He transferred the stare to me. “I am not accustomed,” he told me, “to having my post-mortems interrupted without an excellent reason. Do you, or does your colleague, have an excellent reason?”
So much for Richie getting on Cooper’s good side. And that was the least of our problems. Whatever flak Quigley had been giving Richie in the squad room was nothing to what he could expect from now on, if he didn’t get his arse back into the morgue and see this thing through. We were talking lifetime nickname here. Cooper probably wouldn’t spread the word—he likes being above gossip—but the glint in the assistant’s eye said he couldn’t wait.
I kept my mouth shut while Cooper worked his way through the external examination. No more nasty surprises along the way, thank Christ. Emma was a little above average height for six, average weight, healthy in every way that Cooper could check. There were no healed fractures, no burn marks or scars, none of the hideous spoor of abuse, physical or sexual. Her teeth were clean and healthy, no fillings; her nails were clean and clipped; her hair had been trimmed not long ago. She had spent the little life she had being well taken care of.
No conjunctival hemorrhages in her eyes, no bruising to her lips where something had been pressed over her mouth, nothing that could tell us anything about what he had done to her. Then Cooper, shining his pencil torch into Emma’s mouth like he was her GP, said, “Hm.” He reached for his tweezers again, tilted her head farther back and maneuvered them deep into her throat.
“If I remember correctly,” he said, “the victim’s bed held a number of ornamental pillows, embroidered with anthropomorphic animals in multicolored wool.”
Kittens and puppies, staring in the torchlight. “That’s correct,” I said.
Cooper pulled the tweezers out of her mouth with a flourish. “In that case,” he said, “I believe we have evidence of cause of death.”
A wisp of wool. It was sodden and darkened, but when it dried out it would be rose pink. I thought of the kitten’s pricked ears, the puppy’s hanging tongue.
“As you have seen,” Cooper said, “smothering often leaves so few signs that it is impossible to diagnose definitively. In this case, however, if this wool matches that used in the pillows, I will have no difficulty in stating that the victim was smothered with one of the pillows from her bed—the Bureau may well be able to identify the specific weapon. She died either from anoxia or from cardiac arrest pursuant to anoxia. The manner of death was homicide.”
He dropped the tag of wool into an evidence bag. As he sealed it, he gave it a nod and a brief, satisfied smile.
The internal exam gave us more of the same: a healthy little girl, nothing to say she had ever been ill or hurt in her life. Emma’s stomach contained a partially digested meal of minced beef, mashed potato, vegetables and fruit: cottage pie, with fruit salad for dessert, eaten about eight hours before she died. The Spains seemed like the family-dinner type, and I wondered why Pat and Emma hadn’t eaten the same meal that night, but that was a small enough thing that it could easily go unexplained forever. A queasy stomach that couldn’t take cottage pie, a kid being given the meal she had refused at lunchtime: murder means that little things get swept away, lost for good on the ebb of that red tsunami.