discount store. There was an 8” sushi knife, a santoku knife, a sort of narrow-bladed cleaver, a bread knife, and a couple of steak knives with serrated blades.
Zoë had been stabbed once in the fleshy place where her neck met her right shoulder, by a right-handed person of similar height. That was useful information, because it could help us build a case and establish a scenario once we had a suspect.
The knife had slid under her collarbone and then been withdrawn. Then she had turned or been turned, because the rest of the cuts were from the front. There were numerous shallow cuts on her hands, evidence that she had attempted to defend herself. The ultimate cause of her death was bleeding from several deep wounds in her lower chest, just below her rib cage.
It was always sad to read that kind of report, and then envision the process by which someone had died. It was all too easy to imagine Zoë’s fear, her pain, her desperate attempt to protect herself.
But as a homicide detective, it’s my job to put those emotions aside and concentrate on the facts. I scanned down the report, looking for additional information that might be useful.
“Listen to this,” I said to Ray. “Her blood alcohol was .08.”
He scooted his chair over to look at the report with me. “And that matters because …? She wasn’t operating a motor vehicle at the time of her death.”
I pulled out my notes from the scene. “No beer or wine bottles in the trash,” I said. “There was a vodka bottle in the freezer, though no dirty glasses in the sink.”
I flashed back to a time nearly two years before, when Mike and I had been estranged, when we were forced to work a case together. I picked up a water bottle he’d been drinking from, and discovered it was filled with vodka.
I shook that memory away. “I wonder if she did her drinking somewhere else.”
“Perhaps with her assailant?”
“I think that’s an interesting conjecture.”
We looked at her stomach contents. There was ethanol present, the kind of alcohol in beer, wine and cocktails. Doc’s tests couldn’t tell exactly what kind of alcohol she’d had, but he could tell that her last meal had been sushi. The process of digesting food stops at death, so from the food there he could determine that she had eaten various types of seasoned raw fish and rice about six hours before her death.
That was a good lead. Since there was none of the residue you might expect in the trash if someone was preparing a meal at home, and no glassware used for drinking, we could assume that she had eaten out. “Any restaurant receipts in her purse?” Ray asked.
We looked at the reports from the evidence techs. There were several credit card receipts in a compartment of her wallet, but none from Sunday, and none from a sushi restaurant. “That would have been too easy,” Ray said.
“We can still request a list of her charges from her credit card companies if we need to,” I said. “See if she had a regular place she liked to go. Or we could just ask Anna Yang.”
I started making a list of questions to ask Anna. We needed to know about Zoë’s drinking habits, and if she had a favorite restaurant where she might have taken a date. If we couldn’t get a good guess from Anna, we’d start at the closest restaurants and then radiate outward.
The next thing in the autopsy report was a surprise. Tests for acid phosphatase, an enzyme in semen, and P30, a semen-specific glycoprotein, revealed the presence of semen in her vaginal fluid. “Why would there be sperm in a lesbian’s vagina?” I asked Ray. “Was she raped?”
Making the distinction between rape and consensual sex is often a tough call, particularly when the woman is dead and can’t give us her side of the story. In that case, her corpse has to tell the tale.
A woman who is raped often scratches her assailant with her fingernails, and traces of the assailant’s hair or blood can be found under her nails. Doc
Zoë had been stabbed once in the fleshy place where her neck met her right shoulder, by a right-handed person of similar height. That was useful information, because it could help us build a case and establish a scenario once we had a suspect.
The knife had slid under her collarbone and then been withdrawn. Then she had turned or been turned, because the rest of the cuts were from the front. There were numerous shallow cuts on her hands, evidence that she had attempted to defend herself. The ultimate cause of her death was bleeding from several deep wounds in her lower chest, just below her rib cage.
It was always sad to read that kind of report, and then envision the process by which someone had died. It was all too easy to imagine Zoë’s fear, her pain, her desperate attempt to protect herself.
But as a homicide detective, it’s my job to put those emotions aside and concentrate on the facts. I scanned down the report, looking for additional information that might be useful.
“Listen to this,” I said to Ray. “Her blood alcohol was .08.”
He scooted his chair over to look at the report with me. “And that matters because …? She wasn’t operating a motor vehicle at the time of her death.”
I pulled out my notes from the scene. “No beer or wine bottles in the trash,” I said. “There was a vodka bottle in the freezer, though no dirty glasses in the sink.”
I flashed back to a time nearly two years before, when Mike and I had been estranged, when we were forced to work a case together. I picked up a water bottle he’d been drinking from, and discovered it was filled with vodka.
I shook that memory away. “I wonder if she did her drinking somewhere else.”
“Perhaps with her assailant?”
“I think that’s an interesting conjecture.”
We looked at her stomach contents. There was ethanol present, the kind of alcohol in beer, wine and cocktails. Doc’s tests couldn’t tell exactly what kind of alcohol she’d had, but he could tell that her last meal had been sushi. The process of digesting food stops at death, so from the food there he could determine that she had eaten various types of seasoned raw fish and rice about six hours before her death.
That was a good lead. Since there was none of the residue you might expect in the trash if someone was preparing a meal at home, and no glassware used for drinking, we could assume that she had eaten out. “Any restaurant receipts in her purse?” Ray asked.
We looked at the reports from the evidence techs. There were several credit card receipts in a compartment of her wallet, but none from Sunday, and none from a sushi restaurant. “That would have been too easy,” Ray said.
“We can still request a list of her charges from her credit card companies if we need to,” I said. “See if she had a regular place she liked to go. Or we could just ask Anna Yang.”
I started making a list of questions to ask Anna. We needed to know about Zoë’s drinking habits, and if she had a favorite restaurant where she might have taken a date. If we couldn’t get a good guess from Anna, we’d start at the closest restaurants and then radiate outward.
The next thing in the autopsy report was a surprise. Tests for acid phosphatase, an enzyme in semen, and P30, a semen-specific glycoprotein, revealed the presence of semen in her vaginal fluid. “Why would there be sperm in a lesbian’s vagina?” I asked Ray. “Was she raped?”
Making the distinction between rape and consensual sex is often a tough call, particularly when the woman is dead and can’t give us her side of the story. In that case, her corpse has to tell the tale.
A woman who is raped often scratches her assailant with her fingernails, and traces of the assailant’s hair or blood can be found under her nails. Doc
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