My brows dip at the strange injuries I continue to study as I ask, “Did someone try to cut her throat?”

“Those cuts originate from the inside.”

My gaze jerks to hers. “As in, she swallowed sharp objects?”

“Exactly.”

Inside a pill, I think. “Do we have a toxicology report?” I ask.

“It’s not poison,” she insists.

“I understand that, DD, but our job is to find out how that happened. Whatever cut her ended up in her body through some method of transport. Food or a pill. Do we have a toxicology report?” I repeat.

“Right. Yes. Of course.” She clears her throat and straightens. “We do, and obviously, as you know, I’ll have to send off for the more extensive testing, which will take time. But for now, this is what we know. She had a few expected prescribed drugs in her system as well as ibuprofen.”

“Was there a bottle of ibuprofen found?”

“Not that I know of but she could have easily had a pill bottle or case in a kitchen drawer that was discovered after I left. Or maybe she grabbed it upstairs and then walked downstairs.”

“I’ll find out,” I say. “That’s one option. Another. Could she have eaten something that caused this?”

“If there was something in her food, I’d think she’d know it, she’d bite down on it,” she replies, “but certainly I’m looking at all possibilities.”

She’s right. We chew our food or those of us that don’t, act like the animals do. She would have felt the crunch of a sharp object. I’m back to the ibuprofen. A gel tablet maybe, which drives my next question. “Could a gel tablet be used to hide a sharp object?”

“In theory, it would be possible. I still need to open her up and take a look inside her throat and stomach. I didn’t want to do that until you saw the cuts. But that’s when I’ll know exactly what she swallowed.”

My brows dip. “How would you get something inside a pill large enough to cut her inside out and her not know it was there?”

“Believe it or not because of how stupid I sounded over the toxicology report—you make me a little nervous—I thought the same thing.” She fidgets slightly. I do make her nervous. Good. Maybe she’ll tell me who sent her here because it wasn’t organic. “But then,” she continues, “I thought I, now we, could be overthinking this. In theory inserting sharp objects into a pill is easy. What’s not as easy is inserting enough sharp objects to kill someone while making those pills appear untouched. Furthermore, why did whatever this was, cut her throat? If the sharp object was embedded in the pill it would have landed in her stomach. Which would also be deadly, but something just doesn’t add up.”