That was it; Nick had said when they had recovered Kevin Burns' body from the well shaft.
Now what was left of Burns lay on the autopsy table in Maggie's morgue. And Kevin Burns really couldn't have done it, not anymore, anyway. The face was disfigured, and the orbital floor was broken, as was the zygomatic bone, the nose, and the jaw. And what lay there smelled penetratingly of alcohol. A mixture of hooch and corpse rot, like a decomposed piece of meat forgotten at a barbecue, rotting next to a bottle of cheap booze.
"This one died from the fall from about nine feet. From what we can see and smell," the redhead sniffed demonstratively, "this guy was blotto. And probably not just with alcohol."
"With what else?" wanted to know Jane with furrowed brows. "Drugs?"
"We'll get to that in a minute." Maggie looked briefly at the cut-up body and the organs already lying on the organ table at the foot of the corpse. Then she pointed to the deformed, bloody skull. "As you can see, the upper and lower jaws are broken. The lower lip mucosa is crushed through, the mouth is full of blood, and several front teeth in the jaw are missing or severely loosened." She wiggled her finger at one of the teeth. A soft grinding sound was heard. Elizabeth shook herself and took a hissing breath.
Maggie pointed to the dead man's right ear. "Blood has leaked from the right ear canal, indicating a basilar skull fracture. In addition, due to the fall, the nose, jaw, and zygomatic bone are shattered, and the skull is cracked open. The man hit his head on the ground head-on." Maggie's staff continued to move toward the torso. "Both arms are broken at the ulna and radius. That means he was still trying to brace himself before he fell, but it didn't work."
"It couldn't have been an attacker with a baseball bat or something?" asked Jane with furrowed brows.
Maggie shook her head. "No, those would be completely different injuries. And the defensive injuries would be completely different, too. And the fact that the spine is also sprained and fractured in several places speaks to a fall, not a violent attack with a baseball bat or other weapon."
A dissection assistant had just peeled off the skull skin and used an oscillating saw to saw open the skull. Now he took out the brain and handed it to Maggie.
"Here we go," the doctor said. "The brain is swollen, a sign of central death, as they say." She placed the brain on a scale. "About 1480 grams," she murmured, "bigger and heavier than normal."
"An alcoholic as a brainiac?" asked Jane, who once again couldn't help an inappropriate quip.
"It has nothing to do with size," Maggie replied, placing the brain back on the organ table. "With brain swelling from too much alcohol, the brain gets bigger. But the owner doesn't necessarily get smarter - unless he stops the excessive drinking." She pointed to the brain. "Also, we see here that the brain stem and respiratory center are damaged." She pointed to a spot on the brain, though Elizabeth couldn't for the life of her see where Maggie could see any damage.
"So he died of alcohol poisoning?" asked Elizabeth.
"Wait." Her wife made a cut and pulled the stomach out of Burns' cut-open body. It reeked of alcohol, cheap booze like a corner bar. Aromatic smell, the Medical Examiners used to say about it.
Elizabeth found it less than aromatic. Cinnamon cookies smelled aromatic to her, but not a dead drunk.
Maggie kept digging around in the intestines. "Rectum is dilated. You know," she glanced around, "in central death, there's brain swelling. At the same time, we have blood - and juice congestion in the lungs and the so-called wide hollow organs: stomach, intestines, and bladder." She reached inside the body. "Here is the bladder with almost five hundred milliliters of urine." She pulled out the bladder.
Elizabeth had to gag.
"And here's the liver." The redhead pointed to the organ she had half pulled out of the body. "Yellowish brown. Completely nodular remodeled and twisted. That means severe liver cirrhosis. Burns wasn't going to make it much longer anyway."
"And what does that mean?" asked Elizabeth, averting her eyes.
"That it's nonspecific poisoning."
"From alcohol?"
"From something alcoholic," Maggie improved on her wife with furrowed brows.
"Come on, Maggie," Jane said. "You're just trying to make it exciting again. The body's been here for two hours. You can't tell me --"
"All right, you win," Maggie interrupted her mother-in-law. "We've already taken some of his organs to the lab for a rapid test. It wasn't ethanol, and it wasn't classic alcohol, so it wasn't C2H6OH. It was the precursor of that. One less carbon atom."
"Wait a minute," Elizabeth said with her brows drawn together. "You mean ... Methanol?"
"CH3OH. You said it."
"So someone poisoned him with methanol? The stuff that makes you go blind?" asked Jane.
"Or maybe he dosed himself with it. You hear stories like that all the time. Workers in Russian railroad depots, stupid tourists in the Arab Emirates. But with this stuff, I guess that someone kept encouraging Burns to drink when he was already strung out," Elizabeth replied.
"Methanol makes you blind, doesn't it?" repeated Jane.
"That, too. A little methanol will make you blind, and a lot will make you dead", Maggie finally answered the question of the Chief.
"He wasn't dead right away, though," Jane said, crossing her arms in front of her chest. "He may have picked himself up. CSRU found fingerprints and DNA all over the apartment, especially on the wall, the railing, and the ledge leading down to the fountain."
"The prints could also be older", Elizabeth said.
"Could be."
"Death by methanol can be protracted." Maggie eyed her wife and Jane with a meaningful look. "Whereas you don't die from methanol, you die from the breakdown products. Just like when you have a hangover, you don't have a headache because of the alcohol, but because of the substances produced when the alcohol is broken down."
"And what products are formed when methanol is broken down?"
"Nasty stuff," Maggie said with a sigh. "Formaldehyde and formic acid are both highly toxic." She removed the lung from the organ tray and cut along the side of the organ. Elizabeth couldn't help but think of a Thanksgiving turkey; there was something grave, festive about how she sliced the lung.
She made a shallow cut along the lung tissue, then grasped the lung and squeezed. A frothy fluid bubbled out. "There we go," she said. "The lung is dark purple for now and also hyperhydrated. That means blood and juice stasis in the organ. Likewise, the respiratory center is paralyzed. And here --" she pointed to the lungs again, "we have foreign material and food pulp in the bronchi. So he also inhaled his stomach contents."
"And what was that?"
The redhead grabbed a glass that was next to the table. "Here's the stomach contents. I suspect it was something like pizza mixed with alcohol." Then she pointed to the dead man's neck area. "The neck fracture came shortly after. We don't have any subcutaneous bleeding on the spine."
Elizabeth nodded slowly. If there had been under bleeding on the spine, that would be proof that Burns had died from the broken neck. "And what exactly did he die from? From the fall or something else?" she asked.
"It's almost a kind of polytrauma," Maggie answered promptly, "that is, a death from multiple causes, where any one cause would be sufficient on its own to cause death. The methanol poisoning, the fall into the well, the choking on vomit."
"And this one was asphyxiated?"
"Looks like it at first glance, and it happens a lot," Maggie said. "It's called gastric content aspiration. Unconscious people, especially so-called alcohol-intoxicated people, sometimes inhale their stomach contents, especially if they're in a lying position. The protective cough reflex is absent when people are unconscious or heavily intoxicated."
Elizabeth still had in mind the sight of the vomit that covered the entire bottom of the well and with which Burns had splattered all over the apartment. "Then Burns inhaled his vomit again?"
"Yes. Aspiration, which is the inhalation of liquid or solid foreign material, can cause the victim to suffocate, especially in large quantities. Agonal aspiration is confined to the trachea and the main bronchi adjacent to it, whereas vital or alive aspiration occurs to the periphery or the smallest bronchi and alveoli. I experienced this recently. Food pulp landed in the bronchi, then went into the lungs, and that was it." She paused. "That's why it's important to put unconscious people in a lateral recumbent position and stick their head backward. Then nothing happens."
Elizabeth took a long look at her wife and frowned a little. "What does the fact that Burns is lying here dead teach us?"
"That he poisoned himself or someone else poisoned him with methanol," Maggie said. "It's possible both ways. The first case he did it himself is more likely, though."
"Then he causally poisoned himself with the methanol and then either choked on his vomit or broke his neck in the well?"
Maggie nodded slowly. "Or both. The methanol came first, though."
"Now, if we thought Burns was the killer," the detective said, "who wanted revenge on the lawyer, the psychiatrist, and everyone involved in the trial --" She glanced at her mother. "That would be an extraordinary feat for a dead man."
"You could say that. So someone else has to be the killer," Jane sighed with a nod.
"And since someone with methanol murdered Burns," Elizabeth continued, "the person who did it could be just that person. The real murderer! If that's the case. And the one we thought was the culprit, Burns, also ended up being one of his victims. Similar to the others, the second-order victims, as we have so nicely called them." She considered for a moment. "There has also been no information received from the missing persons from the chase and the press campaign. And why did this man die violently? Could he still be the killer of the others? Or is there a puppet master behind all this? Are we dealing with a phantom again, as with the Nameless One?"
Jane took a deep breath. "Who knows."
"Who knows," Maggie agreed.
"Then, dear family and colleagues," Elizabeth concluded, "we should take another look at the trial records to see if there isn't someone else who might have an equally strong or even stronger motive. Or we may need to look in a different direction."
"Whatever you say, Liz," Jane murmured, nodding.
Elizabeth's cell phone rang, it was the hospital's phone number where Samantha Conway lay.
xxx
The call hit Elizabeth like a hammer blow.
"Samantha Conway is dead." After a tiny pause. "We suspect a pulmonary embolism."
"I'll be right there!" the detective groaned. With that, she left Jane and Maggie standing in the autopsy with the alcohol-smelling corpse of Kevin Burns, ran out to her car, and sped from the BPD to Hospital East Boston.
When she got there, the doctors had just finished resuscitating him. Where "finished" wasn't the right word because that would have meant that the resuscitation had been successful. But it was not, although they had tried everything. When Elizabeth was standing in front of Kevin Burns' body, Samantha Conway died. One of the doctors was in the process of filling out the death certificate.
Elizabeth reached for her cell phone to call Maura and request an immediate autopsy on the body, then turned to the nurse. Nurse Lydia, the woman who had shown Elizabeth the door earlier. "Did anyone see anything?"
"Heaven sent you," the nurse said, close to tears.
"All of a sudden?"
Lydia pointed to the ECG recording. "You see that? It's like there was an embolism. It may have been a heart attack. Stress-related."
"But it could also be that someone helped it, right?"
"You're the detective," the nurse replied. "And I'm not a doctor. But yes, it could be, although a heart attack would surprise no one given the patient's condition, and with all the stress she's been under --"
Elizabeth heard the quiet reproach in the nurse's voice as if to say, I f it were a heart attack, you wouldn't be entirely innocent of it because you still had to pull the son out of the hat.
"All right," said the detective. And wondered once again at the inappropriate situations in which people sometimes said 'all right'. "I'll look around a bit and be right back." Then she called Jane.
"Do you have anything new, Liz?"
Elizabeth looked around with furrowed brows. "I don't know yet. Send some officers over to question people."
Jane paused for a moment. "Do you think it was murder?"
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes as she looked around again. "I don't know. If it was, the perp would have to be pretty damn fast. And damn hard-nosed. How could he know Samantha Conway was here?"
"Some people suspect things like that," Jane replied. "Keep your chin up."
Elizabeth took a deep breath. "Yes. I'll see you at BPD." Then she ended the call.
"Detective Rizzoli --" A voice made her whirl around. A young man in a white doctor's coat stood before her, obviously a resident.
"Can I help you?" asked Elizabeth curtly, her eyebrows drawn together. She wasn't in the mood for small talk, but maybe the man had seen something.
"Don't you remember me?" the doctor asked. "We spoke briefly after Dr. Isles' lecture a few days ago."
Elizabeth remembered her sister's lecture, which she had joined a little later, but still didn't recognize the man.
"Your colleague is here, too," the young man added.
Elizabeth looked at him in confusion, with her eyebrows drawn together. "What colleague?"
"Well, the young man was also at Dr. Isles' lecture. A few days ago. In the BCU. You were there, too, weren't you? You were sitting at the top. The young man was assisting Dr. Isles. What's his name --?"
"You mean Mr. Martinek?"
"Yes, that's right."
The things people see,went through the detective's mind. Who needs the NSA anymore? "And Mr. Martinel is here?" Behind Elizabeth's forehead, it worked. Why was Carl here? Had he seen Samantha Conway? Or had he seen who was with her? Was he now investigating on his own? He was a hotshot who could bring himself to go after the perpetrator and put himself in danger.
"I just saw him," the young doctor said. "I tried talking to him, but he seemed to be in a hurry."
"Like he was chasing someone?"
"Yes, exactly."
"Okay, thank you," Elizabeth said, pulling out her cell phone again. "Thank you so much. I'll get back to you." She had to find Carl and hear what he'd seen if he had seen anything.
And anyway - what was he doing here?
She hurried outside to make her phone call in peace. Entered the parking lot. And saw Carl, and he got into a car and drove off.
After him, she thought and called Jane again. "I've got another hot lead here."
"You're making it exciting," Jane replied, sitting behind her desk.
"As soon as I get more details, I'll let you know, Ma. Maybe it's a false trail. Then I don't want to shout about it and look foolish."
"I can understand that, Liz," Jane replied, opening her laptop with her free hand. "Only the paranoid survive."
Elizabeth glanced at her phone, and the battery was almost dead. The hell, she told herself. After all, she was going to drive, not talk on the phone.
She got in the car and hit the gas.
Should she call Carl? But if he investigated here on his own, he might stop immediately. Besides, he'd know she was behind him. And maybe he did have a hot lead; the boy was a clever little fellow, and Elizabeth didn't want to take that chance.
And then there was the question of who the real killer was. Was he also the man who had held Samantha Conway captive?
He's younger. His voice is different, Samantha had said, now dead.
Elizabeth decided to call Katherine. The doctor should take care of this lead.
The detective took the cell phone, paired it with the car's Bluetooth setup, stepped on the gas, turned onto the street in front of the hospital, and took up Carl's pursuit.