Written in Blood Read Online Free Page B

loss Caitlin felt.
    Caitlin found it difficult to comprehend those simple tragic words. The only other loss she had experienced in
her life was the death of her great-grandfather. And he lived to the respectable age of 104. Her mother was only in her 40s. It was impossible that she was gone.
    Grief counselors arrived to minister to Caitlin. The grieving girl was too numb to feel their words of compassion. All night long, a procession of sorority sisters paraded in and out of Caitlin’s room. They brought offerings of stuffed animals and ice cream, both to comfort Caitlin and to stave off their own feelings of helplessness.
    Fred Atwater, Kathleen’s ex-husband and Caitlin’s father, was consulting on a job in Philadelphia. He spent the weekend at home in North Carolina and just arrived back for the work week when he got the news.
    He drove to Ithaca to be with his daughter. The next day, they would drive back to Philly and then fly together to face the horror of Durham.

5
    Dan George looked over the stairway for any other evidence. Using tweezers, he extracted hair, fibers, Christmas tree needles and samples of wood. While he gathered the minute traces of evidence, Lieutenant Holland and his team spread out over the house looking for any possible weapon. They searched upstairs, downstairs, in the garage and up in the attic, and performed a cursory search around the perimeter of the house.
    George loaded the accumulated evidence into his car and took it to the station. For some reason even he cannot explain, he did not seize the towels that rested beneath Kathleen’s head, the eyeglasses in the stairway or the telephone with its telltale spot of red.
    In the locked, secured evidence room, he rolled out a clean white sheet of paper and laid out all the clothing. He hung each article on a separate hanger and put it in the evidence drying cabinet.
    It was now 2 P.M. Dan George had been on duty since 5 P.M. the previous day. After twenty-one hours, he was exhausted. He went home and slept for four hours before returning to Cedar Street.

    At the medical examiner’s office, Dr. Deborah Radisch, forensic pathologist, received a call from Dr. Kenneth Snell early Sunday morning informing her that he was on the way to a scene that would probably require an autopsy. She prepared to perform another one of the 3,200 autopsies she had conducted in her career.
    Snell arrived at the office before the body did. He ran down the details of the death scene and showed Radisch the Polaroids he had taken.
    When Kathleen’s body arrived, Radisch removed the clothing and submitted it as evidence. She weighed her—120 pounds—and measured her: 5’2”. She scanned the body for scars, marks and injuries that could have been involved in the death.
    On Kathleen’s face, the pathologist found three small bruises in a line pattern over the right eyelid and three scratches on a diagonal over the right eyebrow. Those injuries could not be the result of impact with a flat surface—like a stair step—since they were in locations on the face protected by surrounding bone. Only prominent areas of the face—like the nose, the cheekbones and the chin—would be injured in a fall.
    She noted a small area of damaged skin and a faint bruise on the forehead. There were other marks on Kathleen’s face most likely caused by fingernails. Radisch located bruises on the earlobe and nose caused by blunt trauma—either by falling against a step or by being impacted with force into a step.
    She found no damage inside the mouth. There was a
chip off of one tooth, but it was not possible to determine if it was recent in origin.
    Radisch shaved Kathleen’s head to better view the injuries there. She discovered seven areas of wounds on the head—many spanned the full thickness from the scalp through to the skull. There was a lot of bleeding into scalp tissue around these wounds. One of them created a flap