Page 60 of Unnatural Death

“She’d not eaten anything close to the time she was killed,” I say as Marino returns.

“What do you think they did when they heard this invisible thing coming for them?” Bella asks Benton as if he’s a psychic.

“The footpath is almost a mile long. They knew they had a good twenty or thirty minutes before the intruder reached their campsite,” he replies. “They would have done everything they could to get as ready as possible.”

“You think they had any idea who it was?” Marino puts on fresh gloves and the respirator.

“I doubt it,” Benton says. “But even if they did, they were caught completely off guard, and that was the intention.”

He paints a picture of them turning on camping lanterns inside their tent as they monitored the intruder’s progress over the surveillance cameras’ microphone. Scrambling to collect guns and ammunition, they loaded extra magazines. They grabbed the thermal imaging nightscope that wasn’t going to work any better than their trail cameras did.

As paranoid as they must have been, it surprises me they had no body armor, not even a bulletproof vest. What that tells me is they weren’t expecting an ambush. It never entered their minds that something like this could happen until their cameras alerted them to the intruder on the footpath. Huck and Brittany got dressed and ready. They waited inside the tent as a steady rain fell in the foggy dark.

“They would have talked and planned while inside the tent.” Benton continues explaining what he thinks happened. “They could calculate how long it would take for the intruder to reach them. I’m going to guess that they stayed sheltered until he was about ten minutes out, and then turned off the camping lanterns.”

They ventured outside, positioning themselves in the woods near the entrance of the footpath. Likely they had their phones with them and were monitoring the trail cameras.

“Adrenaline is pumping, and they’re in fight and flight mode simultaneously because they’re cornered,” Benton describes. “The impulse is to run. But they can’t go anywhere, their only hope to take out whoever it is.”

He theorizes that Brittany and Huck were hiding in the pine trees where most of the blood was later recovered. When they could hear the intruder getting close, they put away their phones so he couldn’t see them glowing in the pitch dark. Then the Mansons opened fire, but to no avail, and Brittany was shot. Probably Huck as well, the yellow-tipped bullets ripping through his neck and taking off the back of his head.

“It’s very possible they never got a look at their assailant,” Benton says. “Obviously, he had night-vision capabilities, as I’ve mentioned. He could see his targets, but they couldn’t see him because he was utilizing some type of technology that can defeat thermal imaging.”

“How might that be possible?” Bella asks.

“Thermal imagers can detect fluctuations as minor as a fraction of a degree.” It’s Gus who explains. “These differences paint the picture instead of light and shadow. But in this case, there was no heat signature, no images.”

“Sensors were fooled into perceiving that the intruder was the same temperature as the air he passed through,” Benton adds. “What that suggests is the gear he had on was constantly making the most subtle adjustments, the sensors reading the surrounding air and sending signals to defeat thermal imagers. There’s no other explanation unless we’re dealing with a killer that’s paranormal.”

“What you’re describing sounds absolutely terrifying,” Bella says as I’m sectioning a lung, the blade hitting something hard. “Imagine hearing this thing coming but you can’t see it.”

I dig out a piece of broken tooth. Then I discover another one.

“She aspirated them.” I explain what I’ve found. “The blunt force trauma was inflicted soon after she was shot. She was still breathing, perhaps gasping, when she received powerful blows to the head, breaking her front teeth, fracturing her jaw, her nose and other facial bones.”

I spend the next few minutes sectioning the rest of the organs, all of them healthy and unremarkable. I cut along the hairline, reflecting back the scalp, exposing a skull fractured by multiple hard blows. Turning on the Stryker saw, I press the oscillating blade against bone, and we don’t talk over the infernal grinding.

Weighing the brain, I place it on the cutting board. I begin sectioning with a carbon-steel knife that has a long wide blade. It also came from Wild World, and I can’t help but think of the irony. The badly contused and lacerated left frontal lobe shows little vital response to the injuries. Everything I’m seeing confirms she was killed brutally but quickly.

“The longer somebody survives, the worse they look.” I drop sections of brain into the jar of formalin tinged dark pink from blood. “She was already dead or almost dead when she was hit in the head. The question is with what. On gross examination I’m not seeing pattern injuries that might have been caused by a weapon.”

“Maybe she was banged against the ground?” Bella suggests, an unpleasant expression on her face.

“I would expect abrasions.” I extend the Y-incision up both sides of the neck, all the way to the ears. “Often dirt and bits of rocks are embedded in the wound, and I’m not seeing that.”

Undermining the skin, I expose the torn strap muscles and neck organs. I remove the tongue, the crushed larynx, windpipe and hyoid. I rinse them with water I squeeze from a sponge, patting them dry with a towel.

* * *

Marino takes photographs, winding our obsolete camera each time to advance the film. At intervals he steps over to a countertop, writing down organ weights and other details on forms attached to the clipboard.

“I can’t say when she bit the left side of her tongue, but obviously, she was alive when that happened,” I continue. “It’s a significant injury with hemorrhage, likely occurring around the time she was killed.”

I describe a deep laceration on the inside of her upper lip, and blood at fracture sites in bony structures of the neck. All of it indicates she still had a blood pressure for a brief period.

“Sounds like she had the hell beaten out of her,” says Elena with the NSA.

“What we’re seeing here isn’t typical,” I reply. “These injuries aren’t.”

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