“Your Jane Doe had one tough job,” Lanie replied, still bent over the girl’s body. “X-rays show she’d broken multiple bones, some more than once. All healed, but still.” The ME shook her head and lifted Jane Doe’s right arm. “The radius in this arm was broken at least three times.”
“How can you tell,” Castle asked.
“They were all in different places. None of them was a compound fracture, the ones that break through the skin, but they all snapped in their own way.” She placed the arm back down and started gesturing to different body parts. “Legs, ribs, arms, wrists, even a few fingers.” Lanie gave one of her “Mm Mm”s and then pointed to the stab wound. “This is your cause of death. A knife was thrust into her right anterior side, slicing the pancreas and lacerating the liver.”
“How long?” Beckett asked. Lanie knew that face. Kate just needed to hear it. So Lanie obliged.
“If someone had come across her and helped her to the hospital, she would have made it with surgery. But without help, well, she wasn’t in pain for very long.”
Lanie watched as anger flooded into Kate’s eyes. It matched her own, though Lanie was good enough at disguising it and compartmentalizing. Years at her job had taught her the cruelty people were capable of. This girl was no different. She’d seen many cases where someone had stabbed a person and then left them there, crying and bleeding on the street. People often asked Lanie why she chose to be a medical examiner. She sometimes quipped that dead people were much pleasanter than live people, aside from the smell, or that if you messed up an autopsy people were less likely to sue, or even that someone had to. It was very rarely she told the truth. That dead people need saving, too, and she would do her part to bring them that, to give them peace, a final say. That she helped them with one last word to the living, the name of their murderer.
“Anything else?” Kate said, her voice level.
“There were bruises on her wrists, suggesting a struggle, but that’s it. I’ve sent stray fibers I found on her body to the lab,” she answered. Kate nodded, lost in thought.
Lanie’s eyes flicked to Castle as she watched him move a little closer behind Kate, pretending to peer over her shoulder at the body. Her body unconsciously leaned back into him, but that was nothing new. Lanie wondered if Castle would make some small move or gesture to comfort her when he suddenly stood tall.
“A jockey,” he announced.
Beckett turned around to him. “What?”
“She was a jockey. Think about it. Small body, muscular build, broken bones.”
“Castle, just because she has a small, tight body doesn’t mean she was a jockey.”
“No, come on, think about it. She can’t be taller than what, 5 feet?” He looked to Lanie for support. She nodded.
“5 feet, 1 inch to be precise.”
“Right, and then she’s got broken bones everywhere. What other profession comes with multiple broken bones that have healed and then gotten re-broken?” Castle’s face was eager, searching Kate’s eyes, asking her to believe him. She sighed and turned back to Lanie.
“It’s possible,” Lanie stated before Kate could say anything, but she held her hands up, communicating that it was not her idea.
“Anything else going on here?” Kate asked, avoiding the subject. But before Lanie could respond, Kate’s cellphone rang. “Beckett,” she answered. She held up a finger, hold that thought, and left the mortuary. Castle looked like he was contemplating following her.
