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was moving outward from the body. “You guys find those panties for me yet?”
    “Not yet, Tom.”
    “We’re looking, Tom.”
    I said, “What panties?”
    Graham lifted the girl’s skirt. “Your friend John couldn’t be bothered to finish his examination, but I’d say there’s something significant here. I’d say that’s seminal fluid oozing out of the vagina, she’s not wearing panties, and there’s a red line at the groin where they were ripped off. External genitals are red and raw. It’s pretty clear she had forcible intercourse before she was killed. So I’m asking the boys to find the panties.”
    One of the SID team said, “Maybe she wasn’t wearing any.”
    Graham said, “She was wearing them, all right.”
    I turned back to Kelly. “What about drugs?”
    He shrugged. “We’ll get lab values on all fluids. But to the eye, she looks clean. Very clean.” I noticed that Kelly was distinctly uneasy, now.
    Graham saw it, too. “For Christ’s sake, what are you hangdog about, Kelly? We keeping you from a late-night date, or what?”
    “No,” Kelly said, “but to tell you the truth, not only is there no evidence of a struggle, or of drugs—I don’t see any evidence that she was murdered at all.”
    Graham said, “No evidence she was murdered? Are you kidding?”
    Kelly said, “The girl has throat injuries that suggest she may have been into one of the sexual bondage syndromes. She has signs beneath the makeup that she’s been tied up before, repeatedly.”
    “So?”
    “So, technically speaking, maybe she wasn’t murdered. Maybe she experienced sudden death from natural causes.”
    “Aw, Christ. Come on.”
    “It’s quite possible this is a case of what we call death from inhibition. Instantaneous physiological death.”
    “Meaning what?”
    He shrugged. “The person just dies.”
    “For no reason at all?”
    “Well, not exactly. There’s usually minor trauma involving the heart or nerves. But the trauma isn’t sufficient to cause death. I had one case where a ten-year-old kid got hit in the chest with a baseball—not very hard—and fell down dead in the school yard. Nobody within twenty meters of him. Another case, a woman had a minor car accident, banged into the steering wheel with her chest, not very hard, and while she was opening the car door to get out, she dropped dead. It seems to happen where there is neck or chest injury, which may irritate the nerves running to the heart. So, yeah, Tom. Technically, sudden death is a distinct possibility. And since having sex is not a felony, it wouldn’t be murder.”
    Graham squinted. “So you’re saying maybe
nobody
killed her?”
    Kelly shrugged. He picked up his clipboard. “I’m not putting any of this down. I’m listing the cause of death as asphyxiation secondary to manual strangulation. Because the odds are, she was strangled. But you should file it away in the back of your mind that maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she just popped off.”
    “Fine,” Graham said. “We’ll file it. Under medical examiner’s fantasies. Meanwhile, any of you guys got an ID on her?”
    The SID team, still searching the room, murmured no.
    Kelly said, “I think I got a time of death.” He checked his temperature probes and read off a chart. “I register a core of ninety-six point nine. In this ambient room temperature, that’s consistent with up to three hours postmortem.”
    “Up to three hours? That’s great. Listen Kelly, we already knew she died
sometime
tonight.”
    “It’s the best I can do.” Kelly shook his head. “Unfortunately, the cooling curves don’t discriminate well for underthree hours. All I can say is death occurred sometime within three hours. But my impression is that this girl has been dead a while. Frankly, I would say it’s close to three hours.”
    Graham turned to the SID team. “Anybody find the panties yet?”
    “Not so far, Lieutenant.”
    Graham looked around the room and said, “No purse, no