Salzer nodded. “The way they think it went down, Bartholomew was driving, and he was either surprised by the perp there, or they rode out together. My guess? The UNSUB was in the car, directing him. Bartholomew parked badly and left his door open when he got out. By the time he entered the field, he was in a major hurry to escape whoever was after him. The police found a scrap of his tweed jacket on the barbwire, where he tore it. He stumbled, at some point, and when he got up, his stride was uneven, shorter. He’d injured himself, apparently, when he fell.”
She took another drink. “How about footprints, did they get anything they can use?”
Salzer shrugged. “It’s not in the coroner’s file if they did. The official cause of death was massive blood loss due to a direct arrow hit to the heart, and thermal injuries.”
“Thermal injuries?” She took a long swallow of water and wiped her lip.
“Yeah, Grace, he was still alive when his body was set on fire.” He got up. “Ready to take a look?”
The short answer to that would be no, she thought.
A wave of nausea washed over her and she felt her skin grow clammy. Salzer stared at her sharply.
“You okay?”
“I think it’s the heat.”
“It’s cooler in there.”
She nodded and followed him in. The autopsy viewing suite was a windowless room, filled with two empty tables, stainless steel sinks, metal filing cabinets equipped with scales for weighing and measuring the cost of death.
The body lay under a thick white plastic sheet on a metal table that was raised on the edges to catch fluids. Salzer hesitated briefly, as if to issue a warning, but Grace knew no warning from him could soften the images she was about to see. There had been fire in Guatemala. And death.
She nodded and Salzer slipped the sheet free. The odor of burned flesh permeated the room. “I’ll be right back.”
She went into the hall and leaned against the wall. Gradually the walls stopped moving. She went back inside and closed the door behind her.
He offered a box of gloves and she took a set and put them on, as if stepping into the hall was the most natural thing in the world. Maybe in that room it was.
The body lay on its back, claws pointed toward the ceiling, blackened arms frozen over its head as if trying to protect the face from the accelerant that was about to be dumped onto its dying body, but the face was curiously intact. The hair had been burned off, along with the eyebrows and ears, but in the shape of the brow and the slope of what was left of the nose, the face was still recognizably human.
Especially in the shape of the mouth, open in a frozen scream. The scalp had been cut open in a coronal incision from ear to ear and closed with white stitches. White thick stitches also closed the Y chest incision. The torso was severely charred, the tissue blackened and peeled back in some places to expose red flesh and bone underneath. The chest cavity was collapsed and sunken around a blackened hole.
The underside of the body was still intact. Shreds of what looked like khaki pants, a tweed jacket, and a beige shirt still were visible.
“The clothing remnants weren’t removed?”
“I took samples. They’re fused to the body.”
His feet were unharmed, and seeing two pale feet rising above the blackened carnage of his torso made the damage even more real. This had been a man not long ago, and the doer was still out there somewhere.
“Any genetic material found on the body?”
“Not human. A dog hair. The lab’s got it. As you can see from the severe charring of the midsection, the perp dumped the accelerant directly onto the body in the chest area and then lit a match.”
The smell was an overpowering mix of chemicals, residue from the fire and the decomposing body. Her mouth tasted of death and she blinked and stared across the room, her vision blurred. Salzer glanced at her and dropped his gaze to the clipboard. Grace appreciated that. She stared at the linoleum until the pattern came into focus.
“Bartholomew had first been hit by a bolt from a crossbow, and from the distinctive cracking pattern in the ribs, the killer tried to extricate the bolt and failed.” Salzer pointed at a section of tissue. “Normally, a wound of this kind would have been tight. He used an expandable broadhead, a tip that explodes a barb on impact. The bolt would have plugged the wound and there wouldn’t have been profuse bleeding.”
He lifted a clipboard off the wall and scanned it.
“In this case, fifteen hundred ccs of blood were recovered from his chest cavity. Where you see the raw pink and red tissue and white rib bone, under the blackened, charred skin in the concave of this chest, is the area where the bolt had been. I removed it in the course of my examination.”
“Who has it now?”
“The Palm Springs police were first on scene, followed by the Riverside sheriff’s deputies. The area’s just close enough to the outskirts of town that sometimes they both show up, especially now with the convention. As for who has the bolt now…”
He skimmed the clipboard, found it.
“Police. The bolt had lacerated a lung and punctured the heart in the upper right quadrant of the left ventricle. Death would have been certain, and imminent, but this guy didn’t want to wait around. In essence, Bartholomew was bleeding out as he burned to death.”
Salzer hung the clipboard back on the wall next to a grease board where four current autopsies were listed, amounts and weights itemized in neat columns.
“What was the carbon monoxide saturation level?”
“You mean in his airway?”
She nodded. She was still thinking about what Bartholomew’s last moments must have been like, pinned to the ground by the bolt, in shock, still alive enough to know what was happening, yet incapable of preventing it.
“Toxic saturation levels, but not lethal. His lungs were heavier by a couple hundred grams from fluid produced when the lungs were seared and his airway had narrowed to protect the lungs.”
He covered the body again with the sheet and waited as she went through the door. He turned off the lights and locked up and they walked down the hall.
“I worked the Esperanza fire,” he said quietly. “The burn-over on this one would have been just a few minutes.”
“Burn-over.”
“Fire literally can burn over the top of things. Here, there was a limited amount of fuel and the body was only partially cremated. Bodies cremate at between fifteen hundred and three thousand degrees.”
They were back at the deputy bullpen. He pushed open the front door and the heat smacked her like a living thing.
“Get this guy, Grace. He’s a nasty piece of work.”
She nodded and stepped into the parking lot.
After the door closed on him, Grace trotted behind her car and threw up.
She took 10 to the 111, navigating switchbacks of purple hills cut with dark brown trenches and expanses of sand. Miles of desert stretched ahead. Wind turbines stood close to the road, marching in regiments up the brown hillside, protecting what looked, at a distance, like a compound of windmills—a family—the big ones towering over the little ones. She passed shopping outlets and a billboard advertising