The air-conditioning kept the room icebox cold. Bobby greeted me with his usual lab-geek awkwardness. He looked a little like Matthew Perry if I squinted hard enough. Sure, he was cute, but he had an unfortunate chin. I donned scrubs and gloves, and covered my mouth with a surgical mask in an attempt to keep out the smell of death. It wasn’t working.

Bobby handed me a smooth, cleaned skull, which had been waiting for us in a steel tray. I was surprised that holding someone’s skull in my hands didn’t freak me out, but I figured that when you’d been around this stuff long enough, you just became accustomed to it. You built up immunity to the shock value of everything.

“What do you think?” Bobby asked.

I weighed the skull in my hands for a moment. “Well, this person obviously died of a gunshot wound to the head.” I turned the skull so that the two round holes were visible.

“And what about the entry wound?”

“The hole in the back of the skull is smaller than the hole in the front of the skull, so I would say this person was shot in the head from behind. He was off guard and the bullet exited through the forehead.”

Bobby peered at the skull. “Right. That’s how this gunshot wound happened. But the problem with this case is the wife. She found the body, and she’s been claiming that her husband committed suicide. She says he’d been depressed for months. But for someone to commit suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head is almost impossible.”

Bobby reached his hand around his own head, making his finger and thumb into a mock gun. “See? Who could reach around like that? Why reach around like that? Why not just shoot yourself in the side of the head?” Again he pointed around with his finger-gun.

“Did the police on the scene test for gunshot residue? Did they swab the wife’s hands?” I asked.

“No, she was hysterical over the suicide and they didn’t push it.” He motioned for me to come over to the side lab table. “But check this out.”

He opened up a labeled folder and flipped through to the actual autopsy photos of the body. It was weird: I was holding the skull of the man in the photos. The coroner had had to shave the victim’s hair off to get a better look at the wounds. Bobby pointed to dark marks in the photos.

“The dark shadows are definitely gunshot residue and, if you look closely, the barrel of the gun left an indentation where it was pressed against the back of his skull.” His finger moved across the picture. “There’s no way he could have reached around or pressed the gun that hard into his own skull.”