Chaos

CHAPTER 30

MY COVERALLS CRINKLE. THE thin white material is slippery and whispery as I sit back on my heels to take a closer look at the unpaved path and the nearby grass.

It’s past eleven, and the stench of decomposition has made the air deader and thicker. It’s close to unbearable in here. But at least we’re not dive-bombed by flies. The tent helps keep them out, and as a rule they’re not active at night, not hunting for putrefying wounds and orifices in which to lay their eggs.

I study glass fragments as small as grains of salt that rained over the bicycle, sparkling like diamonds on the frame, the tires, and blades of grass.

“Not that I’m an expert in exploding lightbulbs,” I say to Marino as I return to the bike’s rear tire. “But right here where she went down there’s a fair amount of glass that’s been pulverized into dust.”

“I’ve seen that before in electrical fires and arcing. Lightbulb glass is really fragile, and you give it enough juice it will blow to smithereens.” He squats close to me, and I feel his heat and smell his sweat. “But some of what we’re noticing probably is from the powder that coated the inside of the bulbs.”

We look up at the empty lantern with its open access door, and below it a whitish residue is visible on the black iron frame. When the glass fragments blew out, they created a trail of what looks like fairy dust sparkling and twinkling across the fitness path, through the lawn, to the trees.

In my head I play it out like animation, envisioning the lamp violently exploding and the bicycle going down. The two events happen simultaneously as Elisa Vandersteel is jettisoned from the saddle. If that’s what occurred, it could explain the tiny particles of glass on top of the downed bicycle. It might be the only explanation for the sandlike fragments caught in her hair.

“Well I think you’re right about her burned hair being related to this.” Marino cranes his neck looking up at the black iron lantern again. “But if the lamp malfunctioned as she was riding by? Wouldn’t you also expect her to have cuts from flying glass?”

“That’s a good point, and I can only say I’ve not yet seen any injuries like that.” I think about how low Elisa Vandersteel might have been as she was riding by.

The lightweight hybrid has a small aluminum frame, low-rise handlebars, and a gel seat that I estimate would be approximately four feet off the ground were the bicycle upright. When she rode through the Yard she was bent over but not tucked into a racing position. I estimate the lantern would have been at least seven feet above her head when the lightbulbs exploded out the open door.

“The greater the mass, the greater the velocity,” I’m explaining this to Marino. “And the bigger pieces, the shrapnel, would have flown over her head. But powder wouldn’t travel far. It would drift down. That’s assuming she was on her bicycle at the time, and I’m not seeing anything to make me think she wasn’t,” I add. “All of this is hypothetical. But it’s significant that there’s glass in her hair. It couldn’t have landed on her where she is now.”

“Nope. There’s nothing over there because all the glass blew that way.” He points in the general direction of the Kennedy School. “So we really don’t think she was grabbed off her bike.” He looks at me, and it’s a good sign that he’s started using the word we. “We’re thinking there was no assailant-that she was just riding through the park and got zapped by a faulty lamp or heat lightning or something crazy like that.”

“It’s a possible scenario,” I reply. “I don’t see any sign of a physical confrontation.”

“Then we’re not calling this a homicide. Are we calling it anything when people ask?”

“It’s undetermined for now. The less said the better.”

“That’s for damn sure. But to throw her ten feet like she was shot out of a cannon? All I can say is there must have been a hell of a lot of force. And I guess her helmet ended up even farther away than that because it’s lightweight.”

“And because possibly the chin strap wasn’t fastened.” I tell him when I saw Elisa Vandersteel ride across Quincy Street toward the Harvard Yard, the strap was dangling.

“Shit,” he says. “Well that answers that.”

“We’ll know a lot more when it’s determined exactly what happened to the lamp,” I reply. “It won’t be fun if you have to dig up the entire thing and haul it to the labs.”

“Done it before. Will do it again.”

I busy myself with my scene case, finding clear plastic and brown paper bags. I gather rolls of masking tape, Sharpies, and a gunshot-primer-residue collection kit I use when traces of debris are destined for the CFC’s powerful electron microscopes. Changing my gloves, I return to the body. I kneel by her head, and in the intense illumination of the auxiliary lights, my flashspun polyethylene-covered knees are bright white against the green grass.

I remove the cap from a carbon-covered metal stub. I press the adhesive side against Elisa Vandersteel’s scorched hair, collecting bits of glass, fibers, particles, anything I find. Sealing each stub inside a sterile vial, I label and initial it, prepping in the field, preparing specimens for the trace evidence lab.

This will make it easier for my chief microscopist Ernie Koppel to do the analysis when he gets to work first thing in the morning. The evidence will be waiting. It will save us time if all he has to do is sputter-coat the samples with gold. Then he’ll mount them in a chamber and vacuum it down.

PALPATING THE SCALP, I dig my fingers through Elisa Vandersteel’s tied-back long chestnut hair. Gently, carefully I work my way around the curvature of her skull, and my gloves are smeared dark red.

“She’s got a wound to the back of her head,” I tell Marino, and I’m aware of the side of her face resting against my leg.

She’s as warm as life, and I feel a flutter around my heart again. It’s as if I’ve been touched by the breath of God, reminded of what I’m dealing with, and I steady myself. I can’t have a personal reaction right now, and I move blood-crusted hair out of the way to measure the laceration with a small plastic ruler.

The injury is not quite two inches in length over the occipital bone. I tell Marino that the laceration was caused by skin splitting as a result of blunt-force trauma, and this likely is the source of most of the blood we’re seeing.

“Possibly from striking her head on the hard-packed path,” I add.

“And the reason there’s blood under her back is because she was dragged and that’s where it ended up.” Marino is looking down at Elisa Vandersteel’s feet with their light gray-and-white-striped bicycle socks. “And we can account for how that happened. We know who did that much at least.”

He takes more photographs of marks in the dirt that are no more than six inches long, terminating at the back of the heels. The girls didn’t pull her very far in their effort to get her out of harm’s way. They didn’t succeed if their goal was to make sure she didn’t get run over, as they put it.

Her body isn’t even close to being completely off the path, but I’m bothered that their impulse was to move it at all. I wonder if this is what they habitually handle at home, perhaps when their mother is in a drunken stupor or passed out cold on the floor.

I gently touch the wound to the back of the head, spreading the irregular ragged edges so I can see the slender threads of tissue bridging. They’re a clear indication this isn’t an incised wound caused by a weapon with a sharp edge. I tell Marino that the scalp and subcutaneous tissue were split by a crushing force over a bony prominence of her posterior skull.

“So she must have been alive when she got that or she wouldn’t have bled out,” he says.

“But she didn’t bleed out very much, which suggests she didn’t survive very long. The scalp is incredibly vascular,” I explain. “There would be a lot of blood everywhere had she survived long enough to move, to walk around or try to run from someone.”

I continue working my fingers through her hair, checking for boggy tissue or fractures. There are no other injuries to her scalp or skull, not that I can feel or see, and I ask Marino to bring a hand lens from my scene case. I hear him step away. Then he’s opening drawers, and next he’s back with the magnifying lens. I use it and a flashlight to get a better look at Elisa Vandersteel’s right ear.

“No abrasion, charring, stippling or any other sign of injury,” I inform him. “I’m seeing only dirt and dried blood, and I’m not likely to know what caused the bleeding until we get her into the CT scanner.”

Placing my hands under the back of her head, I lift it a little. I turn it to the right, and there’s dried blood in her left ear too.

“If she’s an electrocution, why would she have blood in her ears?” Marino asks.

“Ruptured eardrums are the most common cause.” I open her eyes wider.

I check them for burns, for hemorrhages, and the blue irises are becoming cloudy. Sliding the long thermometer out of the incision in the abdomen, I wipe off blood so I can read the calibrations. Elisa Vandersteel’s core body temperature is thirty-four degrees Celsius or ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit, and that would be about right if she’s been out here for several hours.

“And her rigor’s beginning, which is also consistent with that. I can feel a little resistance as I move her neck.” I show Marino. “But her right hand and wrist are completely stiff, as Investigator Barclay noted earlier, and it’s beginning to make sense.”

As I lift her arm I notice that on top of her wrist is a peculiar whitish linear burn about three inches long and so fine it’s as if she were scorched by a fiery spiderweb. It wasn’t noticeable when her arm was raised over her head, so I’m just now seeing it, and I wonder if her right hand was near her hair when it got singed. If so, what did she come in contact with? Marino takes photographs, and I show him that the right wrist and hand are as rigid as iron.

“Yet rigor’s only moderately advanced in her right elbow and shoulder.” I lift her arm again to demonstrate. “It’s barely noticeable in other small muscles and not apparent anywhere else including her left arm.” I move that too. “I assume when Investigator Barclay checked for a pulse, the wrist he touched was her right one.”

“I’m going to ask him,” Marino says. “But that’s the only thing that adds up. And from that he decided she was in full rigor all over.”

“She’s not, and it would have been even less advanced a few hours ago. She would have been limber except for this.” I indicate her right hand and wrist. “And I’m reminded of what we see in an electrocution when the victim touched something like a hot wire-and that’s what the white mark looks like on her anterior wrist. It looks like a burn from touching something extremely hot, the kind of burn you get when you scorch yourself on the red-hot burner of a stove.”

“But a burn wouldn’t give you instant rigor,” Marino says. “And that’s what this is even though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it in person before.”

A cadaveric spasm or “instant rigor” supposedly can occur when the death is preceded by a violent expenditure of energy that depletes muscles of oxygen and adenosine triphosphate (ATP). And the result is rigidity. The phenomenon is rare and believed by many experts to be apocryphal. But for sure something odd has happened here.

“So if her right hand was in contact with an electrical current,” I tell Marino, “theoretically this could cause the muscles to continuously contract or clench, to go into what’s known as tetany.”

I pull the body partially on its side, just enough to check the back for livor mortis, or the settling of uncirculating blood due to gravity. I see only a slight pink blush. When I press down my thumb, the skin still blanches. Livor is in the early stages, and this also is consistent with her not having been dead very long.

There’s also no question that when she landed on the ground she was either shirtless or her shirt was bunched up. Her back has the scratches and abrasions I’d expect in a bicycle accident, and there’s dirt on her white sports bra.

When I turn the body a little more I’m surprised by what at first looks like a necrotic tattoo.

“What the hell?” Marino says.

“Her pendant,” it dawns on me.