Chapter Four: How Many Men Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb?
Amanda hunted in the box of candies she kept near the tree for when the excitement got the better of her children, nerves got frayed or tears fell. She handed a red and white cane to CJ and told him to go sit on the sofa until he had finished it. Then with a smile she turned to her other son.
"You know stairs are dangerous, Christmas lights are also dangerous, put them together what do you get?"
Dion looked down at his feet, knowing that he had been lucky that it had only been his brother's pride that he had hurt. "I'm sorry, Mom, but he's … well, he keeps telling me that he knows what you've got me for Christmas and I'm gonna be disappointed!"
Amanda let out a short laugh, "Honey, he has no idea what you have for Christmas, because, trust me, it is so wonderful that if he did he wouldn't be able to keep quiet about it. Now go, get yourself a candy cane and sit and enjoy it. You can put the cartoons on, I need to just check on something in the kitchen, but call me if you need me, ok?"
Dion's eyes were now huge and bright, the thoughts of what he could possibly be getting for Christmas filling his mind. He nodded and made his way silently into the living room, grabbed his sweet and switched on the TV. As Amanda heard the sound of the theme tune to Recess fill the air she headed for the kitchen, made herself a coffee and sat at the table; she needed to think, really think, and try to remember what it was that had eluded her all this time.
The file on her desk seemed to mock her, and in frustration she picked up the folder on Mark Jamieson and plonked it down over the top so that the name Fred Morganstern no longer screamed at her.
She stared at the body on the gurney over to the right of the lab. She had looked him over, done the autopsy, looked him over again, and she knew that something was wrong, she just couldn't work out what it was.
Amanda went and filled her coffee cup again, and then she got her laptop from its place in the hallway, booted it up and typed in Fred's name. It didn't take long for all the details to appear and she skated over the basics, which were that he was about six feet tall, fiftyish, well built, muscle not fat, and the most basic part of all, he was dead. Cause of death was listed as pending. It had been that way five years ago and it was still that way now, but as Amanda sat there she realised that she may have, indirectly, been handed the cause if not on a plate, then at least something close to it.
Fred had been found reasonably quickly after death, and once the scene had been secured, and Amanda had checked in with the ME's Office she had collected her bag and made her way to the Morganstern's home for a second time. The body was hanging limply from the eaves of the large and impressive house next to Mark's and, after she had decided that she was unable to pronounce the man dead until he had been cut free, Amanda had waited for the crime scene guys to come and take pictures and process the crime scene spending the time looking around and wondering what it was that had caused the man to end his life in such an awful way.
Steve had called out for a ladder from the beach house; she had used that excuse to come look around unofficially and she knew that Jesse and Mark had done the same. Steve had then rescued a distraught Bert and he had disappeared from her sight, keeping the man away from the front of the property so as not to upset him further or disturb the crime scene. She had made her call to the ME and gathered her equipment once she knew that Bert was safe, and all thoughts of a pleasant evening left her as she became the consummate professional of her working hours.
There were steps going up to the house leading to the main entrance. Amanda could see where a ladder had been before it had fallen by slight scuff marks on the concrete, and she wished they lived in Colorado where there would have been at least a foot of snow to help her on her way, showing her footprints, ladder imprints, anything would have been nice.
By the time Amanda was able to take a closer look at the body it was clear that even if she hadn't known it, this was a very recently dead person. The skin had taken on a waxy appearance; even in the pale wintery light she could see the blue-grey colour that now tinged the face and neck. Fred's lips and nails were pale, and as she checked the temperature of the area Amanda was very surprised to find that it was already down to fifty degrees Fahrenheit. She hadn't expected Fred's body temperature to have dropped very much from the approximate norm of 98.6, unless, of course he had been outside for a while, but this was California, and if the weather was chilly people tended to stay indoors unless they had no choice.
The Christmas lights, which were strung up to the eaves, followed the line of the roof all around the house, but now they were pulled and stretched out of shape. Amanda checked the position of the body again from underneath, wondered idly where they would make the white tape outline, and then with a sigh waited for him to be cut free so that she could begin to check him over wanting to see whether anything could be gained from examining him further at the scene.
The records scrolling up the screen in front of her told Amanda that she had in fact let the body be taken away quite quickly. The positioning had been noted, and having disturbed the corpse anyway she had decided to get it transported back to the warm, coffee laden lab before she began her work. Leaving her boys with Mark and sending Ms. June on her way, Amanda had followed the coroner's wagon back to Community General, somehow feeling that being so close by she owed it to Fred to begin work immediately.
She clicked off her voice recorder, resisted the temptation to throw it across the room and instead sat heavily in her chair and killed a paper clip. Once the metal was lying in a straight line on her desk she began to go over what she had. Fred Morganstern was dead, there was no doubt about that, what was in doubt was why. From what Amanda could see he had hung by his throat from the side of a house, he hadn't broken his neck, but he had died, probably of asphyxiation.
The position in which he had been found had been such that he should have hung himself, so why hadn't he? Many people who intended to commit suicide by hanging had to endure a far more painful death because the drop hadn't been sufficient for them to break their neck. Leaping from the top of a two storey house should have eliminated that problem but his neck wasn't broken, death wouldn't have been instantaneous and he had never been alone. So, maybe he had been on the ladder, slipped and fallen, but wouldn't he have cried out? Bert had been almost hysterical, devastated that he had heard his brother yell once and done nothing. Still Fred must have been hanging there a while to have died the way he did, and he should have called out again and again, but Bert claimed to have heard only the one shout. Could you suffocate silently? Amanda shook her head as she realised she had no idea.
"So why is he here and not in the ER? There is no reason why this man is dead, he should have been spotted and saved, unless someone didn't want him to live," and she guessed that that someone could have been Fred himself.
With a deep sigh she pushed her suspicions away and began to take down detailed notes on the bruises on the neck. There were four thin rows of discolouration, which tallied with the amount of light wire around Fred's throat, the pattern of the flex went up behind the ears, forming an inverted v, confirming, if she needed it, the theory of suffocation rather than manual strangulation.
Knowing that it was always a good idea to assume at least one greenhorn on every murder enquiry, she had listed the differences between the ligature marks left in manual strangulation as opposed to a hanging. Strangled victims' bruises were straight, because the killer positions himself directly behind or to the side of his victim, contrasting to a suicide or lynching, which result in an inverted 'v', when the victim is left dangling with the rope attached above the head.
Amanda closed down the programme on her computer, there was nothing else there, nothing that would help her anyway. For a few minutes her mind went over what had happened to CJ. She had been coming out of the den when she had heard the horseplay going on at the top of the short flight of steps up to the living room and she was just in time to see her younger son lose his footing and reach out wildly for the banister. He hadn't made it, but he had been able to grab hold of the fairy lights that she had hanging underneath it on clips, and they had undoubtedly broken his fall, as, instead of falling the entire length, he had swung round, banged his shoulder on the wall and ended up in a tearful heap on the third stair.
Amanda picked up a piece of paper from by the phone and began to make some notes. What if Fred had slipped, fallen over the edge, grabbed for the lights, and then got himself caught up in them? That had been one of her original thoughts five years ago, and so she wrote that down first, but then two more sinister scenarios came to mind; maybe he had been pushed over the side in an attempt to kill him, he had gotten caught up and the lights had done the job, causing him to die a far more painful death than either a fall or hanging could cause. Or he had worn the lights somehow draped around him and as he attached them gradually to the eaves, someone on the ground had pulled the ladder out from under him leaving him hanging, but not hanged. She drew a line underneath what she had written, it wasn't her job to sort all this out, but at least she knew that if she mentioned it to her friends they would be able to work on it together.
"Mommy, Mommy, Dion had another candy, can I have another one, can I, can I, please?"
Deciding with a sigh that CJ was spending so much time with Jesse that he was beginning to sound like him, Amanda shook her memories and new ideas away, she'd had enough speculating for now, and besides if she didn't get to the living room quickly there would be no canes left for her.