But which one?

Those four or five liters of blood are pumping under high pressure through more than twenty major arteries in the human body, the most notable being the aorta, the femoral, and the carotid.

It’s difficult to sever the aorta as it’s shielded by the sternum and the ribcage. The femoral artery in the thigh can easily be punctured, but the blood pattern didn’t fit the trajectory that would have resulted from such a wound. A puncture to the carotid artery—which supplies blood to the neck, face, and brain—however, fit the blood pattern profile to a T.

My best guess was that the victim was standing close to where the satellite phone was found. They were hit in the neck, puncturing the carotid artery. Puncture being the operative word. If the artery had been severed, I doubt the blood would have traveled as far as it did.

At a two-day conference on blood-spatter evidence I attended—in what would end up being my last year as a detective with the Seattle Police Department—one of the speakers was a biophysics professor at the University of Washington. Up to that point, it had been six mundane hours of slides and lectures, but Hank something-or-other was one-part professor, one-part Gallagher.

He brought all sorts of props up on stage and proceeded to smash, cut, pop, and poke things until half of us in the audience were covered in water. One of the first things he did was to take out a water balloon and poke it with a needle. I expected the balloon to pop, but it didn’t. Water began to spray from the balloon and the guy pointed the spray at the thirty of us there. When the water drained from the balloon, he asked everyone who got wet to stand up. I was in the fourth row, twelve feet from him, and I got a little bit of water on my knee.

It wasn’t anything profound—it was simple physics—but it stuck with me how far the water had traveled.

Anyhow, once the carotid was punctured, the victim leaned their head back and a heavy arterial spray shot up and onto the tarp. Human nature would predict the victim then grab their neck with one or both hands. At which point, they moved toward the table. They leaned against it, blood running down their hands and spraying through their fingers. It’s hard to say how long the victim stayed near the table, but at some point, they fell to their knees and crawled to the far right of the hut, where they bled out.

Confident I knew how the victim had died, I made my way to the front of the hut and yelled, “Diego and Carlos, I need you. And somebody get me a bamboo pole.”

≈

“Stand here,” I told Diego, indicating a spot a few inches from where the satellite phone was stuck in the ground.