Free The Mourning Sexton by Michael Baron Page A

forty minutes. He'd made two pages of notes on a legal pad. He'd carried the X-rays over to the window three times and held them up to the light, studying them one by one. He'd used a magnifying glass to examine each of the morgue shots. A pair of medical textbooks on pathology were open on the kitchen table.
    Although Granger had hoped to see an autopsy report, he hadn't been surprised by its absence. Autopsies, he'd explained to Hirsch, were no longer routine in traffic fatalities. The procedure had become so expensive that it was only performed on a traffic accident victim if there were suspicious circumstances.
    Granger returned to the table. He lifted his notes and studied them with a frown.
    “Fascinating case,” he said, more to himself than Hirsch. “Troubling case.”
    “What's the bottom line?” Hirsch braced himself for the worst.
    “Hard to say for sure.”
    “Do you think she was conscious after the collision?”
    “Oh, no.”
    Hirsch's shoulders sagged. “Are you sure?”
    Granger pondered the question. “I suppose I am about as sure as one could be without an autopsy. Do I believe that this lady was conscious after the collision? No. Does the available evidence support my conclusion? Yes. Is it possible that an autopsy could refute my conclusion?” He leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest, lowering his head to peer at Hirsch over the top of his reading glasses. “Possibly, but probably not.”
    Hirsch leaned back in his chair and exhaled slowly. “So we can forget pain and suffering.”
    “I wouldn't say that. There certainly was pain and suffering.”
    After a moment, Hirsch said, “I'm not following you, Doc.”
    Granger stared at Hirsch, his lips pursed. “I do not believe that the young lady died in the accident.”
    Hirsch tried to parse the sentence but couldn't. “What do you mean?”
    “I would surmise that she was dead before she got in the car.”
    Hirsch stared at him. “I'm lost.”
    “The medical examiner concluded that she died of asphyxia. Based on the observations in his report, I would agree with his conclusion. I would disagree, however, with his determination of the cause of that asphyxia. Of course, this is hardly the first time I've disagreed with Sam Avery.”
    “Was he the medical examiner?”
    Granger nodded and pointed to the signature line on the report.
    “You don't like him?”
    “To the contrary, Sam is a charming man. Just last fall, in fact, the two of us went duck hunting in Illinois. On a professional level, however, Sam is second-rate. In medical school, David, some students gravitate toward pathology because they are fascinated with the study of various diseases and the changes they produce in the organs they attack. Other students are steered toward pathology because their professors believe they will inflict less harm if their patients are already dead. Sam Avery was one of the latter. Still, I shouldn't be too harsh on him here. This case arrived with all the earmarks of a routine traffic fatality. On a busy night, a better pathologist than Sam could have missed it.”
    “Missed what?”
    He pointed to the bottom line on the medical examiner's report. “Sam describes the cause of death as ‘blunt force trauma with asphyxia, apparently caused by motor vehicle accident and deployment of air-bag system.'” Granger looked up from the report. “In a front-end collision, David, there are only two ways asphyxia could be the cause of death. Either the victim suffocated while jammed against the air bag, or the force of the impact broke her spinal cord and she lost the ability to breathe. The X-rays eliminate the latter scenario.” He held up one of the X-rays he'd been studying by the window. “Her spinal cord was intact.”
    “What about the air bag? She was a small woman.”
    “Her size has little to do with it. To suffocate, the air bag would have to have remained fully inflated for longer than thirty seconds.” Granger shook his head.