Page 15 of Dirty Liars

“The blond hair isn’t natural,” I said, adjusting the focus. “I’m seeing dark roots. She was a brunette, probably with regular bleaching and toning treatments.”

‘None of that is uncommon,” Lily said, making notes on the chart. “Especially for a bride on her wedding day. Most women want to look their best.”

I continued my methodical examination, checking her skin for unusual marks, birthmarks, or scarring. Nothing notable appeared until I reached her feet. Something caught my eye on the sole of her right foot.

“What have we here?” I pulled the light closer and put on my magnifying loupe so I could see better. The 3.5x magnification brought the small mark into focus.

“What is that?” Lily asked, her head bowed close to mine, her breath warm in the chilled air of the lab.

“Maybe just dirt,” I said, squinting through the magnifier.

There was a smudge of blood that I hadn’t completely removed in the initial cleaning. I took a cotton-tipped applicator and dipped it in isopropyl alcohol, then gently rubbed it across the area. The blood came away, revealing something underneath.

“It’s a tattoo,” I said, feeling a small thrill of excitement. “Looks like a pattern of dots.”

I took a photo, adjusting the camera to capture the small mark clearly, then enhanced the image on the computer monitor so the tiny marks were distinguishable. I sketched the pattern on my autopsy form: two dots stacked vertically at the top, a triangle of three dots in the middle, and two dots side by side at the bottom.

“Not your typical tattoo,” I said, frowning at the pattern. “It’s crude—almost like someone did it by hand rather than with a professional tattoo gun.”

“Maybe it’s tally marks or something like that,” Lily suggested, studying the pattern on the monitor. “Maybe gang activity or some kind of identifier?”

“Could be,” I said, my mind already racing with possibilities. “Let’s do full x-rays. If she’s got unusual markings on the outside, who knows what we might find beneath the surface. Maybe there’s evidence of childhood trauma or abuse that isn’t immediately visible.”

We carefully moved her body to the x-ray table, and I rolled the portable machine into place. The apparatus hummed as it powered up, the familiar sound oddly comforting in the sterile environment.

Lily looked at me with poorly concealed excitement when I handed her the lead apron.

“Why don’t you do this part and I’ll observe? You’ve been through the process enough to get all the angles,” I said, noticing how her eyes lit up at the opportunity for hands-on experience.

She nodded eagerly and got to work, positioning the machine with confident movements. The x-ray machine clicked and whirred as she captured images from multiple angles, her face set in concentration. When she was finished, we transferred the digital images to the computer system and pulled them up on the high-resolution monitor.

“She’s got a break in the ulna,” I said, pointing to a faint line in the bone of her forearm. “See the remodeling? That shows it would have been from more than a decade ago, when she was a child.” I frowned as I studied the x-ray more closely. “But it wasn’t set properly. And then look at the distal radius. It was crushed at some point. There should be surgical pins in this, but there’s nothing. An injury like this would have limited her mobility and continued to cause her pain for the rest of her life.”

“Could she have been from a third world country?” Lily asked, leaning closer to the screen. “That would explain the lack of proper medical treatment.”

“Maybe,” I said, scrolling through the other x-rays. “That could also explain why we’re not getting much information on her stateside. But let’s check her teeth—they can tell us a lot about someone’s background.”

I returned to the body and gently opened her mouth, using a dental mirror and penlight to examine each tooth carefully. What I found—or rather, didn’t find—was telling.

“She has two molars missing and several untreated cavities,” I said, my voice tight with concentration. “There are no signs that she’s ever been to a dentist. No fillings, no sealants, nothing. Her teeth are fairly straight naturally, but she’s definitely never had orthodontic work.”

“More signs of poverty or limited access to healthcare,” Lily said softly, a note of sympathy in her voice.

“And her wisdom teeth haven’t fully erupted,” I added, examining the back of her mouth. “That’s consistent with her age. So she is likely around nineteen to twenty-one, as her identification claims.”

“If she was creating a fake identity, wouldn’t she have made herself at least twenty-one?” Lily asked. “What can you do at nineteen?”

“Get married to a middle-aged man without raising too many eyebrows, I guess,” I said grimly. “Though that still attracts attention, as we’ve seen.”

I continued my examination of her mouth. “She’s missing the first molar on her upper left side and the second molar on the lower right. They likely became infected and had to be pulled by someone with minimal training. The second molar typically emerges around age twelve, so that extraction would have been fairly recent—within the last few years.”

“That’s pretty fast decay for someone so young,” Lily observed, making notes on the chart.

“Not if you have deficiencies in your drinking water,” I said, my brow furrowed in thought. “Lack of fluoride, or even contaminated water sources, can accelerate tooth decay dramatically. But it’s very odd to see this pattern in someone her age in the United States.”

“Any other theories?” Lily asked, watching me closely.

“Maybe,” I said, removing my gloves and reaching for a fresh pair. “I once did an autopsy for an Amish man in his forties. You’d have thought he was in his seventies by looking at his body. He had no modern medical or dental care—bones that had been broken and healed incorrectly, teeth pulled rather than saved, arthritis that could have been treated but wasn’t.”

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