‘Jesus Christ!’

After reaching for her digital camera and documenting everything, Doctor Hove finished undressing the body, sprayed it with fungicide and used a hose with a powerful water jet to methodically wash and disinfect every inch of it. With that over, she turned on her digital voice recorder and started the official examination.

She began by stating the date and time, followed by the case number. After that, she described the general state of the body. Now it was time to move into all the grisly details.

Using a magnifying headset with a directional light, Doctor Hove began by checking the skin around the neck. There were no suspicious bruises. A quick touch-examination also revealed that neither Nicole Wilson’s larynx nor her trachea had collapsed. The hyoid bone in her neck also didn’t seem to be fractured. There was absolutely nothing to suggest that she had been strangled by hand, or any other method.

Using her thumb and index finger, Doctor Hove pulled open Nicole’s eyelids and, with the help of the magnifying headset, carefully studied her eyes. As expected, her corneas were cloudy and opaque, but what the doctor was looking for were minute red specks that could be dotting her eyes or their lids, called petechiae. These tiny hemorrhages in blood vessels can occur anywhere in the body, and for a number of reasons, but when they occur in the eyes and on the eyelids it’s usually due to blockage of the respiratory system – suffocation or asphyxiation.

Doctor Hove saw none. It also didn’t seem like Nicole Wilson had died from lack of oxygen.

Her next step was to check all of Nicole’s cavities for any signs of aggression, sexual or otherwise. She began with her mouth, pulling it open and first checking for any trauma or skin and teeth color alteration. Certain poisons will leave a clear indication of having being used by either burning the fragile skin inside the victim’s mouth, or leaving a residue that will discolor the teeth and tongue, or both. Doctor Hove found no primary indications of poisoning, but she’d have to wait for the results from the toxicology tests to be completely sure.

She was about to move on when something caught her attention.

‘Wait a second,’ she whispered to herself, turning the light on her magnifying headset back on and squinting at the inside of Nicole Wilson’s mouth. ‘What do we have here?’

She examined the victim’s throat for a moment.

‘I’ll be damned.’

Carefully, the doctor moved the head left, then right, then down a fraction. She had no doubt about it, there was definitely something lodged in the victim’s throat.

From the instrument table to her right she grabbed a digital camera and proceeded to photograph the object undisturbed, snapping three shots from different angles. Once that was done, she retrieved a pair of surgical fishing forceps and inserted them into Nicole’s mouth. It took her just a couple of seconds to pinch the edge of the object she could see. It looked like a thick piece of paper. Cautiously, she began extracting it from the throat.

‘What the hell?’

What at first looked like a paper fragment just kept on coming – three, four, five inches long before it finally came loose. The piece of paper had been tightly rolled up into a tube, then inserted into Nicole Wilson’s throat.

Doctor Hove deposited the rolled-up piece of paper on to an aluminum tray on the table, grabbed her camera once again, and snapped a couple more shots.

She put the camera down and very slowly started to unroll the paper tube.

Despite everything she’d seen in all her years as a pathologist and medical examiner, and she’d seen things that defied belief, as she held the unrolled tube of paper in her hands, Doctor Hove had to pause for breath.

‘Oh fuck!’

Ten

The day outside was bright and warm, with a cloudless blue sky that could’ve belonged in the Caribbean. Even at that time in the morning, and with the breeze that blew from the west, temperatures were already getting up to 68°F.

Garcia drove while Hunter re-studied Nicole Wilson’s fact sheet and the photographs in both files the captain had given them. As they merged on to Harbor Freeway, heading towards the airport, Hunter’s cellphone rang inside his pocket.

‘Detective Hunter, Homicide Special,’ he answered on the second ring.

‘Robert, it’s Doctor Carolyn Hove at the LA County Coroner.’

‘Oh, hi, Doc.’ Hunter wasn’t expecting her call so soon.

‘I’m not sure if “welcome” is the right word, but . . . welcome back.’

‘Thanks.’

Doctor Hove sounded tired, which Hunter knew wasn’t that unusual due to her workload and the problems she faced when it came to sleeping. Not that she had ever discussed it with him or anyone else for that matter, but Hunter knew about her husband, and he had recognized the telltale signs of insomnia over a year ago, just after her loss. He was well qualified to do so.

Hunter was an insomniac himself. He had struggled with it most of his life. It’d started mildly, just after his mother lost her battle with cancer. As the years went by it intensified, but Hunter quickly learned that his insomnia was nothing more than his brain’s defense mechanism so he didn’t have to deal with the ghastly nightmares that tormented him almost every night. Instead of fighting it, he simply learned to live with it. He could survive on three, sometimes two hours of sleep a night for weeks.

‘I just finished the autopsy on case 75249-6. Young female identified as Nicole Wilson. According to the case file, you’re the lead, is that correct?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘OK.’ Hunter heard the sound of pages turning. ‘I think that you’ll want to have a look at what I found, Robert.’

‘Sure, Doc. But we’re just on our way to the location where the body was found. We’ll drop by the morgue in, let’s say –’ he consulted his watch – ‘two hours, give or take.’

There was a heavy pause. When Doctor Hove spoke again, there was something else in her tone of voice – trepidation – that was very unusual.

‘Trust me, Robert, I really think that you should have a look at this first.’

Eleven

The main facility of the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner on North Mission Road was an impressive building, both in size and architecture. Showing hints of Renaissance and neoclassicism, the large hospital-turned-morgue was fronted by terracotta bricks with light-gray details. Old-fashioned lampposts flanked the extravagant entrance stairway, and from the exterior alone one would be forgiven for thinking that the inspiration for such lavish design had come from the old town of Prague, or the historic universities of Oxford.

Garcia parked in the area reserved for law enforcement officials and both detectives took the stairs up to the main building in a hurry. They pushed open the large glass doors that led into an awfully busy, but pleasantly air-conditioned, lobby and stepped inside.

Neither Hunter nor Garcia were too surprised as to the number of people mingling around the reception foyer. As the busiest coroner in the whole of the USA, the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner could receive anywhere up to one hundred bodies a day. The LACDC was also the only department of coroner in the country with an official gift shop, where one could purchase sweatshirts, baseball caps, mugs, skeleton bones and a multitude of other items, all carrying the legitimate logo of the Los Angeles morgue.