Free When Shadows Fall by J. T. Ellison Page A

no evidence of blood on his clothes or his body. She tucked that fact away, but felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. Someone had cleaned up Mr. Savage, after all. The police? Or someone else?
    “Take a vitreous fluid, would you, Regina?”
    “Sure.” She expertly drew the fluid from his eye with a syringe as Sam finished the rest of the external exam. “Let’s flip him.”
    They manhandled the body so it was facedown, and Sam gasped. The upper part of Savage’s back was covered in tattoos. Spirals and triangles and stars, what seemed to be a type of Celtic love knot. No faces, no names, just strange symbols, arranged in what looked to be a repeating pattern.
    “Take a photograph please, Regina.”
    The girl hopped up on the autopsy table and motioned for Sam to hand her the camera. She snapped off a few shots. “Pretty.”
    “You think?”
    “Absolutely. Here, look at the shot from above. They’re arranged in a triskele. Do you know what that is?”
    “Never heard of it.” She looked at the photos and could see now what Regina was talking about—the multiple symbols formed a clear pattern of three interlocked spirals.
    “A triskele is Celtic, and it’s ancient. It was a pagan symbol, the power of three—maid, mother, crone or land, sea, sky. Any triad, really, but once Christianity came into the land, it morphed into a trinity symbol. Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
    “How do you know this?”
    She smiled, and Sam was reminded of a pixie. “I studied Comparative Religion and the Classics at Randolph College. I was considering entering a convent for a while, then decided I could be of better service to my Lord by helping discover what causes death. I’m considering pathology, but med school is so very expensive.”
    It was a strange way to phrase it, what causes death, instead of the more common forensic phrase, cause of death. But Sam didn’t pursue it. She looked at Savage’s back again.
    “It must have taken years to get all of these tattoos,” she said. “Did you know Savage, Regina? Or his son, Henry? Where he went to church, or anything else about him?”
    “No, I didn’t. Then again, Lynchburg’s a bigger town than you might think.”
    “I was told Henry went to Randolph College, too.”
    “Really? Must have been after I left. I graduated the last year it was all women. I’m still stunned they went coed on us.”
    “Too much to hope for, I guess, leaving the school single-sex. Let’s flip him and get moving.”
    Sam put her hands on his shoulders. As they maneuvered the body onto its back, she felt something hard and crusty under her fingers.
    She carefully brushed back his hair and saw a trail of something silvery by the man’s ear. “Hold up a sec, I want to collect this. Can you hand me a DNA swab?”
    “What is it?”
    “Tears. I think. It makes sense. His eyes would be burning from the chemicals. Just want to be sure we catch everything.”
    She collected the sample, then they washed the body and got down to the internal exam. Sam added a second set of gloves, pleased Regina had the Marigolds she preferred, put on an eye shield and double-masked herself in case of any leftover gases from Savage’s lungs. She wasn’t too concerned, though. It had been long enough that most of the gas would have dissipated, and they were in a well-ventilated room. Just in case, she made sure Regina had taken the same precautions, then hefted the scalpel in her right hand and glanced at the girl. “Would you like to do the cut?”
    “Oh, no, Dr. Owens. I’d like to watch you do it, if you don’t mind. I can probably learn a thing or two from your technique.”
    Sam laughed to herself a little—her technique was rusty as hell, considering—but placed the tip of the scalpel into the flesh just below the clavicle and swept the knife downward decisively. The tough skin parted, the yellow subcutaneous fat along the edges thicker than she would have anticipated for a man in such good shape.