At the Stroke of Madness

CHAPTER 61

Adam Bonzado didn’t like what he was thinking. It couldn’t be possible and yet it made sense.

He had driven back to West Haven, all the way to his lab at the university to retrieve the rest of the Polaroids Dr. Stolz had given him. It was bad enough that the victims’ head wounds matched the exact angle of the pry bar he kept in the El Camino, but now he needed to check something else.

He grabbed the photos and rushed out of the lab, bumping into several of his students, barely mumbling a greeting. Now in the parking lot once again, he stood at the tailgate of his pickup. He stood there, hesitating with the Polaroid in his hand. It was a photo of the victim with the pronounced livor mortis on her back.

Adam knew that livor mortis was the result of gravity pulling and settling all the blood to the lowest area of the body. This victim had been laid on her back for several hours after her death. That’s why the skin on her back was so red. Called the bruising of death, livor mortis also had the tendency of transforming the skin’s texture. The skin often took up the pattern of the surface it was laid out on. So a body laid out on a brick sidewalk might have indentations resembling brick and mortar. A body found dead on a gravel road might have a pebbled texture. And in this case, a body laid out in a pickup with a waffle-pattern bed lining might have a waffle-pattern imprint.

Adam pulled down the tailgate and held up the Polaroid. The pattern matched the dead woman’s back. And as much as he didn’t want to believe it, he knew that Simon Shelby was the only person who had borrowed his pickup.