“Hmm. I think so. Yes, I’d say the fragrance is masculine. Perhaps her husband wears cologne?”

Wright was near retirement age, a balding, potbellied man with a West Virginian accent. He was a very capable forensic pathologist and knew exactly what I was contemplating.

“Good question,” I said. “I’ll ask Marino to check it, but her husband was ill yesterday and went to bed after lunch. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have on cologne. It doesn’t mean her brother or father didn’t have on cologne that got on her collar when they hugged her.”

“This looks small-caiiber. No exit wounds.”

I dosed my eyes and listened. “The wound in her right temple is three-sixteenths of an inch with half an inch of smoke - an incomplete pattern. A little bit of stippling and some powder but most will be lost in her hair. There’s some powder in the temporalis muscle. Nothing much in bone or dura. “

“Trajectory?” I asked.

“The bullet goes through the posterior aspect of the right frontal lobe, travels across anterior to basal ganglia and strikes the left temporal bone, and gets hung up in muscle under the skin. And we’re talking about a plain lead bullet, uh, copper coated but not jacketed.”

“And it didn’t fragment?” I asked.

“No. Then we’ve got this second wound here at the nape of the neck. Black, burned abraded margin with muzzle mark. A little laceration about one-sixteenth of an inch at the edges. Lots of powder in the occipital muscles.”

“Tight contact?”

“Yes. Looks to, me like he pressed the barrel hard against her neck. The bullet enters at the junction of the foramen magnum and C-one and takes out the cervicalmedullary junction. Travels right up into the pons.”

“What about the angle?” I asked.

“It’s angled up quite a bit. I’d say that if she was sitting in the car at the time she received this wound, she was slumped forward or had her head bowed.”

“That’s not the way she was found,” I said. “She was leaning back in the seat.”

“Then I guess he positioned her that way;” Wright commented. “After he shot her. And I’d say that this shot that went through the pons was fired last. I would speculate she was already incapacitated, maybe slumped over when she was shot the second time.”

At intervals I could handle it, as if we were not referring to anyone I knew. Then a tremor would go through me, tears fighting to break free. Twice I had to walk outside and stand in the parking lot in the cold. When he got to the ten week-old fetus in her womb, a girl, I retreated to my office upstairs. According to Virginia law, the unborn child was not a person and therefore could not have been murdered because you cannot murder a non person.