Harm None by Will North

Author:Will North
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Police Procedural, Mystery & Detective, Paranormal, British, Crime, Fantasy, Women Sleuths, Witches, Fiction
ISBN: 9781620152133
Publisher: Booktrope Editions
Published: 2014-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

WEST’S TEAM ARRIVED just a half hour behind Davies and Bates. The first thing they’d done was to lay grated aluminum stepping plates down in the hall and along the approach to the body in the parlor, so as to protect the floor. While one of the men fiber-taped the parlor door and frame for hairs or threads and West took wide-angle photos of the interior, others began canvassing the rest of the house, taking prints, and checking the ground in back near the cellar entry. One of them found the woman’s purse in the upstairs bedroom and recorded everything that was in it, finally bagging and tagging it all. The Tactical Aid Group men—West’s “knuckle-draggers”—would be along soon to really take the place apart.

West lowered his camera when he heard a Tyvek boiler suit rustle behind him.

“You plan on spending all day taking pictures of corpses, Calum?”

“Doc! How’d you get here so fast?”

“I was on my way to a meeting at the hospital in Truro,” the pathologist Jennifer Duncan said, “and came directly. Always rather spend a day with a body than in a meeting.”

“Me too. Something dreadfully wrong with both of us.”

“That’s some knife,” Duncan said, looking over West’s shoulder.

“Care for a closer look?”

“Try to stop me.”

Standing on the aluminum plates, the two of them bent over the body on the settee.

The pathologist manipulated limbs. “Rigor’s well established. No sign it’s going off yet, either.”

Working slowly, their hands in surgical gloves, Duncan and West cut away Judith Chynoweth’s clothes, bagging and tagging them as they went, but taking care not to disturb the knife. When the body was naked, Duncan took oral, vaginal, and anal swabs, slipping the swabs into plastic vials and marking them. Then West fiber-taped the body for any additional thread or hair traces. Duncan inserted a long digital thermometer into the victim’s rectum to get a body temperature by which to estimate time of death.

After a while, she turned to West, shaking her head. “Less than twelve hours. Best I can do from here.”

“No blood. Dead before she was knifed?”

The voice came from behind them and they turned to find Davies at the entry in her own Tyvek bodysuit.

“The absence of exsanguination tells us nothing, Morgan,” Duncan said. “She could very well have been alive when stabbed. But because the knife remained, it can seal the wound like a stopper.”

“Only knifings we see down here tend to be street fights or domestics. Stabbers usually take the knife with them.”

“I know. This is odd. And suspicious. It doesn’t look like suicide.”

“Yeah,” West agreed. “Nobody knifes themselves through their clothes; they always lift them.”

“Not always, Calum. There are exceptions. You’ll have to wait till the postmortem for a definitive cause of death, I’m afraid, Morgan.”

Davies turned to West. “Undertaker’s van is here, Calum. Your boys are ready with the body bag.”

“We’ve got to improvise a barrier to isolate the knife,” Duncan said.

West thought for a moment. “Got it. I’ve a small box in the car. We can place it in a sterile bag and sit it atop the knife.

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