Free Grave Situation by Alex MacLean Page B

the
individual. You’re correct, the subject is probably a male. I feel
the knife is of high quality. Sharp. Strong. Single-edged. But you
can rarely match a knife to a wound with any certainty. You’d be
better off checking a suspect knife for blood, either around the
guard or beneath the handle.”
    Allan turned to him. “Do you think
the suspect is left or right-handed?”
    “Based on the angle of the wound,
I’d say right.” Still looking over the images, Coulter concluded,
“There are no other signs of previous trauma here. No healed
fractures. No prior operations. All the organs are present. Mister
Hawkins was in good shape.”
    Sodero helped him transfer the body
to the dissection table again. Coulter put a block under the
victim’s back, allowing the chest to rise up, the head and arms to
fall back.
    That block could only mean one
thing; Allan braced himself for what was to come. He watched
Coulter take a scalpel from the steel tray. Starting at each
shoulder, the medical examiner made an incision down across the
chest to the sternum, then proceeded down the abdomen, around the
navel and ended at the pubic bone.
    With the forceps, he pulled back on
the corners of skin. Keeping the tension throughout, he scraped
away the underlying tissue. He peeled off the top flap of skin and
brought it up over Brad’s chin to expose the vessels in front of
the neck. Coulter then cut the pectoral muscles from their
attachments to the sternum, intercostals and clavicles and
reflected them outward. When he finished, the rib cage lay
bare.
    Standing close by, the faint smell
that drifted to Allan was of fresh meat.
    Quick, shallow
breaths , he told himself. Quick, shallow breaths.
    Pale, he watched a mound of coiled
intestinal track shift to one side and then spill onto the
table.
    The rib cutters Coulter took from
the tray resembled gardening loppers. One at a time, he clipped the
ribs from the lateral costal margins to the inner clavicles. Allan
flinched at each sharp little snip.
    Coulter removed the breastplate.
Blood began to flow over the table now.
    He leaned over the body, eyes
intent. “The pericardial sac has been damaged,” he said. “The
pleural cavity is full of blood. This is where things get messy.”
He turned on a faucet hooked up at the table. “We had little blood
at the scene, Lieutenant, because most of it stayed inside the body
as you can see.”
    Allan swallowed as he watched waves
of bloody water roll down the raised sides of the table, swirling
around the drain between the feet of Brad Hawkins.
    “There’s been a stabbing down on
Lower Water Street… Your son was involved.”
    “Is he all right?”
    “I’m sorry…”
    Allan drew a breath and turned
away. The other two men didn’t seem to notice.
    Coulter cut open the pericardial
sac to expose the heart. With a needle and syringe, he withdrew two
vials of blood from the organ. One would be used for toxicology,
the other for typing.
    “Can you take an additional blood
sample, Doctor?” Allan asked.
    “I can, Lieutenant.” Coulter
removed another needle and syringe from a package. “Is there a
special need for it?”
    “We found a blood trail at the
crime scene and at this point we don’t know who it belongs to. I’d
like to have an ample supply of Mister Hawkins’ blood so we can
rule out whether or not it belongs to him.”
    After Coulter withdrew another vial
of blood, he proceeded to take out the heart. He weighed it, and
then carried it to the sink where he rinsed it under the water. For
some time, he stood there, quiet. Diligently, he examined the wound
track. Then, with the bread knife, he began to dissect the
heart.
    “The blade entered the posterior
of the heart at a slight downward angle,” he said. “Went straight
through the anterior wall and punctured the pericardial sac.
There’s lethal damage to the right atrium and right ventricle. The
right coronary artery had been cut. As well the superior vena cava
and inferior