Chapter 3 #2
He approached her slowly. “I promise we’ll let you know if we find anything that could possibly be yours.”
Lacy must’ve realized she had no other option, and with my eyes I begged her to walk away.
I did not want to have to pick sides in a fight between the law, aka Charlie, and what I knew to be true of my best friend.
If she said she was looking for something that belonged to her, then she was.
It might not be a note, but Brett had died with something she needed.
Unfortunately, catching her in the act of rifling through a dead man’s pockets wasn’t a great look.
Suddenly, a new face appeared between the red curtains. It was Anton. “Lacy? Are you back here?” He seemed distressed, as if he’d thought he’d lost her.
Lacy’s face relaxed when she saw him. “Anton!” She started toward him, but she had to pass me on the way. Charlie put out a hand and lightly touched her forearm. “Don’t go far, okay? We may need to ask some questions.”
I knew that wasn’t a maybe, and Lacy did too. She nodded, looked at the ground, and let Anton take her hand and lead her away.
After they were gone, Charlie shook his head as he put on latex gloves and offered the box to me. “Any idea what that was about?”
“None,” I said, hoping my tone implied that I wasn’t in a mood to speculate.
Charlie seemed to accept my response.
I didn’t take the gloves, figuring I could observe best with my eyes.
Besides, I had no desire to touch Brett’s flesh again.
I could still feel his bones cracking under my palms. I’d seen dead bodies before—Momma’s in her casket at the funeral home and Mr. Finch’s falling out of a stage set during the Rose Palace Pageant—but not one that had expired right in front of me.
A chill crept up the back of my neck, leaving prickles, but I pushed aside my own discomfort and summoned my professional training.
I circled the body, first noting the gray pallor of Brett’s skin and then the red and purple marks along his neck, a combination of burst blood vessels and scratch marks.
I’d cut into my fair share of animals during labs in the first year of vet school, but I’d never stared at a human corpse, trying to discern what the body might be telling me.
I tried to do as Charlie had suggested and pretend this was any other mammal, which, in my mind, was a compliment rather than a way to dehumanize the victim.
Animals, after all, were often much better creatures than their human counterparts.
“Tell me what you see,” Charlie said as he took a step back and waited. I felt very much on the spot, but I made myself focus.
“Burst blood vessels,” I noted, pointing to the squiggly red lines. “That almost makes it look like…”
“Like he was strangled,” Charlie added.
“But he wasn’t,” I said. “I heard him, and I saw him. No one touched Brett until…” I listed the people off on my fingers.
“Joe tried the Heimlich, and Mina and I attempted CPR. Presley fell to his other side, but I’m not sure she ever touched him.
” I replayed the moments, grabbing at myself as I’d seen Brett do.
“He coughed and held his throat, but he couldn’t exactly strangle himself. ”
Charlie lifted a shoulder. “Right.”
I examined Brett’s mouth and noticed a slight trickle of blood in the left corner of his lips.
“There’s nothing visible in the airway,” Charlie said.
“But there’s dried blood that indicates some kind of scraping or tearing in the mouth or throat,” I added.
“I could see someone choking on ice, but ice wouldn’t have torn him up like this,” Charlie replied.
“You think it might be poisoning? Like, with some kind of acidic compound? Bleach, maybe?” I paused to consider.
Charlie shook his head. “I don’t think it’s poison.” He tilted his head toward a row of litmus strips on a nearby podium.
“Is that your test kit?” I asked, remembering how he’d talked about buying it for the station even though it was almost a thousand dollars of the county’s tiny budget. He’d deliberated for far longer than I would’ve, but I appreciated how seriously he took his job.
“Yeah, it came in handy after all.” Charlie motioned to the tests as he spoke. “I had one of the officers run Brett’s glass for different toxins, and everything came back clear.”
“How reliable are the tests?”
“Pretty good. Ninety-five percent accuracy for common toxins.”
“And uncommon?”
“Hit or miss,” he answered. “Just in case, we’re also sending the glass to forensics.”
“And the coroner will take blood samples,” I said, standing back and crossing my arms, trying to figure out what else could’ve killed Brett so quickly.
My eyes traveled down the body to the dead man’s arms, and I crouched low to study his hands, the very ones that appeared to have strangled him as he gasped for air.
I peeked beneath the palms and at the fingers, the hairy knuckles and the tiny indentations on the skin.
All seemed fine except for… I stopped, noticing the nail beds: a bluish purple.
I pointed to them. “This discoloration is likely from cyanosis.”
I’d taken one class on animal forensics, and by the end of the semester, I’d known that I couldn’t stomach examining cases of animal cruelty even if it was a good and necessary job to prosecute perpetrators.
Still, that class had taught me the signs of a lack of oxygen: discoloration of the nail beds, the gums, the tongue.
Add that to what I’d seen with my own two eyes as Brett struggled on the dance floor, and I was confident as to how he’d died.
Technically, Brett had suffocated from a lack of air to his lungs.
That still didn’t explain how he’d been deprived of oxygen.
Whatever the cause, the blood in the mouth and the burst vessels on the neck meant it wasn’t a simple case of choking.
“The discoloration could also have something to do with circulation or a heart problem,” I added. “You’ll need to wait for the coroner’s report to know for sure—”
“I know exactly what happened.” A voice cut in from the wings.