Livid

Book 26: Kay Scarpetta

by Patricia Cornwell

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

COMING SOON: THE UNSTOPPABLE NEW THRILLER FROM THE GLOBAL #1 BESTSELLER

In this thrilling new instalment of Patricia Cornwell's #1 bestselling series, chief medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta finds herself a reluctant star witness in a sensational televised murder trial causing chaos in Old Town Alexandria with the threat of violent protests.

Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has just inherited one of the most notorious cases of her career. Two years ago, a former beauty queen's body washed up on the shore of Wallops Island, Virginia. She was last seen on a boat with her fiancé, who has since been held in jail while awaiting trial.

Scarpetta must act as the expert witness for the case - an investigation previously botched by another forensic pathologist. After a gruelling cross-examination by the prosecutor, Scarpetta leaves the court only to discover that the sister of the judge on her case has been found dead.

Scarpetta ultimately finds herself facing a powerful, invisible enemy - who's planning the unthinkable . . .

'ONE OF THE BEST CRIME WRITERS WRITING TODAY' GUARDIAN

'ASTONISHING . . . THIRTY YEARS ON, THERE'S STILL NO OTHER CRIME WRITER LIKE HER' SUNDAY TIMES

'AMERICA'S MOST STIMULATING AND CHILLING WRITER OF CRIME FICTION' THE TIMES

Release date: October 25, 2022

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

After three days in the Atlantic Ocean during a heat wave, April Tupelo wasn’t recognizable to her family.

What the cops call a floater, the former beauty queen was marbled green and bloated by gases from decomposition. The outer layer of her skin and her long blond hair had sloughed off. Her eyes, ears, lips and other delicate body parts were gone, the images displayed inside the crowded courtroom like something from the movie Jaws.

I wasn’t working in Virginia when her remains washed ashore on Wallops Island twenty-one months ago. I didn’t go to the scene or perform the autopsy. The forensic pathologist who did isn’t alive to amend his egregious errors. By the time I got involved, April Tupelo’s fiancé had been indicted for first-degree murder and mutilating a dead body.

He was in jail awaiting trial, held in isolation without bail, the story headline news internationally. The prosecution was a dog with a bone. It didn’t matter what I said.

“Again, let me emphasize how much I regret the necessity of displaying these painful images.” Alexandria’s Commonwealth’s Attorney Bose Flagler carries on in his lyrical drawl, and had this case been mine from the start, we wouldn’t be here now. “Seeing things like this can wound one’s very soul and psyche, isn’t that true, ma’am?”

“I’m not sure what you’re asking,” I reply.

He continues repositioning himself in front of the witness stand, doing what he can to block my view of the jury. A master of choreography, Flagler is mindful of his every move, never straying far from the fixed cameras filming live for Court TV.

“No matter how difficult, we have to look unflinchingly. Would you agree with that, ma’am? That we owe it to April Tupelo to see the full extent of what was done to her at the end of her very short life?” Flagler slowly paces back and forth in front of me. “It’s our moral obligation to do so, isn’t it, ma’am?”

His incessantly calling me ma’am is anything but polite. He’s dismissing me as a silly armchair sleuth guided by hormones and intuition. I’ve been in court with him a number of times since I was appointed chief medical examiner last year. He’s always been obsequiously polite, at times flirty. Until this case I wasn’t the enemy.

“I’m not sure of the question,” I say yet again, and I can tell that the jurors are intrigued by him.

They always are. Charismatic and clever, the thirty-four-year-old bachelor brings to mind Michelangelo’s sculpture of David or Giuliano de’ Medici. But with clothes on, expensive ones. Dipping his hand into a pocket, he slides out the small touchscreen tablet that controls the grotesque slideshow around us.

“I regret the necessity of subjecting everyone to these graphic images,” Flagler says disingenuously as they fill the courtroom monitors in vivid color.

He clicks through multiple photographs of the victim’s body facedown on an autopsy table in the Norfolk morgue. Close-ups of her flayed back and buttocks show four long deep gashes spaced close together, yawning widely and blackish red.

“You’ve seen these photos before, correct?” Flagler asks me.

“Those and many others.”

“And what we’re looking at are the victim’s decomposing remains, and the savage knife cuts to her back from when the defendant tried to turn her into fish bait—”

“Objection!”

“What this time, Mister Gallo?” Judge Annie Chilton asks from her black leather chair flanked by the state and U.S. flags, the bronze seal of Virginia behind her.

“The photos are inflammatory and prejudicial. He’s testifying, Your Honor! Again!”

“Overruled. Again. Please rephrase, and let’s move on.”

In her early fifties, with a compelling face and short dark hair, Annie is tall and lanky, more handsome than pretty. Based on her demeanor toward me as I’ve been testifying this afternoon, you’d never guess we’ve known each other since our law school days at Georgetown. You wouldn’t suppose we were roommates at the time or that she encouraged my return to Virginia last year.

In fact, she was the deciding factor, influencing Governor Roxane Dare to appoint me. All was fine until last month when Annie started avoiding me for no apparent reason.

“Thank you, Your Honor. Let me try a different way,” Flagler says in his compelling baritone while people around us mutter angrily and sob. “What we’re seeing is severe damage inflicted postmortem. In other words, after death, correct, ma’am?”

“That’s correct,” I answer.

“This is what April Tupelo looked like on the Saturday morning of October seventeenth, two-thousand-twenty, after three days in the ocean?” he asks to more upset sounds around us.

“In these photographs the body has been cleaned up, as you can see,” I reply. “And decomposition is continuing at a rapid rate. So, she’s not going to look exactly as she did when she was first found—”

“Ma’am, would you agree that most of what you experience as a matter of routine would be traumatizing for a normal person?”

“Again, I’m not sure what—”

“My point is, you’re accustomed to these sorts of nightmares. The dreadful images we’ve been looking at since you took the stand are part of your routine, your bread and butter. It’s what you’re paid to do, isn’t that true?”

“I don’t think you ever get accustomed to—”

“One dead body after the next. Yet another stiff on the slab. Day after day, it never stops, if we’re honest. Let’s just call things what they are. Death is darn ugly. There’s nothing pretty about it. What was that nursery rhyme? The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…?”

“Objection!” Sal Gallo is on his feet.

“… They play pinochle on your snout…? Or something like that, ma’am?” Flagler continues stereotyping me as antisocial and morbidly peculiar while hardly letting me get in a word. “I realize that empathizing isn’t what you’re paid to do—”

“Your Honor, I’m just going to keep objecting to the commonwealth’s attorney badgering the witness!” Gallo is red-faced in his rumpled blue seersucker suit and crooked bow tie. “The only reason for his ranting and harassing is to prejudice the jury.”

“Overruled.”

“I’d like my continuing objection noted on the record.”

“So noted.”

“Again, I request a mistrial.” Gallo sits back down, disgusted.

“Denied.”

It’s obvious what Bose Flagler is doing. His strategies have been cleverly and carefully planned from the start. His intention is for me to make the worst impression imaginable on the jurors. That’s why he’s saved me as his last witness before resting his case.

The only reason he’s called me to the stand at all is for that singular purpose. To dismantle me. To impeach my credibility and integrity, leaving negative impressions foremost in the jurors’ minds. If Flagler doesn’t cause reasonable doubt about my testimony, he can’t win.

“Your Honor?” he offers politely, unflappably. “I think it only fair for the jury to know what services the witness receives compensation for as the chief medical examiner of our fine Commonwealth. You know, what’s in her job description that entitles her to be paid a handsome six-figure salary funded by our tax dollars?”

“Objection! Here we go again, Your Honor!” Gallo erupts. “And I believe Mister Flagler is handsomely compensated by these same taxpayers!”

“Not all that handsomely,” he fires back, some people laughing.

“Mister Gallo, your objection is overruled.”

The restless noise inside the crowded courtroom is getting louder as Flagler carries on with his outrageous antics while assassinating my character. Annie continues to allow it. I’ve been in her courtroom before, and don’t expect special treatment because we’re friends. But she won’t make eye contact, and is barely respectful. Something’s wrong, and has been for weeks.

“My point?” Flagler resumes. “We want to know what’s expected of the witness in this most unusual profession she’s chosen. One that very few people know much about, I might add. Or want to, for that matter?”

“Your Honor!” Gallo’s voice is getting hoarse. “The commonwealth’s attorney is doing everything he can to impeach Doctor Scarpetta’s credibility. That’s the only reason he has her on the stand. He’s trying mightily to make the jury distrust her because he doesn’t have a case! He knows that what he’s orchestrated is a witch hunt!”

“That’s enough,” Annie decides. “And I’m asking the jury to disregard defense counsel’s comment about this proceeding being a witch hunt. Let’s refrain from any further asides.” She sternly peers down from her lofty perch. “What’s your objection, Mister Gallo?”

“The prosecution is preaching a sermon and testifying!” he says as Flagler continues ignoring him, loudly flipping pages, skimming his notes. “Not to mention going after Doctor Scarpetta nonstop, and insulting her.” Gallo is so angry his voice shakes. “She can’t even finish a sentence!”

The prominent defense attorney has been sticking up for me with great flourishes of chivalry because what I have to say is helpful to him for once. That will change soon enough when my findings don’t suit him in some other case.

“Your objection has been noted, Mister Gallo.” Annie dismisses him yet again. “Mister Flagler, you may continue.”

“If I could have just a few seconds, Your Honor.” He smiles apologetically. “Unlike the witness, I don’t have the memory of a computer. I actually have to check my paperwork, making certain I don’t misspeak.”

Leaning against the witness stand, he shuffles through his notes, cutting quite a figure in his vanilla suit and blue suede shoes. He’s close enough that I detect the verbena eau de parfum he has custom made in a Paris shop on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. I can make out the heraldic crest engraved on his Super Bowl–size gold signet ring.

His wealthy Virginia family traces back to the Norman Conquest. Also the Mayflower and Ellis Island, I’ve heard him boast, depending on whose vote he wants. He’s been given every advantage while groomed for greatness, and I catch whiffs of his citrusy scent as he moves about. He’s dragging things out, making sure he’s the focus of attention, something he’s perfected to an art.

“Ma’am?” Flagler retrieves the touchscreen tablet from his pocket again. “If you’d please direct your attention to what’s displayed on the monitors? Have you seen these?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“Please take a moment to refresh your memory.” He directs my attention to images that scarcely look human.

Displayed on monitors around the room are photographs of April Tupelo’s putrefying remains spangled with starfish and scuttling with crabs. I can well imagine the stench, the static of flies buzzing. Horrors like this don’t happen in the cloistered part of the world where she and the defendant were born and raised, some two hundred miles south of here on a spit of land surrounded by water.

The six-square-mile barrier island’s population is fewer than five hundred, and there’s only one road that will get you there from Virginia’s mainland. Otherwise you need an aircraft or a boat. The location is ideal for those who make a living on the water catching and selling seafood, and operating tourist inns and diners. Wallops Island’s remoteness also makes it ideal for a spaceport.

Home to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the NASA-Wallops facility has four pads, with more under construction. Those living and working in the area are accustomed to the mighty roar of rockets blasting off. They light up the skies over the Atlantic Ocean like gigantic Roman candles, the launches so frequent that the locals barely notice.

The typical payload is space probes and other scientific instruments for NASA and private aerospace industries. Often it’s research experiments, and supplies bound for the International Space Station. In photographs of April Tupelo’s body washed up on the rocky beach, I can make out the launchpads on higher ground in the distance. Starkly etched against the horizon are lightning suppression masts, water towers and generic concrete block buildings.

A rocket juts up from its pad like a colossal stick of white chalk with a sharpened tip, a satellite concealed inside the nose cone. Before taking over the Tupelo case, I had a pretty good idea of the work that goes on at NASA-Wallops. In recent months I’ve learned more, and some of the details are surprising. I wouldn’t have guessed that often it’s the locals who do the fetching when experiments touch down in the water.

It could be anything. The prototype of a crew capsule carrying crash-test mannikins. A flying car with pop-out floats. An amphibious drone that looks like a dolphin. A robotic bird that flies while it spies. The boat pilots who retrieve such curiosities rarely have any idea what they’re carrying or towing back to shore. Most of them aren’t interested, don’t care, and the defendant was hired routinely for such missions.

At the time of April Tupelo’s death, Gilbert Hooke was the twenty-five-year-old owner and operator of a forty-foot charter trawler named Captain Hooke, as one might expect. He and April kept busy working pleasure cruises, fishing trips and other excursions, including official ones for the federal government. On the day she died, they’d retrieved a weather balloon that had been launched 120,000 feet to the edge of space.

Malfunctioning, it hurtled back through the atmosphere, splashing down off the Virginia coast late that morning. Indirectly, this single event may have been a factor in what happened that night. Displayed on a monitor directly across from the witness stand is an image of a uniformed NASA Protective Services special agent who’s young and extremely nice to look at.

He and Hooke are using gaff poles to snag a deflated bright silver balloon hundreds of feet long. Its mysterious gondola brings to mind a shiny metal satellite bobbing in the water on inflatable floats. Juxtaposed to this image is one of April Tupelo’s decomposing body tangled in seaweed and rotted netting on a rocky shore strewn with plastic bottles, a faded boat cushion and other marine detritus.

Hooke admits to getting upset with April. They’d been arguing right before she died. He wrote in his police statement that the NASA special agent paid too much attention to her, and she got off on it. She encouraged it. The couple’s exchanges got angrier as the evening wore on, and based on psychological reports and other confidential materials I’ve reviewed, their relationship was volatile.

They fought often and violently. It would seem she had a habit of encouraging attention from other men, and in general creating drama. It’s Bose Flagler’s contention that the night of her death, Hooke was in a jealous fury. While he and April argued as they sat on the boat drinking beer in the heat, he plotted how to get away with the perfect murder.

Most important was how to dispose of her body, Flagler explains in the cadence of an evangelist. The defendant had to make sure it wouldn’t be found.

Have you seen these?” Flagler asks me over the upset noise around us.

He waves his hand around the courtroom like a game show host, indicating the gruesome images on the multiple big-screen displays.

“Yes,” I reply.

“Do these images accurately depict the condition April Tupelo’s body was in when she washed up on the beach?”

“Yes, as best I know,” I reply. “I wasn’t there but have reviewed the photographs and videos taken by police and death investigators.”

“And you don’t think she looks like a victim of violence, ma’am?”

“What I’m seeing is common when dead bodies are recovered from water—”

“Common? As if anything we might be looking at is common?”

“Objection! Argumentative commenting on the testimony!”

“Sustained.”

“Go ahead, ma’am,” Flagler says to me. “You were talking about how common April Tupelo’s death was.”

“I was saying that usually a dead body will float facedown and partially submerged, the extremities and head hanging lower than the torso.” I explain this to the jury and not Flagler. “Often it’s run over by ships or motorboats.”

Those aboard them rarely have a clue, I continue painting the gory picture. Or if they do, they don’t want to get involved, and keep going. They leave the gruesome discovery for someone else to manage, meaning we don’t always have a history that might correlate with postmortem injuries.

“When human remains have been preyed upon by marine animals and slashed up by a boat propeller, you can understand why one might assume the death was violent.” I summarize for the jury as if Flagler is invisible. “To someone untrained or no longer thinking rationally, it’s easy to attribute such postmortem artifacts to torture, mutilation and murder.”

“Isn’t it also possible, ma’am, that a murder victim might look exactly like what we’re seeing in these photographs and videos?” He again indicates the disturbing images brightly displayed on big flat screens.

“Yes, it’s possible, but—”

“You can’t look at these pictures and from them alone tell us that April Tupelo wasn’t murdered, can you, ma’am?”

“No, not at a glance,” I reply as he continues moving around strategically.

This moment I’m confronted with his dark blue crocodile belt, and the diamond eyes of the silver rampant eagle buckle. I can make out the pearly buttons of his powder-blue cotton shirt, and the gray spots where his flat belly is sweating through it.

“Of course, you weren’t at that Wallops Island scene. You’ve been clear about that, haven’t you? You… weren’t… there…,” he slowly drawls while pacing in front of me. “I mean it’s important the jury’s reminded of that point. You were living in Massachusetts, busy with your life up there. You weren’t even in Virginia, and never saw April Tupelo’s body in person, so to speak, correct?”

“That’s correct.” I’m increasingly uneasy about getting out of here alive.

Enclosed by cherrywood-paneled partitions with a waist-high door, I’m mindful there’s no quick way out as Flagler continues working the courtroom into a frenzy. I steal a glance at Pete Marino, seated up front on the aisle where he can get to me in a hurry. His big sun-weathered face is stony as he takes in everything around him without making it obvious.

“What about the defendant, Gilbert Hooke?” Flagler starts his next tactic, and the rumbling around me is ominous. “How many times have you met with him, ma’am?”

“I haven’t,” I reply.

“The two of you have never been introduced?”

“No.”

“You never visited Mister Hooke while he was locked up in Norfolk jail prior to being transported to Alexandria?”

“No.”

“Maybe you’ve spoken to him by phone?” Flagler persists, and what he’s implying is absurd.

“I haven’t. It wouldn’t be a normal thing for me to do in this case or any other.”

“Why’s that?” He stops pacing, stares at me, shrugging. “Why wouldn’t it be normal?”

“Determining guilt or innocence of the accused isn’t up to the medical examiner,” I reply.

“Then the only time you’ve had any direct exposure to the defendant is this afternoon inside this courtroom? Is that what you’re telling us?”

“That’s correct.” I know better than to let my eyes wander to the defense table.

But it doesn’t mean I’m not aware of Gilbert Hooke seated with his lawyers. He watches me intensely, not reacting to much, the legal pad and pen in front of him remaining untouched.

“And ma’am?” Flagler keeps ramping it up. “Since you haven’t spoken to or met with the defendant, you don’t have an informed opinion about what kind of human being he might really be, now do you?”

“I don’t.”

“You have no direct knowledge about whether he’s capable of cruel acts, including murder and mutilation? You couldn’t possibly know if he’s the cold-blooded monster people say he is, now could you?”

“I have no direct knowledge—”

“Objection!”

“You wouldn’t have personal knowledge about whether Gilbert Hooke is pathologically jealous? Of if he’d been violent and psychologically sadistic with April on other occasions—?”

“I object!”

“… You have no personal knowledge of him being out of control and vindictive when he doesn’t get his way or isn’t the center of attention? Especially when he’s drinking, correct—”

“Objection! Asked and answered!”

“… My point is, you don’t personally have a clue what the defendant’s really like, do you, ma’am?” Flagler says to me while Annie watches with stunning silence.

“No,” I answer. “I have no personal knowledge.”

“And you wouldn’t know whether any of us are safe should the jury come back with a not guilty verdict, and Gilbert Hooke is out and about, free again? You have no direct knowledge of that either, do you?”

“I don’t.”

“Well, the courts seem to think the defendant is plenty dangerous, bringing to mind Hannibal Lecter—”

“Objection!” Gallo shouts, and I’ve never seen him this offended. “For God’s sake, Your Honor!”

“It’s no accident that Gilbert Hooke has been held in isolation without bail since his arrest almost two years ago,” Flagler continues unimpeded. “It’s clear why he should remain behind bars for the rest of his destructive and hateful life…”

All eyes are on Gilbert Hooke, clean-shaven with pale skin and short mousy hair, in a drab cheap suit several sizes too big. He could pass for a young attorney were it not for his jail-issue orange sneakers, and the shackles around his wrists and ankles.

This in vivid contrast to how he looked at the time of April Tupelo’s death almost two years ago when he was muscular and darkened by the sun. In every image I’ve seen of him displayed in the courtroom so far, he’s wearing a tactical combat knife on his belt and a large-caliber pistol.

He’s shirtless, sporting tattoos and a cocky grin, usually with a beer in hand. We see him baiting outriggers, filleting fish, blood and guts everywhere. Or shooting his gun at a shark he’s gaffed while laughing maniacally, ejected cartridge cases glinting in the sun. All of this is a deliberate and effective ploy on the prosecution’s part.

“Again, I’m just reminding the jury that what you see with Gilbert Hooke isn’t what you’re getting.” Flagler aggressively points at the defense table’s team of pricey lawyers, and the upset murmuring is louder. “Don’t be fooled by his mild-mannered appearance!”

“Objection!” Gallo complains.

“Mister Flagler, that’s enough,” Annie finally says.

He digs his hands in his trouser pockets, parking himself squarely in front of me. I’m staring at the champs de fleurs pattern on his blue silk tie, picking up his bright scent again.

“Ma’am? I don’t care how many fancy degrees you have, you can’t undo death, now can you?” he asks me.

“No.”

“You can’t restore to April Tupelo’s loved ones what they’ve lost, correct? So what choice does someone like you have except to become desensitized, isn’t that right, ma’am?”

“No, that’s not right—”

“In fact, your earliest memories are of your father sick and dying,” he says. “I regret the necessity of bringing up such a delicate subject. Because how could it have done anything but ruin your formative years…?”

“I object! Relevance!”

“While also making it difficult for you to have relationships, to connect with people. Living ones, I mean—”

“Objection, Your Honor!”

“Sustained. What’s your question, Mister Flagler?”

“What type of cancer did you say?” He directs this at me.

“My father died from chronic myeloid leukemia.”

“Sadly, you got started young learning how to make yourself bulletproof emotionally. Of course, growing up in a bad neighborhood in Miami, you probably needed to be bulletproof in more ways than one,” he adds to derisive laughter around me. “Neither of your parents were born in this country and barely spoke English, isn’t that true?”

“I’m just going to keep objecting!” Gallo shakes his head in disgust, and I’m more incensed than he is but no one would know it.

By bringing up details about my childhood and Italian ethnicity, the well-heeled Flagler with his prominent pedigree is reminding the jurors and everyone else that I’m an outsider. He’s painting me as a coldhearted female who’s barely American, and I can feel the hostility in the air like static electricity.

“Let me rephrase,” he replies while Annie looks on without interfering. “From an early age you were taking care of your terminally ill father, weren’t you, ma’am?”

“Yes.”

“You had to learn not to feel, isn’t that true.”

“No, it’s not true.”

He stalls again, flipping through his notes, and people are making ugly comments that I’d rather not hear.

“Quiet in the courtroom,” Annie says.

“Ma’am?” Flagler looks at me. “You’ve decided that April Tupelo wasn’t murdered because…? Um, strike that. I’ll start over… Now, let me see if I’ve got this straight. Your opinion is based on these little snowflakey-looking things that the jury heard testimony about earlier from someone who works at a museum… Diatoms. Am I pronouncing that right?”

“Yes,” I answer.

“And diatoms are basically algae, the scummy stuff we see on ponds and in fish tanks.”

“You can’t see diatoms with the unaided eye unless there are a lot of them, a bloom as it’s known,” I reply.

“So, you happened to notice these teeny-tiny things called diatoms even though they’re invisible to the rest of us unless there’s a bloom of them?”

“The individual unicellular algae can be seen easily with a microscope.” I keep my attention on the nine women and three men in the jury box, most of them retired and college educated.

“And ma’am, you were looking through that microscope in hopes of getting lucky. Sort of like finding the prize in the Cracker Jack box, is that right?”

“No, that’s not right. It wasn’t luck or happenstance that I found diatoms,” I reply. “I checked for them specifically in lung tissue preserved during April Tupelo’s postmortem examination twenty-one months ago on October seventeenth—”

“Like I’ve said, you had a hunch, and wanted to prove it by experimenting with body parts,” he says. “Ones that had been preserved in glass jars like canned peaches all this time…?”

“Objection!”

“Sustained. Mister Flagler, let the witness fully answer the questions. We need to speed this along,” Annie adds, to a distant rumble of thunder as a late afternoon storm rolls in.

“During autopsies,” I continue, “it’s standard to preserve sections of organs and other biological tissue in a colorless solution of formaldehyde and water called formalin.”

As I give the jurors a brief morgue primer, Flagler constantly shifts his position. Moving my head this way and that, I must look ridiculous as I try to see past him.

“This is basically the same fixative that funeral homes use in embalming, and has no effect on diatoms being present or not,” I explain. “Formalin wouldn’t have destroyed the diatoms, in other words. The problem is they weren’t looked for at the time of April Tupelo’s death. This should have happened but didn’t.”

There’s nothing I’ve seen in reports or been told that would make me think the subject came up. I’m sure the reason it didn’t was that Dr. Bailey Carter had become incompetent. According to those he was closest to, the sixty-four-year-old forensic pathologist was suffering from rapid onset dementia. He’d become forgetful, erratic and resistant to suggestions.

Performing April Tupelo’s postmortem examination and in charge of the medico-legal investigation, he didn’t consider drowning as the likely cause of death or a possibility. She died from manual strangulation according to what he filled in on the final autopsy report and death certificate. I have no idea why he thought this unless it was a guess. Much of her throat’s soft tissue was gone, decomposed and fed upon by marine life.

There was no apparent evidence of injury to the structures of the neck, and no reason to rule that strangulation killed her. It didn’t. She may have sustained. . .