“All right,” Ken said. “We noticed that Rebecca Ziegler had a recent venipuncture in one of her arm veins.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Marissa said with exasperation. “The woman was undergoing in-vitro fertilization. She was getting hormones and blood tests all the time. Is that what you’ve made this big buildup for? Please!”

Ken shrugged his shoulders. “That’s part of it,” he said. “If it were only that, we wouldn’t be concerned. We know she’d been stuck a lot of times over the last months. There were marks all over her body. But this stick gave the appearance of being done just before she died. That makes it suspect. So we decided to expand our toxicology screen to look for drugs other than the usual hormones. As pathologists we’re supposed to be suspicious.”

“And you found something?” Marissa asked with horror.

“Nope,” Ken said. “Toxicology was clean. We’re trying a few other tricks, but so far nothing has turned up.”

“Is this some kind of joke?” Marissa said.

“No joke,” Ken said. “The other part of the puzzle is that she only had a few hundred cc’s of blood in her chest.”

“Meaning . . .”

“When someone ruptures an aorta there is usually a lot of blood in the chest,” Ken said. “A bit more than a few hundred cc’s. It’s possible to have only that much, but it’s not probable. So finding only a few hundred cc’s is not something concrete, it’s just suggestive.”

“Suggestive of what?” Marissa asked.

“Suggestive that she was already dead when she fell,” Ken said.

Marissa was stunned. For a moment she couldn’t speak. The implications were too horrendous.

“So you can see our problem,” Ken said. “If we say something like this officially, we have to have more proof. We have to come up with an explanation of what killed her before she fell. Unfortunately, we haven’t found anything on gross or microscopic. We went over her brain extremely carefully and found nothing. The only chance is toxicology and so far we’ve gotten a big zip.”

“What about her dying as she fell?” Marissa suggested. “From fright or something?”

“Come on, Marissa, be serious,” Ken said with a wave of his hand. “That only happens in the movies. If she was dead before she hit the ground, then she was dead before she fell. Of course that means she was tossed out of the building.”

“Maybe she hadn’t paid her bill,” Greg suggested jokingly. “But with all due respect, I think we’d better get on with our present case before the body putrefies.”

“If you want, I’ll call you if we come up with anything,” Ken said.

“Please,” Marissa answered. She was in a daze as she headed for the door.

Ken stopped her by calling out: “Remember, Marissa, mum’s the word. Don’t say anything to anybody.”