Room 348: Death at the Inn - Ch # 6

Dr. Brown was not convinced.

He had inspected the man’s body from head to toe, cut him open, reviewed his inward organs one by one, and turned around the desires of the police. With accuracy and with the understanding of a long time, he had decided that Greg Fleniken kicked the bucket not from characteristic causes but from a extreme beating. Presently they needed to tell him that his cautious and proficient perceptions were off-base? That he had missed, of all things, a bullet wound?

Brennan volunteered to do the talking. After he and Apple had found the bullet gap and followed the direction, the reply to the secret of Greg’s passing was, he accepted, clear. But in arrange to act—in arrange to bring Greg’s executioner or executioners to justice—they would have to get the coroner to re-write his discoveries. You may not contend in court that a respondent had shot somebody if the restorative examiner’s office had concluded that the casualty had not been shot.

Brown’s office was a mess. Papers, records, books all over, each accessible surface was buried, indeed the floor. They cleared absent space on two chairs to sit down, and when they specified they were working the Fleniken case, the specialist inquired, “Oh, did you capture the fellow that beat him up?”

“No, we’re not there yet,” said Brennan, and he at that point begun to clarify what they had found, attempting to approach the subject gently. Brown rapidly got the picture.

“You’re attempting to tell me that this man was shot,” he said. “I’m telling you he wasn’t shot.” He might see where this was heading, and he straight denied to arrange the body unearthed. Exhumation is a torment in the ass. It is costly, exasperating to the family, and a hell of a parcel of work. And in this case, as it happens, it was incomprehensible, since the body had been incinerated. The broilers were hot sufficient to devastate metal fragments.

“Listen, Doc,” Brennan proposed, “let’s fair take out the photographs from the post-mortem examination and go through them and see what we can find.”

Brown humored them. As they looked through the photos, passing them back and forward over the work area, Brennan pointed out things.

“What approximately this here?” he said, demonstrating a spot of damage.

“Yes, that’s the liver.”

“And what around this here?”

“Yes, that’s the intestines.”

Brennan knew what he was looking at. The bullet had entered Greg’s scrotum and torn up through him. The skin of the scrotum was delicate and malleable, and it had collapsed over the passage wound, making it less self-evident what it was. The inner wounds followed the bullet’s lethal direction. Brennan inquired, “Doc, might all of this harm have been done—besides blunt-force injury, seem a bullet cause the same?”

“Yes, it may, but that’s not what happened here. This man was beaten.”

“O.K., Doc, but might it have?”

Brennan found something in a photo that upheld his contention. It looked like a track.

“You seem get the same thing from being beaten,” Brown explained.

Then they got to the heart. Brown passed the photo to the detectives.

“Doc!,” Brennan said.

“What?”

“That’s a bullet gap, Doc.”

Brown took the photo.

“What?”

Brennan pointed. “That’s a fuckin’ bullet hole.”

Brown clarified that some of the time when a man is kicked or hit with a limit protest in the chest, it is the right chamber that regularly bursts.

“Doc, that’s a fucking bullet hole.”

Brown looked again.

“Yeah, that’s a bullet hole.”

After a long minute he included, “The media is going to murder me on this.”