Tunnel Vision Read Online Free PDF

pushed the door open farther and led Nicholls into the room.
    “You here about the burn victim?” the voice said.
    “Yeah. Brodie and Nicholls from Cedar Springs,”
    she answered.
    “Well, Brodie and Nicholls, come over here. This is a very interesting case.”
    They moved to the foot of the table, and Brodie couldn’t help but notice that the victim took up surprisingly little room on the polished steel table. She had lain under glaring lights on a similar table eight years earlier. She had survived. Remembering how cold the metal had felt through her uniform sent a shiver down her spine.
    “Short little fella,” Nicholls commented.
    One of the men looked up at them and then back down at his work.
    “Shrinkage. Like putting half a pound of
    hamburger on the grill and removing a quarter pounder when it’s done cooking”
    Smile lines formed around the eyes of the second man.“Let’s flip him over, Les,” the first man said. The second man nodded and moved a few
    instruments out of the way. The first man looked at Brodie, pulled his mask down and said, “Frank Harrald, Deputy Medical Examiner. My assistant here is Les Phillips. I’d offer to shake hands, but...”
    She looked at the gloved hand and said, “Royce Brodie. This is Curtis Nicholls. What have we got, doc?”
    “One white male, well-done. The initial report said it was a traffic accident.”
    “There’s some preliminary evidence it may not have been an accident.”
    “Do you have an I.D. on him yet?”
    “No. We’re hoping there might be dental records or some other anomaly about him to help us out.”
    “He’s ready, Dr. Harrald,” Phillips said.
    Harrald pulled the mask back up over his face and returned to the body which was now lying on its stomach.
    “Well, at least there’s some meat left on the backside. If it wasn’t an accident someone probably hoped the whole body would be burned. Almost never works that way. There’s always something left.”
    Brodie pulled her notebook out and waited.
    “Okay,” Harrald began. “We’ve got a white male. From the measurements we’ve already taken, I’d place his height at about five-five or six, below average height. If I had to make a guess, and I suppose I’ll have to, I’d say he weighed anywhere from 150 to 200 pounds. There’s some hair remaining here on the back of the head.”
    Harrald used tweezers to pull a small clump of singed hair from what remained of the scalp and held it out to Brodie. “What color would you guess?”
    Adjusting her glasses, she looked closely at the hair. “Could be brown, but some of it looks gray.”
    “Sounds right to me,” the doctor said. “So it looks like he was probably older.”
    “What about the teeth?” Nicholls asked.
    “There weren’t any.”
    Brodie looked up quizically.
    “They were knocked out, but the roots were all in place. Probably a hammer or some other blunt object. He may have had a partial plate on top. There was a space, about an inch on each side, with no roots.”
    “Well, now that we know he didn’t just keel over from a heart attack, I guess we can assume that he was dead before the fire,” she said.
    “Absolutely. I didn’t detect any evidence of smoke in what was left of the lungs. And there are a couple of other things, too. Roll him back over, Les.”
    The lab assistant rolled the remains over and repositioned the man on his back. Harrald leaned down closer to the corpse and looked at Brodie. “Look at this,” he said pointing to the victim’s head with the tip of his scalpel. “See this discoloration here on the bone just above the forehead?”
    “Yeah. What is that?”
    “It’s not from the fire. May have happened earlier, but it’s recent. See how the bone of the skull is pitted?
    Looks like damage from some type of acid. But, of course, I’ll have to run more tests to determine that for sure. We had a body in here a few weeks ago. Chemical accident of some kind and he had similar pitting and