In the morgue.
Harper, the medical examiner, took only half a day to complete the autopsy, so she called Nick over that afternoon. "Your assessment was right. The cause of death was suffocation, but her lungs hadn't collapsed, and there were no signs of external injury. The car accident didn't cause this."
"So we have another murder?"
Hancock arrived almost on Nick's heels. The moment he pushed the door open, he covered his eyes. "Oh, come on, Harper. Couldn't you cover her with something?"
Harper rolled her eyes at him, picked up a white sheet from nearby, and covered the body from the neck down.
"He's had a bit too much to deal with lately. Seeing less of this is good for him," Nick said in his partner's defense.
Although the Y-shaped autopsy incision on the body's chest had been stitched up and the blood rinsed away, it was still somewhat unsettling.
Harper paid little attention to a certain someone. She pulled down the corpse's lower lip and shone a flashlight on it for Nick. "Look closely at the bruising and pinpoint hemorrhages here."
Compared with Hancock, who always dozed off during forensic training classes and relied entirely on his partner to help him cheat on the exams, Harper preferred talking to the eager-to-learn Nick.
And he never disappointed her. "Someone covered her mouth and nose, suffocating her." When pressure was applied to a person's mouth and nose, contact with the teeth could easily cause abrasions and bruising inside the lips.
Nick recalled the details he had gathered while examining the victim's body, glanced at the X-rays hanging over the workbench, and continued.
"She wasn't seriously injured in the accident. And if the driver wasn't lying, that passerby smothered her in the brief time it took him to turn around,