Avriel Kaplan: Well dressed, well groomed, beautifully handsome, quiet and brooding and exactly the kind of man Ariel Declan doesn't need to know. But, that is not for her to decide.
Alexander Kirk: wickedly handsome, well known and well liked, egot...
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This thug was far too young to have died unexpectedly, of a gunshot wound or a beating sure, but unknown causes or heart failure? He was too young. He had a wrap-sheet three miles long but must have been high up in the food chain because he had no arrests. Witnesses, the ones that could be found, said that he had been acting strangely, waving his gun around and sputtering nonsense about dead people and then he suddenly flopped to the ground and stopped moving. They all said that they tried to save him, 'mouth to mouth' they said. She knew better. She never asked the detectives for any details concerning the deceased when they were left in her care, especially in criminal or potentially criminal cases. They gave her the basics. It was better that she did not know more than that. She walked carefully around the body that lay on her examination table. It was a fresh one. He had died just that night, a few hours before. There wasn't a mark on him, not even track marks, not at first glance. She ran a toxicological panel, pulling her samples immediately after the body had arrived and a cursory examination of the sample extraction site.
She completed her external examination and moved on to the internal one. Her findings were the exact same as the last seven. The heart wasn't enlarged, it didn't weigh more than it should have. It did, however, show signs of stress that were not always evident on a decaying muscle. The muscle looked stretched and strained. There was a touch of petechia in his eyes, kidneys, and liver but it wasn't nearly enough to cause heart failure. It was more likely to have been caused by high blood pressure than any kind of asphyxiation.
She took samples of every kind of fluid she could collect and every kind of tissue that she could and sent them to the labs to be examined. She closed the body and put him in his drawer.
"When your labs come back maybe, just maybe you'll have something to tell me that the others couldn't.
His labs came back inconclusive. He had no drugs or alcohol in his system. He didn't have syphilis, though he had gonorrhea and herpes, neither of which would cause delirium or dysplasia. He didn't have any parasites, microscopic or otherwise in his brain, nothing that would explain his odd behavior before he collapsed. He was a carrier for sickle cell anemia and had O negative blood. What his labs did determine where high levels of adrenalin, and a low iron, calcium, potassium and several other minerals and proteins the body used to make energy. He had no sugars left in his blood to produce energy for his cells. She discovered that the cells of each organ that she had taken samples from all showed some sort of damage like they had turned on themselves and were destroyed from within. That was a ridiculous notion, but the proof was there in front of her. She documented everything and filed her report. His electrolytes were depleted, and his cells deionized.
Despite all her findings, the cause of death remained, much to Deborah's chagrin, natural causes. She had no overwhelming proof that the man was murdered or that his death should be ruled, inconclusive or suspicious given that it was clear that his heart stopped, albeit for unknown reasons.
