"Just as we found no bottle of perfume to account for the fragrance he had on, we found no women's clothing in the house except what he had on," I said.
"There was only one condom missing from the box. The rope was old, and we found nothing, including other rope, that might be the origin of it. He was cautious enough to wrap a towel around his neck, yet he tied a knot that's extremely dangerous."
"As the name suggests," said Jenrette.
"Yes. A hangman's knot pulls very smoothly and won't let go," I said.
"Not exactly what you want to use when you're intoxicated and perched on top of a varnished bar stool, which you're more likely to fall off of than a chair, by the way."
"I wouldn't think many people would know how to tie a hangman's knot," Jenrette mused.
"The question is, did Ferguson have reason to know?" I said.
"I guess he could have looked it up in a book."
"We found no books about knot tying, no nautical- type books or anything like that in his house."
"Would it be hard to tie a hangman's knot? If there were instructions, let's say?"
"It wouldn't be impossible, but it would take a little practice."
"Why would someone be interested in a knot like that? Wouldn't a slip knot be easier?"
"A hangman's knot is morbid, ominous. It's neat, precise. I don't know. " I added," How is Lieutenant Mote? "
"Stable, but he'll be in the I.C.U for a while." Dr. Jenrette turned on the Stryker's saw. We were silent as he removed the skull cap. He did not speak again until he had removed the brain and was examining the neck.
"You know, I don't see a thing. No hemorrhage to the strap muscles, hyoid's intact, no fractures of superior horns of the thyroid cartilage. The spine's not fractured, but I don't guess that happens except in judicial hangings."
"Not unless you're obese, with arthritic changes of the cervical vertebrae, and get accidentally suspended in a weird way," I said.
"You want to look?"
I pulled on gloves and moved a light closer.
"Dr. Scarpetta, how do we know he was alive when he was hanged?"
"We can't really know that with certainty," I said.
"Unless we find another cause of death."
"Like poisoning."
"That's about the only thing I can think of at this point. But if that's the case, it had to be something that worked very fast. We do know he hadn't been home long before Mote found him dead. So the odds are against the bizarre and in favor of his death being caused by asphyxia due to hanging."
"What about manner?"
"Pending," I suggested. When Ferguson's organs had been sectioned and returned to him in a plastic bag placed inside his chest cavity, I helped Jenrette clean up. We hosed down the table and floor while a morgue assistant rolled Ferguson's body away and tucked it into the refrigerator. We rinsed syringes and instruments as we chatted some more about what was happening in an area of the world that initially had attracted the young doctor because it was safe. He told me he had wished to start a family in a place where people still believed in God and the sanctity of life. He wanted his children in church and on athletic fields. He wanted them untainted by drugs, immorality, and violence on TV.
"Thing is. Dr. Scarpetta," he went on, "there really isn't any place left. Not even here. In the past week I've worked an eleven-year-old girl who was sexually molested and murdered. And now a State Bureau of Investigation agent dressed in drag. Last month I got a kid from Oteen who overdosed on cocaine. She was only seventeen. Then there are the drunk drivers. I get them and the people they smash into all the time."
"Dr. Jenrette?"
"You can call me Jim," he said, and he looked depressed as he began to collect paperwork from a countertop.
"How old are your children?" I asked.
"Well, my wife and I keep trying." He cleared his throat and averted his eyes, but not before I saw his pain.
"How about you? You got children?"
"I'm divorced and have a niece who's like my own," I said.
"She's a senior at UVA and currently doing an internship at Quantico."
"You must be mighty proud of her."
"I am," I replied, my mood shadowed again by images and voices, by secret fears about Lucy's life.
"Now I know you want to talk to me some more about Emily Steiner, and I've still got her brain here if you want to see it."
"I very much do." It is not uncommon for pathologists to fix brains in a ten percent solution of formaldehyde called formalin. The chemical process preserves and firms tissue. It makes further studies possible, especially in cases involving trauma to this most incredible and least understood of all human organs. The procedure was sadly utilitarian to the point of indignity, should one choose to view it like that. Jenrette went to a sink and retrieved from beneath it a plastic bucket labeled with Emily Steiner's name and case number. The instant Jenrette removed her brain from its formalin bath and placed it on a cutting board, I knew the gross examination would tell me only more loudly that something was very wrong with this case.
"There's absolutely no vital reaction," I marveled, fumes from the formalin burning my eyes. Jenrette threaded a probe through the bullet track.
"There's no hemorrhage, no swelling. Yet the bullet didn't pass through the pons. It didn't pass through the basal ganglia or any other area that's vital." I looked up at him.
"This is not an immediately lethal wound."
"I can't argue that one."
"We should look for another cause of death."
"I sure wish you'd tell me what. Dr. Scarpetta. I've got tox testing going on. But unless that turns up something significant, there's nothing I can think of that could account for her death. Nothing but the gunshot to her head."
"I'd like to look at a tissue section of her lungs," I said.
"Come on to my office."
I was considering that the girl might have been drowned, but as I sat over Jenrette's microscope moments later moving around a slide of lung tissue, questions remained unanswered.
"If she drowned," I explained to him as I worked, "the alveoli should be dilated. There should be edema fluid in the alveolar spaces with disproportionate autolytic change of the respiratory epithelium." I adjusted the focus again.
"In other words, if her lungs had been contaminated by fresh water, they should have begun decomposing more rapidly than other tissues. But they didn't."
"What about smothering or strangulation?" he asked.
"The hyoid was intact. There were no petechial hemorrhages."
"That's right."
"And more importantly," I pointed out, "if someone tries to smother or strangle you, you're going to fight like hell. Yet there are no nose or lip injuries, no defense injuries whatsoever."
He handed me a thick case file.
"This is everything," he said. While he dictated Max Ferguson's case, I reviewed every report, laboratory request, and call sheet pertaining to Emily Steiner's murder. Her mother, Denesa, had called Dr. Jenrette's office anywhere from one to five times daily since Emily's body had been found. I found this rather remarkable.
"The decedent was received inside a black plastic pouch sealed by the Black Mountain Police. The seal number is 445337 and the seal is intact" - "Dr. Jenrette?" I interrupted. He removed his foot from the pedal of the dictating machine.
"You can call me Jim," he said again.
"It seems her mother has called you with unusual frequency."
"Some of it is us playing telephone tag. But yes." He slipped off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
"She's called a lot."
"Why?"
"Mostly she's just terribly distraught. Dr. Scarpetta. She wants to make sure her daughter didn't suffer."
"And what did you tell her?"
"I told her with a gunshot wound like that, it's probable she didn't.
I mean, she would have been unconscious. uh, probably was when the other things were done. " He paused for a moment. Both of us knew that Emily Steiner had suffered. She had felt raw terror. At some point she must have known she was going to die.