Free Act V by Ansley Adams Page B

even though I don’t recall asking you to be, I
guess you’re in. You can work on it days while Handy and Hawkins
take the nights. There’s a bunch of pressure coming down on this
one seeing as Danning was such a fine, upstanding citizen, pillar
of the community kind of guy and all. So I want it handled fast and
with a great deal of finesse. You two understand?”
    “ Yes sir,” both men
agreed.
    “ Police services has got
intell for you and so does the M.E., so move your
asses.”
    They did.
    *****
    Andy Wofford had been with
the Medical Examiner’s office since God’s dog first got fleas. He
was old enough to have voted for Eisenhower and was happy to tell
you all about it if you asked. He was also one of the finest
coroners in the state. When Andy took office, most coroners didn’t
have a medical degree. In South Carolina, it still wasn’t required.
Andy, always the curious type, didn’t buy into the I’m old as water so naturally I know more than you
ever will school. He kept up with current
forensic techniques by taking as much coursework on forensic
medicine as he could and learning from experience, too. He didn’t
miss much.
    “ This,” he told Addison and
Brice, “is a classic stab wound.” He pointed to the body which was
now laid out on the table, covered by a sheet. “I’m not sure of the
weapon yet, but you can bet it was big. It’s hard to tell thickness
because the skin is elastic and tries to shrink in once the weapon
is removed, but it’s roughly diamond shaped and at least long
enough to go from the entrance, here,” he pointed to the obvious
wound on the belly, “through the small intestine, nicking a bit of
the large intestine, and out the back, here.” He tilted the corpse
with both hands and nodded to the exit wound. “It missed the spinal
cord, but I understand that the chair wasn’t so lucky.”
    “ True,” said Brice.
“Anything else?”
    “ Yep,” Wofford rolled the
body back into the original position. “You see this bruise right
here at the entry point?”
    They nodded.
    “ It’s 17.8 cm in width.
That’s about 7 inches to those of you who dislike the metric
system. In other words, whatever went through our boy’s gut here,
had one heck of a stopper.”
    “ Are we talking about the
hand-guard of a sword?” Addison asked.
    “ Could be, but I suppose
something else might have done it. Don’t know what
though.”
    “ Did the stab wound kill
him?” Brice asked.
    “ It looks like it, but there
are a couple of other elements here.” He walked to the head of the
corpse. “Take a look at these marks on the chest.”
    “ Taser?” Brice touched the
burns. “Is that how he was subdued?”
    “ That would be my guess.
There’s a goose-egg on the back of the head, too; blunt force
trauma. And there’s this as well. Do you see that there’s some kind
of white residue wherever the wine dried up on his face? There’s
probably some on the clothes too. I haven’t gone back over them to
check.” He scraped a bit of it off with a file and pushed it into a
plastic evidence bag. “I can’t identify it until I run a tox
screen, but it could be a drug or some other toxin.”
    “ So he might have been hit
with a taser, knocked in the head, stabbed and poisoned?” Addison asked.
“Somebody really wanted him dead.”
    “ Maybe, or it could be
powdered sugar from his last donut.” He winked. “I’ll let you
know.”
    *****
    The report from police services was
pretty straight forward. Only one set of prints was found that
didn’t belong in the house. It was being checked for a match. In
addition, the rug had revealed a great deal of hair, all human,
most of it matching the occupants of the house. The three other
samples might have been recent guests in the house. One of them
might also have belonged to the killer. Fortunately, the
housekeeper had vacuumed just the day before, so the choices were
limited. They would send the results on those when they