I looked inside the glistening smooth walls of the airway and found no soot, meaning she was no longer breathing when heat and flames had reached her. But I also found blood, and this was further ominous news.
'More premortem trauma,' I said.
'Possible something fell on her after she was dead?' McGovern asked.
'It didn't happen that way.'
I noted the injury on a diagram and dictated it into the transmitter.
'Blood in the airway means she inhaled it - or aspirated,' I explained. 'Meaning, obviously, that she was breathing when the trauma occurred.'
'What sort of trauma?' she then asked.
'A penetrating injury. The throat stabbed or cut. I see no other signs of trauma to the base of the skull or lungs or to the neck, no contusions or broken bones. Her hyoid's intact, and there's fusion of the greater horn and body, possibly indicating she's older than twenty and most likely wasn't strangled manually or with a ligature.'
I began to dictate again.
'The skin under the chin and superficial muscle are burned away,' I said into the small mike on my gown. 'Heat-coagulated blood in the distal trachea, primary, secondary, and tertiary bronchi. Hemoaspiration, and blood in the esophagus.'
I made the Y incision to open up the dehydrated, ruined body, and for the most part, the rest of the autopsy proved to be rather routine. Although the organs were cooked, they were within normal limits, and the reproductive organs verified the gender as female. There was blood in her stomach, too; otherwise it was empty and tubular, suggesting she hadn't been eating very much. But I found no disease and no other injuries old or new.
Height I could not positively ascertain, but I could estimate by using Trotter and Gleser regression formula charts to correlate femur length to the victim's stature. I sat at a nearby desk and thumbed through Bass's Human Osteology until I found the appropriate table for American white females. Based on a 50.2 millimeter, or approximately twenty-inch, femur, the predicted height would have been five-foot-ten.
Weight was not so exact, for there was no table, chart, or scientific calculation that might tell me that. In truth, we usually got a hint of weight from the size of clothing left, and in this case, the victim had been wearing size eight jeans. So based on the data I had, I intuited that she had been between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and thirty pounds.
'In other words,' I said to McGovern, 'she was tall and very slim. We also know she had long blond hair, was probably sexually active, may have been comfortable around horses, and was already dead inside Sparkes's Warrenton house before the fire got to her. I also know that she received significant premortem injury to her upper neck and was cut right here on her left temple.' I pointed. 'How these were inflicted, I can't tell you.'
I got up from my chair and gathered paperwork while McGovern looked at me, her eyes shadowed by thought. She took off her face shield and mask and untied her gown in back.
'If she had a drug problem, is there any way you might be able to tell that?' she asked me as the phone rang and rang.
'Toxicology will certainly tell us if she had drugs on board,' I said. 'There may also be crystals in her lungs or foreign body granulomas from cutting agents like talc, and fibers from the cotton used to strain out impurities. Unfortunately, the areas where we might be most likely to find needle tracks are missing.'
'What about her brain? Would chronic drug abuse cause any damage that you might be able to see? For example, if she started having severe mental problems, was getting psychotic and so on? It sounds like Sparkes thought she had some sort of mental illness,' McGovern then said. 'For example, what if she were depressive or manic-depressive? Could you tell?'
By now the skull had been opened, the rubbery, fire-shrunken brain sectioned and still on the cutting board.
'In the first place,' I answered, 'nothing is going to be helpful postmortem because the brain is cooked. But even if that were not the case, looking for a morphological correlate to a particular psychiatric syndrome is, in most cases, still theoretical. A widening of the sulci, for example, and reduced gray matter due to atrophy might be a signpost if we knew what the weight of the brain originally was when she was healthy. Then maybe I could say, Okay, her brain weighs a hundred grams less now than it did, so she might have been suffering from some sort of mental disease. Unless she has a lesion or old head injury that might suggest a problem, the answer to your question is no, I can't tell.'
McGovern was silent, and it was not lost on her that I was clinical and not the least bit friendly. Even though I was aware of my rather brittle demeanor around her, I could not seem to soften it. I looked around for Ruffin. He was at the first dissecting sink, suturing a Y incision in long strokes of needle and twine. I motioned to him and walked over. He was too young to worry about turning thirty anytime soon, and had gotten his training in an O.R. and a funeral home.
'Chuck, if you can finish up here and put her back in the fridge,' I said to him.
'Yes, ma'am.'
He returned to his station to finish his present task while I peeled off gloves and dropped them and my mask into one of many red biological hazard containers scattered around the autopsy room.
'Let's go to my office and have a cup of coffee,' I suggested to McGovern in an attempt to be a little more civil. 'And we can finish this discussion.'
In the locker room, we washed with antibacterial soap and I got dressed. I had questions for McGovern, but in truth, I was curious about her, too.
'Getting back to the possibility of drug-induced mental illness,' McGovern said as we followed the corridor. 'Many of these people self-destruct, right?'
'In one way or another.'
'They die in accidents, commit suicide, and that gets us back to the big question,' she said. 'Is that what happened here? Possible she was whacked out and committed suicide?'
'All I know is, she has injury that was inflicted before death,' I pointed out again.
'But that could be self-inflicted if she were not in her right mind,' McGovern said. 'God knows the kinds of self-mutilation we've seen when people are psychotic.'
This was true. I had worked cases in which people had cut their own throats, or stabbed themselves in the chest, or amputated their limbs; or shot themselves in their sexual organs, or walked into a river to drown. Not to mention leaps from high places and self-immolations. The list of horrendous things people did to themselves was much too long, and whenever I thought I'd seen it all, something new and awful was rolled into our bay.
The phone was ringing as I unlocked my office, and I grabbed it just in time.
'Scarpetta,' I said.
'I've got some results for you,' said Tim Cooper, the toxicologist. 'Ethanol, methanol, isopropanol, and acetone are zero. Carbon monoxide is less than seven percent. I'll keep working on the other screens.'
'Thanks. What would I do without you?' I said.
I looked at McGovern as I hung up, and I told her what Cooper had just said.
'She was dead before the fire,' I explained, 'her cause of death exsanguination and asphyxia due to aspiration of blood due to acute neck injury. As for manner, I'm pending that until further investigation, but I think we should work this as a homicide. In the meantime, we need to get her identified, and I'll do what I can to get started on that.'
'I guess I'm supposed to imagine that this woman torched the place and maybe cut her own throat before the fire got her first?' she said as anger flickered.
I did not answer as I measured coffee for the coffeemaker on a nearby countertop.
'Don't you think that's rather far-fetched?' she went on.
I poured in bottled water and pressed a button.
'Kay, no one's going to want to hear homicide,' she said. 'Because of Kenneth Sparkes and what all of this may imply. I hope you realize what you're up against.'