I said, “Any sign of sexual assault?” Richie jerked like I was electric. Cooper’s eyes slid over my shoulder to him for a second, amused and disdainful.

“On preliminary examination,” he said, “there are no signs of sexual abuse, either recent or chronic. I will, of course, explore this possibility in more depth at the post-mortem.”

“Of course,” I said. “And this victim here? Can you give us anything?”

Cooper pulled a sheet of paper out of his case and waited, inspecting it, till Richie and I went over to him. The paper was printed with two outlines of a generic male body, front and back. The first one was speckled with a precise, terrible Morse code of red-pen dots and dashes.

Cooper said, “The adult male received four injuries to the chest from what appears to be a single-edged blade. One”—he tapped a horizontal red line halfway up the left side of the outline’s chest—“is a relatively shallow slash wound: the blade struck a rib near the midline and skidded outwards along the bone for approximately five inches, but does not appear to have penetrated farther. While this would have caused considerable bleeding, it would not have been fatal, even without medical treatment.”

His finger moved upwards, to three leaf-shaped red blots that made a rough arc from below the outline’s left collarbone down to the center of its chest. “The other major injuries are puncture wounds, also from a single-edged blade. This one penetrated between the upper left ribs; this one struck the sternum; and this one entered the soft tissue by the edge of the sternum. Until the post-mortem is complete I cannot, of course, state the depths or trajectories of the wounds or describe the damage they caused, but unless the assailant was exceptionally strong, the blow directly to the sternum is unlikely to have done more than possibly flay off a chip of bone. I think we can safely posit that either the first or the third of these injuries is the one that caused death.”

The photographer’s flash went off, leaving a flare of afterimage hovering in front of my eyes: the squiggles of blood on the walls, bright and squirming. For a second I was sure I could smell it. I asked, “Any defense injuries?”

Cooper flicked his finger at the scattering of red on the outline’s arms. “There is a shallow three-inch slash wound to the palm of the right hand, and a deeper one to the muscle of the left forearm—I would venture to guess that this wound is the source of much of the blood at the scene; it would have bled profusely. The victim also shows a number of minor injuries—small nicks, abrasions and contusions to both forearms—that are consistent with a struggle.”

Patrick could have been on either side of that struggle, and the cut palm could go either way: a defense wound, or his hand slipping down the blade as he stabbed. I asked, “Could the knife wounds have been self-inflicted?”