BooksBarbecue
Back The Silenced Women
Chapters (50)
  1. Front Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Part I
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. Chapter Eight
  14. Chapter Nine
  15. Chapter Ten
  16. Chapter Eleven
  17. Chapter Twelve
  18. Chapter Thirteen
  19. Part II
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. Chapter Nineteen
  26. Chapter Twenty
  27. Chapter Twenty-One
  28. Chapter Twenty-Two
  29. Chapter Twenty-Three
  30. Chapter Twenty-Four
  31. Chapter Twenty-Five
  32. Chapter Twenty-Six
  33. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  34. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  35. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  36. Part III
  37. Chapter Thirty
  38. Chapter Thirty-One
  39. Chapter Thirty-Two
  40. Chapter Thirty-Three
  41. Chapter Thirty-Four
  42. Chapter Thirty-Five
  43. Chapter Thirty-Six
  44. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  45. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  46. Read on for a sneak peek at the next Violent Crime Investigations Team mystery!
  47. Chapter One
  48. Acknowledgments
  49. About the Author
  50. Back Cover

And trapped in his memory were the concentrated details of the last minute of her life.

“It’s impossible to determine how long she was conscious,” the medical examiner, Trish Armstrong, had told him the day after the murder. “Besides, how could it possibly help your investigation?”

“Just tell me,” Mahler had said.

They stood under the lab’s bright fluorescent lights. Trish, who had just finished an examination for another case, was still in her scrubs.

“Jesus, Eddie, where’s this coming from?”

“Just tell me.”

“Look, I get it. The whole thing with this girl, it’s awful. But we’ve been through a hundred of these things. It’s our job.”

“Tell me.”

“Honestly, I don’t know. And what difference does it make?”

“You don’t know, or you won’t tell me?”

“No one knows,” Trish said quietly. She leaned against a stainless-steel table and looked at Mahler. Under her eyes were dark shadows. She took a deep breath. “It’s just guessing. With ligature strangulation, you don’t know if asphyxia was caused by compression of the larynx or if strangulation compressed the carotid arteries. You also don’t know if the occlusion of the arteries was complete or incomplete. Which would affect the loss of blood flow. Which would determine time to unconsciousness. We’d have to make assumptions and—”

“Tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“Tell me.”

“Stop it, Eddie.”

“Tell me.”

“Is this about the case or you?”

“Tell me.”

“Tell you what, exactly?” Her voice rose, her face up close to his. “Do you want to know this girl fought to get her fingers under the cord or whatever the fuck was around her neck? Do you want me to tell you the fingertips on both hands were cut, two nails broken off? Do you want me to tell you that hanks of her hair got caught in the cord and were torn out at the roots? That, at some point, the killer put something, probably his knee, in the small of her back to get more leverage? Do you want to know that? Do you want to know that once the doer got the cord tight, it probably compressed the carotid, not the larynx? So it cut off blood flow to the brain. Carotid compression causes unconsciousness in seven to fourteen seconds. But, in this case, the victim struggled, so it probably took longer. Does that help you in some way, Eddie? Come on, I want to hear you explain it to me.”