“But do you really think that would have made any difference to the verdict?”“Maybe not, but I’m sure happier when I know the work was done competently
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