“A .38 is pretty common, isn’t it?” I continue. “That alone isn’t enough to convict the guy.”
“Maybe not,” Hurley says. “But it’s one more piece of the puzzle.”
“Did you find Erik’s gun?” Izzy asks.
Hurley shakes his head. “Apparently he was smart enough to ditch the thing. I had a couple guys execute a search warrant on his place early this morning.”
We have removed the second lung, and after noting that Shannon had a hiatal hernia—a typically benign condition where there is a hole in the diaphragm that allows a portion of the stomach to slide into the chest cavity—Izzy cuts loose Shannon’s stomach. As soon as it’s out, he slices it open.
“Her stomach is empty,” he says.
“What does that mean?” Hurley asks.
“Well, it takes four to six hours after ingestion for food to empty out of the stomach and move into the intestines. So if Shannon ate around twelve-thirty as her coworkers said, it’s unlikely she was killed before four-thirty. Once I get a look at her intestines I might be able to finesse that estimate some more.”
For the next half an hour the room is relatively silent except for the sounds of slicing, dicing, and sloshing organs. We find a second bullet in the abdominal cavity and my initial suspicion that Shannon’s liver was hit by one of the bullets is confirmed. The damage to the organ is extensive and would have caused significant bleeding. Some of the blood, most of it eventually, would have oozed out through the bullet wound. But a fair amount had also spread throughout the abdominal cavity, a condition that would have been excruciatingly painful. It might also have been a blessing of sorts since the bleeding into the chest cavity, along with the gradual collapse of the shot lung, would have caused a slow form of suffocation had she not bled out from the liver first.
For a moment I imagine Shannon, wounded, frightened, weak, and in pain, dragging herself down the hall of her house and out onto the porch in hopes of finding help. She had to have known she was seriously wounded and likely dying, and her will to live must have been strong. That she lost her life in such a cruel, horrifying, and painful way both saddens and angers me.
Nothing new is discovered during the examination of the remaining organs other than the fact that Shannon’s uterus is riddled with large, fibroid tumors, something that would have made it very difficult, if not impossible, for her to get or stay pregnant. With Shannon’s abdominal cavity now devoid of organs, Izzy shifts his attention to her intestines, which we’d removed earlier and placed in a large basin on the dissection table. He runs the twenty-some feet of small intestine like a garden hose, examining it inch by inch, opening sections along the way. Then he does the same with the large intestine.
“The only food I see here is in the ascending colon,” he says when he’s done. “That would take, on average, about eight to twelve hours. So if we assume she ate nothing else after her lunch at Dairy Airs, it’s likely she was killed sometime between the hours of eight P.M. and midnight, give or take an hour or two.”
“What a coincidence,” Hurley says, shooting me a smug look. “Our primary suspect has no alibi for those hours.”
“You mean your primary suspect,” I grumble.
Hurley ignores my comeback and instead closes his eyes and licks his lips, an action that leaves me with my jaw hanging. “I can taste my steak already,” he says.
His display of arrogant confidence brings out my competitive side. But though I want desperately to be right about Erik and his innocence, I know I have to be careful not to lose my objectivity.
“Don’t get too cocky,” I tell Hurley. “It’s still only an estimate and I’m sure crow doesn’t taste nearly as good as filet mignon.”
Chapter 11
Hurley’s challenge leaves me more determined than ever, so Monday morning I phone the office to tell them I’ll be in late. Cass takes the message and informs me that Izzy is also tied up this morning so my delay shouldn’t be a problem. I then make a phone call to the hospital to see if Erik Tolliver is on duty. He is, but I have another stop I want to make first.
Ten minutes later I pull into the parking lot of Dairy Airs, head inside, and settle in at one of the tables.
The waitress who serves me is Jackie Nash, an ex-classmate of mine and the owners’ daughter. I know Jackie not only because of our school connection, but because she’s had a number of surgeries at the hospital. Back in high school she had big plans, as did the rest of us, for escaping her small-town roots and moving to the big city. But a tragic car accident in her junior year left her burned over seventy percent of her body, and that changed everything. She still bears some horrific scars despite several plastic surgeries for grafts and scar revisions, and the gnarled tissue on her legs has given her a chronic limp. It might not have been so bad had the damage been contained to her torso and limbs but the flames also reached one side of her face. As a result, she resembles the Batman villain Two Face, looking relatively normal—and quite pretty—from one side, and horribly maimed from the other.
Jackie has been working the family business ever since her recovery from the accident. Those of us in town who know her are used to her scars, but occasionally, when strangers drop in, she is forced to face the awkward stares and rude comments of brutally honest children and tactless adults. Not surprisingly, those moments along with the trauma of the accident and the disruption it caused to her personal life have left her with more than a few emotional scars to go with the physical ones. During the years I worked in the hospital ER, I took care of Jackie during several of her mental breakdowns, though I’ve heard she’s doing better these days.
Today she greets me with a smile, takes my order for a bowl of peach ice cream—I figure fruit is a good choice for breakfast—and brings it back a few minutes later. As I watch her walking back to the table something about her seems different, though I can’t figure out what it is. I finally decide it’s her face, which seems to have a new glow to it. Had she had another graft revision surgery, or was she simply using new make-up?
“What’s new?” she asks, sliding into the chair across from me as I swallow my first spoonful. “What’s this I hear about you and David?”
As if the whole town didn’t know already. “It’s true,” I tell her. “We split up. I’m filing for divorce.”
“I also heard you changed jobs. Someone said you’re working for the coroner now.”
I suspect Jackie is merely being nosy, trying to earn a little leverage in the gossip commodity. But it’s okay because her veiled inquiry offers me the perfect opening.
“That’s also true,” I say after swallowing another bite. “In fact, that’s one of the reasons I’m here. I’m looking into Shannon Tolliver’s murder.”
She shakes her head, looking stricken. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing that happened to Shannon. Do they have any idea who did it?”
“Nothing solid yet. Do you have any ideas?”
Jackie rears back and looks at me, clearly startled by the question. “Me? Why would you ask me?”
I shrug. “You worked with Shannon so I figured you might have some insight into her life and the people in it.”
Jackie glances around at the other tables and then looks down at her hands in her lap, her fingers fidgeting. “I suppose they’ll suspect Erik,” she says in a low voice. “Things have been kind of strained between him and Shannon ever since they split up.”