“You’re saying kidney and brain cells get killed off when you got high blood pressure?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing significant.”

“What about gastric contents?” Marino asked.

“Meat, some vegetables, partially digested.”

“Alcohol or drugs?”

“No alcohol. Drug screens are under way.”

“No sign of rape?”

“No injuries or other evidence of sexual assault. I swabbed her for seminal fluid but won’t get those reports for a while. Even then, you can’t always be sure.”

Marino’s face was unreadable.

“What are you after?” I finally asked.

“Well, I’m thinking about how this thing was staged. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make us think she gassed herself. But then the lady’s dead before he even gets her into her car. What I’m considering is that he didn’t mean to whack her inside the house. You know, he applies a choke hold, uses too much force, and she dies. So, maybe he didn’t know her health was bad and that’s how it happened.”

I started shaking my head. “Her high blood pressure has nothing to do with it.”

“Explain how she died, then.”

“Say the assailant is right-handed, he brought his left arm around the front of her neck and used his right hand to pull the left wrist toward the right.”

I demonstrated. “This placed pressure eccentrically on her neck, resulting in fracture of the right greater cornua of the hyoid bone. The pressure collapsed her upper airway and put pressure on the carotid arteries. She would have gotten hypoxic, or air hungry. Sometimes pressure on the neck produces bradycardia, a drop in the heart rate, and the victim has an arrhythmia.”

“Could you tell from her autopsy if the assailant started using a choke hold that ended up a yoking? If he was just trying to subdue her and used too much force, in other words?”

“I can’t tell you that from medical findings.”

“But it’s possible.”

“It’s within the realm of possibility.”

“Come on, Doc,” Marino said, exasperated. “Get off the witness stand for a minute, okay? Somebody else in this office besides you and me?”

No one was. But I was unnerved. Most of my staff had not shown up for work today, and Susan had acted bizarrely. Jennifer Deighton, a stranger, apparently had been trying to call me, then was murdered, and a man who claimed to be her brother had just hung up on me. Not to mention, Marino’s mood was foul. When I felt a loss of control, I became very clinic.

“Look,” I said, “he very well may have used a choke hold to subdue her and ended up applying too much force, yoking her by mistake. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to suggest that he simply thought he’d knocked her out and didn’t know she was dead when he placed her inside her car.”

“So we’re dealing with a dumb shit”

“I wouldn’t conclude that if I were you. But if he gets up tomorrow morning and reads in the paper that Jennifer Deighton was murdered, he may be in for the surprise of his life. He’s going to wonder what he did wrong. Which is why I recommended we keep this away from the press.”