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.
“An
d 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.
CHAPTER 31
THE BURN IS SHAPED like a skull.
“You can see the face. Well almost,” I show Marino as we change our gloves, and we have a red biohazard trash bag full of soiled ones by now. “You can make out an eye and part of the grin, at any rate.”
“Was she wearing the necklace backward when you ran into her?” He blots sweat on his chin with a paper towel, careful not to drip anywhere important, including the body.
“I wouldn’t think so because I noticed the gold pendant was a skull with a whimsical face.”
“Then it had to be turned over when it burned her, and it had to be inside her shirt so it was directly against her skin.” He states what he wants to be true.
Marino doesn’t want to think anything that might feed into his phobia of things that creak, groan and go clank in the night. He’s getting spooked. I would expect as much after today, and it seems far from over.
“If you saw an injury like this and had no idea?” He goes on and on about it. “In the Salem days this would get you hung as a witch. They’d say it had to be a witch who zapped this person, and you’d better hope you never gave whoever it was the evil eye.”
“Well fortunately we don’t live in those days. But you’re right. I probably would have been hanged as a witch.” I pick up my hand lens, and he takes close-up photographs of the burn.
Dry and dark reddish brown, the partial impression of the skull’s grinning face was caused by sparing when the metal pendant got extremely hot. The debossed or depressed mouth and an eye weren’t in contact with skin, and those areas aren’t burned. They’ve remained pale, explaining what looks somewhat like a grotesque emoji in the middle of Elisa Vandersteel’s upper back. Even I would be the first to say that it’s bizarre.
“It looks like a dead head.” Marino’s eyes race around. “Like something supernatural, like a stigma.”
He means a death’s-head and a stigmata, and the burn only looks like that if one knows what caused it.
“Can you help me hold her please?” Sweat runs down my chest, my belly, between my thighs, and the scrubs under my coveralls are soaking wet.
Squatting across from me, Marino steadies the body as I turn it completely on one side to give me a better look from head to toe, front and back.
“That’s weird too,” he says about the delicate whitish linear burns I find on the right shoulder and posterior base of the neck. “More of the same thing she’s got on her stiff right wrist, and they’re on the same side of her body. But if they’re burns, they don’t look anything like the one here.” He indicates the angry red wound caused by the pendant.
I explain that when burns look leathery and white it usually indicates full thickness or third degree. I suspect that these whitish linear marks are from direct contact with whatever may have electrocuted her.
“Such as wires.” I give him a hypothetical. “Except they would have to be very fine, almost hairlike.”
“What wires?” Marino looks around nervously as if they might be close enough to get him.
“I have no idea—assuming that’s what we’re dealing with,” as I notice she has something in the interior pocket of her blue running shorts. “The other burn is from the gold pendant making contact with this same electrical source. That’s my guess.”
Digging my fingers under the waistband, I find the small interior pocket and the hard flat shape inside it. I pull out a black plastic fob that appears to have a serial number on it.
“Bingo. Maybe it’s the key to where she lives,” Marino says as I drop the fob in an evidence bag I hand to him.
I get up and look around at the trees, the lamp, the trail of exploded glass. I try to come up with what could have been long and linear like fine wires that she might have come in contact with as she rode her bicycle out here. I think of her pedaling through the shadows, through the stifling heat, perhaps getting anxious and weary as it got later and darker.
Then suddenly something sears her bare right shoulder, the back of her neck, scorching her between her shoulder blades. It must have been excruciatingly painful and terrifying as she frantically grabbed at whatever it was, burning and shocking her right hand. It must have felt as if she were being attacked by an invisible swam of hornets, and that might be the last thing she was conscious of as her bike went down and she was thrown clear.
Such a scenario could explain the linear burns, and it could account for her asymmetrical rigor. A powerful electrical current striking a gold pendant and passing through her body would have heated up moisture, turning it to steam, and that could have blown off and damaged her shoes and clothing. Heat could have broken the gold chain we recovered, and I check her neck again, looking for any sign the chain burned her before it broke free.
Using a magnifying lens and moving her hair, I find what look like several red hash marks, tiny red burns no bigger than dashes on the right and left sides of her neck. There’s nothing in front, and then I envision Elisa Vandersteel again, hot and
sweaty but alive and friendly on the sidewalk in front of the Faculty Club. She was wearing a neckerchief.
A blue paisley print, I’m fairly sure, and I recall having the impression it was somewhat faded, possible a little frayed as if it might be something old. I ask Marino if a neckerchief has shown up, and I describe it. Did the twins possibly have it in a knapsack, and he didn’t realize where it came from?
“Nope,” he says. “I didn’t see anything like that but I’ll have Flanders double-check while she still has them in the daisy room.”
“If not, then it should be around here somewhere,” I reply, “unless she took it off after I saw her on Quincy Street. The important point is if she were wearing something like that it might have protected the front of her neck if the fabric was under or partially under the chain when it got heated up. If we find the neckerchief there may be burns that would verify this.”
Then I tell him we also need to check on whether there might have been thunderstorm activity reported in the area early this evening. And I add that flipping the necklace around to her back may have been the worst thing she could have done.
“Even though she would have been sweaty and electricity loves sweat. But even so, skin isn’t the best conductor,” I explain. “But finding a chunk of gold is another story, and that may be why she’s dead.”
“Because the current would have hit her heart.” Marino watches me work a small brown paper bag over one of the hands. “And there’s a lot of resistance to pass through, which is why some victims have nothing more than burns after the fact. I know a guy who lost a finger but that was it.”
“If the electrical charge didn’t pass through her body, it’s possible she would have survived,” I agree. “And I’m betting we’re going to discover her head injury isn’t what killed her.”