Winston reached up and hooked her hair behind her ears and then placed both hands on the victim’s shoulders. With her partner’s help she turned the body on its side, the dead man’s back to the camera.
The camera then came in over the victim’s shoulder and closed in as Winston gently pulled the bucket handle from under the man’s chin and proceeded to carefully lift it off the head.
“Okay,” she said.
She showed the interior of the bucket to the camera – blood had coagulated inside it – and then placed it in an open cardboard box used for evidence storage. She then turned back and gazed down at the victim.
Gray duct tape had been wrapped around the dead man’s head to form a tight gag across the mouth. The eyes were open and distended – bugged. The cornea of each eye was rouged with hemorrhage. So was the skin around the eyes.
“CP,” the partner said, pointing to the eyes.
“Kurt,” Winston said. “We’re on sound.”
“Sorry.”
She was telling her partner to keep all observations to himself. Again, she was safeguarding the future. McCaleb knew that what her partner was pointing out was the hemorrhaging, or conjunctive petechiae, which always came with ligature strangulation. However, the observation was one that should be made to a jury by a medical examiner, not a homicide detective.
Blood matted the dead man’s medium-length hair and had pooled inside the bucket against the left side of his face. Winston began manipulating the head and combing her fingers through the hair in search of the origin of the blood. She finally found the wound on the crown of the head. She pulled the hair back as much as possible to view it.
“Barney, come in close on this if you can,” she said.
The camera moved in. McCaleb saw a small, round puncture wound that did not appear to penetrate the skull. He knew that the amount of blood evidenced was not always in concert with the gravity of the wound. Even inconsequential wounds to the scalp could produce a lot of blood. He would get a formal and complete description of the wound in the autopsy report.