Casual clothes. Good for travel. She made a mental note: Check the file Charlaine’s sending—how did Souleyret get back into the country?

“Shoes?”

“Boots. Military-style. In the bag, just there.”

Sam saw the bulging white trash bag on the table near the wall, nodded.

“So she wasn’t undressed, hadn’t taken off her shoes and gotten comfortable?”

“That is correct.”

“Can we turn her, please?” Sam asked.

Nocek nodded, went to the woman’s head. Sam stationed herself at her waist, and they turned her over slowly.

Here the damage was dreadful. The wounds were stark against the fair flesh of her back, red gashes that gaped wide like heavy-lidded eyes. Sam quickly counted them, six in all—one cut in the right side of her neck, two extremely deep ones below each scapula, the other three varying from deep to superficial.

Fletcher was standing a few feet away. “So she was running away when she was stabbed?”

Sam nodded. “The neck wound came first. That slowed her down long enough for her attacker to hit her in the lungs, one on each side. The rest were reaches. Amado?”

“Yes, I believe you are correct. There are very few defensive wounds. There was nothing under her nails—no breaks, matter, anything. It fits with the theory of her running away.” He tsked, as if in sympathy with the girl’s plight. “There is something else I believe you should see. On external examination, we discovered a tampon in place. Subsequently, we removed the tampon. This is not an unusual occurrence, save for this. There was no indication our guest was menstruating. The tampon was clean of any biological material I would normally associate with its usage.”

Now that was interesting. “Has it been disposed of?”

Amado shook his head, pointed toward a small tray on the counter. “I saved it. Its placement and status felt...off.”

They moved Souleyret’s body back into position, then Sam went over to the tampon. It wasn’t pristine, but there was no blood. She glanced at Fletcher, who was eyeing her with the kind of horror most men do when faced with anything oriented to a woman’s monthly cycle, and bit back a laugh.

“It won’t bite, Fletch. I promise. I just want to test it. It could be laced with drugs. I’ve seen it before.”

She took a scalpel and teased the edge of the cotton apart, clipping a bit to put into a tube for testing. She set the tampon back onto the tray, then something caught her eye. A dark edge inside the tampon itself.

“What is that?” Fletcher asked.

Sam used her small forceps, got a grip on the thing. It came out easily. She turned it over, looked at Fletcher with a grin.

“A micro SD chip. Now that’s a handy place to carry something you need to sneak into the country.”

“What do you think is on it?”

“I have no idea.” She turned to Nocek. “Do you have a secure server, one that doesn’t hook into the OCME network? This could be classified information. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“No, we do not, not in the way you need. Just as we can access anything from any computer in the building to put up on the screen here, technically speaking, it could go the other way, should someone want to snoop. Normally, this is a wonderful way for all of our doctors and technicians and administration to access files. For instance, should I have a death I believe is linked to another, I can call up the previous files and do a comparison on the spot, without leaving the autopsy suite or waiting for files to be delivered.

“In this case, if this is sensitive information, I believe you would be safer trying to open the contents away from any sort of wireless network. We are trustworthy, but I do not want you to get into any trouble down the road.”

“Thank you for your candor, Amado,” she said, and he inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment. Such a graceful man, she thought, both in action and speech.

Sam put the SD card in an evidence bag and handed it to Fletcher, who looked at it like it might explode. “Chain of custody,” she said with a smile.

His hand convulsed on the bag, and he placed it carefully on the table beside him.

“Let’s get going,” he said. “Get her posted. I’m eager to see what’s on this SD card.”

“Me, too,” Sam said. “Amado? Shall we?”

He nodded, pulling up his mask. “Let us go inside our guest, and see what else may be happening.”

And without further ado, his scalpel flashed in the overhead lights, and the Y-incision was made.

Chapter 24

SAM AND AMADO went through the rest of the autopsy with relative ease, while Fletcher called one of his computer geeks to bring a secure laptop so he could take a look at the micro SD card.

Amado did the oral recitation of Souleyret’s wounds so his report would be easier to compile when he was finished. Sam, used to both dictation and writing specifics on a whiteboard, took a few notes of her own. They sawed and weighed and dissected companionably, as if they’d been working together for years.

The initial Y-incision had shown little subcutaneous fat, and coupled with the girl’s oversized calf muscles and lithe build, Sam took her for a runner. Her heart was beautiful. There was nothing remarkable about the woman’s head, nose or throat, though Sam could tell she had been delicately pretty while she still breathed, fit and healthy. Amado was correct—she had not been menstruating.

It was her lungs that told the tale. Souleyret had died of hemothoraxes of both her right lung, the result of a four-inch-deep stab wound, and another on the left, three inches deep, between her ribs in the eighth intercostal space, puncturing the lung and causing the hemothorax. There was quite a bit of blood in her lungs; despite the gash in her neck and all the arterial spray, she hadn’t bled out. Which meant a good deal of the blood at the crime scene must have come from Thomas Cattafi, something the crime scene techs would realize once they began processing the evidence.

Three of the six stab wounds were superficial, though two inches deep. It was impossible to tell which of the two deeper wounds was the culprit, but Sam was comfortable with Amado’s conclusion that the hemothoraxes had killed her. The perpetrator was right-handed; the wounds were horizontally oriented and were deeper on the right posterior than the left.

The rest of Souleyret’s autopsy was nominal. She’d never carried a child to term, something Sam noted with as little internal imagination as possible. Her liver and kidneys were clean, her brain matter coiled tightly. She hadn’t eaten in the few hours before she died.

Unless there was something significant in her blood, which had already been sent to the OCME’s in-house lab with specialized instructions to test for all sorts of unusual diseases more common to the African continent than the normal tox screens would cover, she had certainly died as a result of the stabbing.

Stabbed in the back. Sam wondered again if there was some significance to the crime scene, or if it was just her imagination on overdrive. Something just felt so strange about all of this. And it wasn’t only seeing what made Amanda Souleyret tick, as it were.

And the tampon...now that was one for her annals. She’d pulled all sorts of things from orifices over the years, most of them drug related, some the result of pleasure gone wrong, but she’d never had information smuggled in a tampon before.

Fletcher, who had promptly set the bag with the SD card down once Sam had handed it to him, had finally been coaxed closer to the “thing,” as he called it, lying quiet in its bag on the small metal tray, which he eyed from time to time with great distaste. “I suppose this is one advantage to being a woman. Smuggling is easier.”

“This is true. Something this small, she could have swallowed it, but stowing it in a tampon is a much less messy proposition.”