Free When Shadows Fall by J. T. Ellison

help.”
    Hoyle shook his head. “Thank you, but I’ve got it. We have a pulley system that moves the bodies around. Let me just call Regina, and I’ll get the body moved for you.”
    Regina promised to come straightaway, and Hoyle got Sam situated.
    A few minutes later, an automated cart on wheels arrived in the autopsy suite with the cardboard coffin.
    “Handy contraption,” Sam said.
    He smiled shyly. “It is. We have the only crematory outside of the big cities that can handle bodies over three hundred pounds. My grandfather designed the pulleys. My father added the automation. They practically move the bodies themselves.”
    Davidson called to Fletcher, “Hey, you need to see this.” He gestured to an outer room.
    Fletcher looked at Sam. “You okay?”
    “Sure thing. Go ahead. I’m not going anywhere.”
    He left, and a pretty young woman with the same slight build as her brother appeared in the door to the suite. Roy’s face lit up. “Ah, here’s Regina.”
    “Hi, Roy.” His sister came and gave his arm a squeeze, then turned to Sam with a sense of awe. “You’re Dr. Owens. I’ve heard so much about you. I’ve read all your papers. It’s a real honor to have a chance to work with you, ma’am.”
    Goodness. She felt her face getting red; she wasn’t used to this kind of adulation.
    “Hi, Regina. Call me Sam. You ready to get to work?”
    “I am. Are you strong? Savage isn’t a little guy.”
    “I can handle myself if you can.”
    “Let’s do it, then.”
    Roy excused himself, and the two women wrestled the body from the cardboard coffin.
    Savage definitely wasn’t little. Sam’s measurements said seventy-two inches, and the scale showed him at two hundred pounds. He was fully dressed in a black turtleneck and jeans.
    “Is this how he came in?” Sam asked.
    “This is how we got him,” Regina said. “We did the usual radiographs to make sure he didn’t have any devices or replacement joints, but the orders were to cremate him clothed.”
    “Is that usual?”
    “Sure. Put Grandma in her favorite blue dress before the cremation, that sort of thing.”
    “Who dressed him, do you know?”
    “No idea.”
    “Okay. You have the radiographs?”
    “I do.” She put them up on the light board, and Sam looked them over. She saw nothing of great significance, only a previous tibia fracture, well healed.
    “Let’s get his clothes off. I can’t believe they redressed him after they examined him,” she said.
    “From what I’ve been told, there was no real examination at all. You have a clean slate.”
    Sam looked at Regina. “What? I knew there wasn’t an internal exam, but nothing external, either?”
    “Not that I know of. It was a clear case of suicide, they told us, and warned us to be careful with the body because of the hydrogen sulfide. It’s the only reason we haven’t sent him through the retort yet—we wanted to give the chemicals time to dissipate.”
    Sam shook her head, partly annoyed and partly glad. When they said no post, she’d assumed they were talking about an internal exam. What sort of fool wouldn’t do any external exam on a dead body? Someone was trying to get Timothy Savage out of the way, and fast.
    Once his clothes were off, Sam started on a cursory check of the body. She stopped at the neck. There were bruises around his throat. Her first instinct was strangulation, but she thought about the method of his suicide, the hydrogen sulfide, and the reaction he might have had to suddenly being unable to breathe. People sometimes brought their own hands to their throat as if they could claw an airway open from the outside. It was suspicious, but not entirely unheard of. Sam looked closely at his eyes and under the edge of his upper lip, saw the red pinpricks of petechial hemorrhage. That was to be expected in the case of asphyxiation.
    He’d also bitten his tongue, a deep black wound caused by his incisors. The injury would have bled profusely, and she had seen