In the forensic autopsy room, the body discovered that morning had already been autopsied by the afternoon, and its chest had been stitched back up.
"He died approximately twelve hours ago. The cause of death was indeed drowning. His skin showed goosebumps, there was sediment between his fingers, and mushroom-shaped foam remained around his mouth and nose. Most importantly, I detected diatoms in his lungs."
The speaker was a female medical examiner in her early forties, short and plump but not unattractive, named Harper Riley. Nick was not particularly close to her, but after working together a number of times, they were on a first-name basis.
Hancock, however, knew her very well. Supposedly, the two had even had a little romantic entanglement that could not be spoken of, so he had been somewhat reluctant when Nick dragged him to the medical examiner's office.
Sure enough, the moment they met, she rolled her eyes at him several times in succession, giving Nick plenty of entertainment as he watched from the sidelines.
"I can't accurately determine his red blood cell count before death, but I can roughly estimate that when this boy entered the water, he already had less than two-thirds of his blood left," Harper continued.
"So he was thrown into the river upstream of the waterfall after he was already near death?" Hancock asked.
Before Harper could roll her eyes at him again, Nick answered first. "You're talking about acute blood loss. With chronic blood loss, or an existing condition involving anemia, someone can have less than half the blood volume of a normal person."
"You're right, so I specifically ran some additional tests. But there were no drugs in this boy's system, and he didn't have hemophilia. Apart from underdevelopment caused by long-term malnutrition, everything else was fairly normal."