THE ME’S OFFICE is in a building connected to the Hall of Justice by a breezeway out the back door of the lobby. Claire was already working in the chilly gray heart of the autopsy suite when I got there at 9:30 that morning. She said, “Hey, darlin’,” barely looking up as she drew her scalpel from Patty Malone’s sternum to her pelvic bone. The dead woman’s hands were clenched and her legless body was carbonized.
“She hardly looks like a person,” I said.
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“Bodies burn like candles, you know,” Claire said. “They become part of the fuel.” She clamped back the burned tissue.
“Did the blood tests come back from the lab?”
“About ten minutes ago. Mrs. Malone had had a couple of drinks. Mr. Malone had antihistamine in his blood. That could have made him sleepy.”
“And what about carbon monoxide?” I was asking as Chuck Hanni came through reception and back to where we stood over the table.
“I picked up the Malones’ dental records, Claire,” he said. “I’ll put them in your office.”
Claire nodded, said, “I was about to tell Lindsay that the Malones lived long enough to get a carbon monoxide in the high seventies. The total body X-rays are negative for projectiles or obvious broken bones. But I did find something you’re going to want to see.”
Claire adjusted her plastic apron, which just barely spanned her ever-thickening girth, and turned to the table behind her. She pulled back the sheet exposing Patricia Malone’s legs and touched a gloved finger to a thin, barely discernible pink line around one of the woman’s ankles.
“This unburned skin right here?” said Claire. “Same thing on Mr. Malone’s wrists. The skin was protected during the blaze.”
“Like from a ligature?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am. If it was just the ankles, I’d say maybe Mrs. Malone was wearing socks, but on her husband’s wrists, too? I’m saying these are from ligatures that burned away in the fire. And I’m calling the cause of death asphyxia from smoke inhalation,” Claire said. “Manner of death, homicide.”
I stared at the fire-ravaged body of Patty Malone.
Yesterday morning she’d kissed her husband, brushed her hair, made breakfast, maybe laughed with a friend on the telephone. That night she and her husband of thirty-two years had been tied up and left to die in the fire. For some period of time, maybe hours, the Malones had known they were going to die. It’s called psychic horror. Their killers had wanted them to feel fear before their horrible deaths.
Who had committed these brutal murders – and why?
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