Page 123 of The Valiant Knight
“I say we wrap this up. That sounded malevolent. That’s never a good thing in my world.”
And it wasn’t.
While he was skeptical, they all heard that voice, and there was no one else out there.
So they got to work.
Tony got into the hole, and he carefully made sure he didn’t stand on the bones. One-by-one, he handed them to Gabby, who placed them in a body bag that she’d rolled out for them to carry Ceit.
She did it with the utmost respect, and the whole time, she felt like someone was right next to her, looking over her shoulder.
“What can you tell us about her, Doctor?” Finn asked, and it made the man laugh.
That he hadn’t been expecting.
“What’s funny?”
He explained.
“I am on a lot of crime scenes, and I just had a flashback. Do you ask your coroner about the TOD and COD before he gets the body back to the morgue to work on it?”
He shrugged.
“Well, yeah. Of course, I do. It’s the first thing you have to ask. We all do it.”
Yep.
Well, that explained a lot. Apparently, a cop was a cop was a cop, no matter where you went.
“What I can tell you is that she definitely had massive trauma. The bones, on the bottom side of them, there is shattering and splintering.”
Graham had no idea what he was saying. He was the only one there who didn’t do this kind of a thing for a living.
“What’s that mean?”
Gabby explained since Tony was hyper-focused on the bones. At that moment, he was in examination mode.
“She jumped, or that’s what rumors and history say. He’s telling you in his bone language that she landed flat on her back. All of the damage is to the backside of the bones.”
Oh, well, that made sense.
When Tony picked up her skull, he paused. He saw something, but he wanted a second opinion before he said anything to anyone else.
That meant calling his bestie. It looked like Chris was going to be hearing from him. He’d told him to call and update him, but this was a conversation they needed to have.
“It’s definitely a woman. I’ll say she was about eighteen when she gave birth and died.”
Finn got it.
“The bones, huh?”
He nodded.
“She wasn’t fully developed. The shape of her pelvis says woman, and the calcification inside the bones tell me that she was a child herself. She hadn’t had time to develop beyond those teen years.”
Gabby sighed.
“Life expectancy was low in the sixteen hundreds. They started marrying off girls early.”
