Chapter Six

Martin Carstairs lay on a stainless-steel table, his skin milky-white under the harsh incandescent lighting except for where blood had settled into a deep purple layer after his heart had stopped beating.

At Eban’s request, the Medical Examiner’s Office had performed a full CT scan and checked for any latent prints on the victim’s body. He found the fact they didn’t find any highly suspicious but maybe he was desperate for anything that didn’t point neon arrows at Darby as a suspect.

“Do you have a clear TOD yet?” Eban asked.

The ME eyed him in a way that reminded him of his old high school math teacher. If he planned to ask questions, he better back it up with some intelligence. “Time of Death is between midnight and ten AM.”

“Surely you can narrow it down a little?” Torgerson crossed her arms over her chest.

The man conceded. “You know it’s always a range, Signy.”

“Doc…” she cajoled.

“We know this young man was seen leaving a party not long before midnight so definitely after that.” The wry tone hinted at humor. “Body temp suggested he’d been dead approximately eight-to-nine hours by the time I arrived at the scene, but the house was cold so that’s a rough estimate. He was in full rigor when the paramedics arrived which also suggests he was dead at least six hours. Livor mortis looks close to full. So, TOD is probably—and this is just an educated guess and I will run more tests and calculations—sometime between midnight and two AM.”

Eban nodded and stared at the thin wound in the man’s chest. One and a half inches wide and slightly right of the sternum, glancing off the bone of the ribs and through the cartilage into the chest cavity.

The sound of the saw set Eban’s teeth on edge, but he didn’t outwardly react. He’d attended enough autopsies over the years for this to be nothing new to him, but he’d never gotten comfortable watching one human dissect another even in the name of forensic science.

The noise stopped abruptly and Eban observed the Medical Examiner carefully pull away the rib cage to reveal the chest cavity.

The man pointed to the pathway the knife had made. “See, the tip nicked the left ventricle. Hmm…” he said thoughtfully. “That’s odd. It looks as if there are two puncture wounds and there’s enough blood in the chest cavity to suggest Mr. Carstairs did not die immediately.”

“Poor bastard,” Torgerson said quietly.

“Two wound pathways? The knife went in twice through the same insertion site?”

The ME nodded. “Looks that way.”

That didn’t make much sense to Eban. If Darby had killed Martin in a frenzied attack, he couldn’t see her stabbing him the second time with such precision.

“If Martin didn’t die immediately, why didn’t he try to save himself? Why don’t we see any defensive wounds on his hands? Why didn’t he fight or grab his phone and call for help?”