Still, she asked, "Where are the X rays?"
Deacon exchanged a look with Hoss before saying, "We don't normally do X rays."
Sara tried to cover her shock, knowing how it would look to come into their backyard and start treating them like a bunch of yokels. X rays were standard procedure for an autopsy, but they were especially important when dealing with a head wound. The bullet punched out bone as it entered the skull, and X rays of bone chips would provide conclusive evidence of the path the bullet had taken. Excising the wound could distort the path or even create false tracks.
She asked, "Have you found the bullet?"
"From his head?" Reggie asked, sounding surprised. "I got two twenty-twos out of the walls. I didn't find anything near his head except for…head."
"The bullet could still be in there," Sara told him.
Hoss cleared his throat politely before saying, "Maybe ol' Reg here missed it on his sweep through the room. I'm sure we'll find it when we look again."
Reggie seem to bristle a bit at this, but he had regained his composure by the time Hoss looked his way. He gave the sheriff a slight shrug as if to say it could happen.
Sara tried to phrase her words carefully. "Sometimes, brain tissue can slow a bullet down enough so that it has insufficient velocity to exit the skull."
Hoss pointed out, "The right side of his head has been blown out."
"That could be from a fracture." Knowing the policeman's ammunition of choice, she made an educated guess, asking Reggie, "We're talking a nine-millimeter hollow-point, I would assume?"
He flipped back through his notebook, reading, "The Beretta had twenty-two long rifle, the Glock had hollow-point."
Sara said, "That could exert enough force to fracture the bone out through the scalp." She did not add that an X ray would easily show this.
Hoss said, "All right."
She waited for him to say more, but when he did not, Sara pulled back the sheet. She should not have been surprised to find the body faceup, and hoped she managed to hide her irritation. Livor mortis had shifted to the back of the head, which meant blood could have seeped into the soft tissue of the scalp. Any evidence of confluent bruising would be difficult to tell from antemortem bruising. Unless there was a laceration or some sort of pronounced abrasion in the scalp, it would be almost impossible for Sara to tell whether the bruises came from the man's own pooling blood or from someone hitting him in the head.
Rigor mortis had set in, fixing the body in a casketing position. Swan's hair was plastered to most of his face with sweat and blood. Still, she could see his mouth and eyes were slightly open, and there was a purple-blue cast to the side of his face where it had rested on the carpet. His chest was narrow, his ribs pronounced. The waistband of his pants gaped at the top as if he had recently lost weight. His hands had not been bagged to preserve evidence from the scene, such as gunpowder residue or any fibers he might have clutched in his hand – and "clutched" was the right word in this case; Swan's right hand was in a tight fist.
Reggie said, "I tried, but I couldn't get his hand open."
"That's fine," Sara said, thinking that if she was able to find gunshot residue, there would be no proving whether or not it came from Reggie's or the dead man's hands. "Do you have photographs of the scene yet?"
He shook his head no. "I've got my drawings here," he said, taking a folded mailing envelope out of his pocket. Inside were three sheets of paper with crude diagrams of the crime scene. He seemed apologetic when he showed them to Sara. "I was gonna do 'em up better this morning."
"That's fine," she repeated, smoothing out the papers on a table by the sink. The bed and armoire were two lopsided rectangles across from each other. Luke Swan had been reduced to a stick figure with two X's for eyes. His right hand was under his body, the other out to his side. She asked, "He was lying on his right hand?"
Reggie nodded again. "Yeah. It was stuck like that when we turned him over."
Deacon added, "Rigor mortis was extremely pronounced."
"What time did you get there?"
"About two hours after the accident," he said, and Sara tried not to dwell on the fact that the man who would have performed the autopsy was already calling it an accident.
"Did you have trouble moving him?"
"We had to break the rigor to get him on the gurney."
"Arms and legs?" she asked, and he nodded yes. Rigor mortis generally started in the jaw and worked its way out to the extremities. The body would take anywhere between six and twelve hours before it became fixed.
Jeffrey spoke for the first time, saying, "Maybe he panicked. Maybe he was high on something that got his heart rate going."
"We'll do a tox screen."
Hoss broke in with strained politeness, "Wanna explain that for those of us who didn't go to college?"
Sara told him, "Rigor mortis can be brought on more quickly by strenuous exercise before death. A depletion of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, would cause the muscles to stiffen more quickly."
The sheriff nodded, though she could tell from his expression that he had not absorbed the information.
Sara opened her mouth to explain again, but something about Hoss's posture told her it would do no good. He was so much like her grandfather Earnshaw that she caught herself smiling.
Reggie said, "These're the casings from the bullets," indicating a line he had drawn near the door. Two more were marked beside the victim. "The twenty-twos were here and here. The nine-mil is here by the door."
Jeffrey cleared his throat, seemingly reluctant to speak. "Did you fingerprint the casings?"
Reggie let his rancor show this time. "Of course I did." He added, "And the guns. We traced the Glock back to Robert. It's his service weapon. The Beretta had the serial number shaved off."
Hoss nodded, tucking his hands into his pockets.
Sara asked Deacon, "Gloves?" and he took a box down from the cabinet by the sink. All the men watched Sara as she pulled on two pairs of surgical gloves, one over the other. Deacon rolled over a mayo tray, and she glanced down at the instruments, relieved to find a breadloafing knife, scissors, scalpels, and the other requisite tools for autopsy.
Deacon said, "I'll help you with this," and together he and Sara folded back the sheet covering the lower half of Luke Swan's body. His jeans and underwear had already been removed, which meant she could only guess by the lack of blood spatter from the head wound as to where the pants had been on the body.
Swan was a small man, probably no more than five seven and around a hundred sixty pounds, his body containing none of the grace his last name implied. Though he kept his blond hair long to the shoulder, he was far from hirsute, with a sparse patch of pubic hair around his groin. His penis was slightly tumescent, the swollen testicles showing signs of petechiae. His legs were spindly, and a large scar ran down the side of his left thigh. Sara guessed the wound had come during childhood. At the time it must have been a significant injury. For some reason, she thought of the scar on Jeffrey's back, and wondered what had been going through Jeffrey's mind when his father had hit him.
She asked Paul, "Do you mind taking notes for me?"
"No, ma'am," he said, turning to a fresh page in his notebook.
"He's how old?"
Paul said, "Thirty-four."
She nodded, thinking that fit the man in front of her. She called out her findings so far, pausing to give Paul time to write. Back in Grant, she used a Dictaphone for her reports, and she was not used to having to pause the natural cadence of the exam.
"Skin is slightly dry, probably due to lack of nourishment," she said, running her hand down his arm. "Track marks, probably a few years old, along the right arm." On a hunch, she examined the area between his toes, saying, "Fresh needle marks."