Page 63 of Forged in Steele

“Find anything?” Jared asked from the doorway.

She told him about the flyer. “But nothing to suggest that Reya wanted to end her life.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t add up. No vehicle in the garage or out front, so I put an APB out on it. Maybe if we find her car, we’ll get that lead we’ve been hunting for. I also called in Sierra, and she’s already on her way.”

“Good,” Bristol said. “Reya’s phone isn’t in here. Is it in her room?”

“I didn’t see it, but could be in her back pocket. We’ll have to wait for the ME to check. She left when I called and should be here any minute.”

“That’s fast.”

Jared nodded, but his eyes were tight. “With the abduction of a baby, everyone’s willing to let us jump to the head of the line.”

She wished they hadn’t come to the front of the line for that reason, but they were called to a very important task that they seemed to be failing at. “Luna’s been gone for more than twenty-four hours now. Exponentially decreases odds of finding her alive.”

“Unfortunately, that’s true.” Jared frowned.

A female voice coming from the front door grabbed her attention.

“Probably the ME.”

“Already?”

“You’ve been in here for thirty minutes or so.”

“Really?” She knew she’d gotten lost in thought, but…

“I’ll go meet her.” Jared pushed off the door jamb and disappeared down the hall only to come back with not one woman but two trailing behind.

He pointed at the office. “Sierra will start with printing and swabbing the computer so when Colin gets here, he can begin the images.”

Bristol nodded and stepped out of Sierra’s way.

Bristol greeted the other woman she recognized as Dr. Albertson, the long-term local medical examiner. She was slim and wearing white protective coveralls like Sierra’s. Several pathologists worked under her, but she was the top dog in their department, and they were fortunate to have her on their team today.

“Nice to see you again, Bristol.” Dr. Albertson continued down the hall, not stopping to talk.

One of the great things about this woman was that she remembered the names of most officers she interacted with at a murder scene. How she did it, Bristol didn’t know, but the doctor had a lot of respect for law enforcement, and the officers knew she valued them.

Bristol followed them into Reya’s bedroom.

The ME was already kneeling next to Reya and moving her limbs. “Rigor is still present but passing. Stab wound. One, from a large knife that I can see at this point.” She inserted a thermometer through Reya’s skin, likely accessing her liver, and left it to examine Reya’s fingers. “No obvious skin cells under her nails. Doesn’t look like there was a struggle, but I’ll scrape the nails once I have her on the table.”

She glanced at the thermometer, her eyebrows raised below her short salt and pepper hair. “My assistant will have to check the ambient temperature here, but I noticed on the way in that the hallway thermostat was set at sixty-eight degrees. Victim’s reached that temperature. Means she’s been dead for at least twenty hours.”

“And her temperature tells you that?” Bristol asked as she loved to learn as much as she could while on the job. Her grandad had instilled that thirst for knowledge in all of them.

Dr. Albertson sat back on her haunches and looked up. “On average, a body loses one and a half degrees every hour after death. Of course the surrounding area has a lot to do with that, but if she was left here at her death or shortly after, she’s dropped from 98.6 to 69 degrees. That’s a drop of almost thirty degrees and divided by the one and half degrees gives me the twenty hours. This is assuming her basic body temp is 98.6, which isn’t true of all people.”

“Thanks for explaining,” Bristol said.

“Happy to educate whenever I can. Just don’t go playing armchair quarterback and think you can make a determination with this little information. You add in the state of rigor, which is starting to wane, my preliminary estimate puts her death between twenty and twenty-four hours. Likely closer to the twenty-hour mark.”

“How long could she have lived after sustaining such a stab wound?” Jared asked.

“I can tell you more once I do the cut, but death from such a wound is typically from blood loss. It takes many minutes and sometimes hours for someone to exsanguinate—bleed to death—from stab wounds.”

“We located a blanket saturated with her blood yesterday at twelve p.m.,” Jared said. “Twenty to twenty-four hours would put the time of death between ten and two o’clock yesterday, which could fit our timeline.”

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