Hannah leaned forward slightly. She could feel her heart rate increase and she felt a flurry of excitement run through her. Was Doc about to tell her that she hadn’t killed the man after all? She wanted to ask, but Doc started speaking again.

“I found three sites of trauma that didn’t line up with the damage to the front end of your truck.”

“Exactly what do you mean?” Mike asked, looking almost as hopeful as Hannah was.

“Our John Doe suffered a massive blow to the cranium, causing several fissures of the frontal bone.” Doc noticed Delores’s puzzled expression and clarified. “That’s the front part of the skull, Lori. And fissures are fractures. At first, I thought that contact with the front bumper of Hannah’s truck was the cause of the injury, but this particular trauma was not consistent with the other injuries that were caused by the collision.” He stopped as he noticed several other puzzled expressions. “Sorry. I’ll try to put it more clearly. These injuries were too severe for the speed that Hannah was traveling. There was also the location of the fractures. They weren’t consistent with the other injuries I attributed to the impact.”

“Something else hit him before Hannah did?” Mike asked, taking the words right out of Hannah’s mouth.

Doc nodded. “Something or someone. I spent most of the afternoon examining him again, and that’s the conclusion I reached.”

“Then I didn’t kill him?” Hannah finally managed to ask.

“Let me finish, Hannah. There’s more.”

Hannah clamped her mouth shut. Doc would tell her exactly what he meant eventually. It was difficult to wait, but she would let him tell them in his own precise way.

“There were two other injuries that were not consistent with the configuration of Hannah’s truck. Both were on the left side of his face, one on his chin and one on his cheek. They were approximately the same size and shape as the configuration of a man’s hand clenched into a fist.”

“He was in a fight?” Delores guessed.

“That’s the conclusion I drew.”

“But the fight didn’t cause the man’s death, either?” Hannah asked, hoping that she was wrong and that someone else had delivered the fatal blow.

“That’s correct, Hannah.”

“How about the shape and configuration of the fist?” Mike asked. “Is there any way to identify the man who fought with him from the pattern the blows left on his face?”