Chapter 18: HOW THINGS WERE DONE IN A POST MORTEM
Mikael bent at the waist again and tilted his head to the other side to look obliquely into the chest cavity but there was nothing note observing about it anymore since Santina had already remove the entire chest plate; both sternum and ribs with an electrical saw prior to his arrival.
"What about the skull?"
He asked her instead.
"Skull fracture shows that there is a heavy blow hear."
Santina said as he gestured to the upper right side of the head.
"Heavy blow; and base form the fracture lines, it looks like----"
"It came from the right."
Mikael finished her off and when he was done talking, he touched the place where Santina gestured previously. He examined the head of the corpse himself before he stood straight again.
"About how old?"
He inquired again to which Santina also has an answer.
"My guess is that the victim is around the age of twelve or thirteen"
Mikael nodded his head to let the other party knew that he heard her before he picked a pair of surgical gloves for himself at the nearby stainless steel troller.
He then pulled the gloves onto his hand until the rubber snapped against the underside of his wrist.
"Genitals were removed as I could see. But is the face also flayed like the others?"
Mikael glanced at Santina and waited for her answer.
Way before Mikael even arrived that night, Santina had already long started with her internal examination.
It was also for that same reason why the smell of decay that lingered in the air that night was stronger.
With a scalpel at hand, Santina had made a large deep, Y-shaped incision from shoulder to shoulder meeting at the breast bone and extending it all the way down to the pubic bone of the corpse.
Right after that, she peeled back the skin, muscle, and soft tissue using the same scalpel and then pulled the chest flap over the face of the child to expose its ribcage and neck muscles.
That was why Mikael was not able to see the status of the face at the moment and he still has to ask Santina about it.
To answer his question, Santina moved forward and pulled down the upper part of the Y shaped incision that she made on the torso during the autopsy and that action of hers revealed the ruin on the face of the victim that was made by no other than the ruthless killer itself.
Mikael was no longer surprised by the sight and he just nodded his head and secretly prayed for the poor child's soul to rest in peace.
After that, he leaned forward and ran his forefinger in a straight line beneath the child's exposed chin bone
"Clean horizontal slit under the chin from ear to ear. What do we know about the weapon?"
Mikael shared his thoughts first and told Santina about the things that he could understand and observed so far. But due to his limited knowledge of forensic pathology, he still needed to ask the other party for further details.
The duo worked with impressive synchronization. The way they carried out themselves as they conduct the things that needed to be done in a post mortem made it easy for any observer to guess that they had done it a lot before.
"Again, probably a small knife. About six inches long. The blade should not be more than an inch wide. Something easy to handle for close and detailed work. Very sharp and with no serration. We also have the same groove on the chin bone just like the rest of the previous victims."
Santina offered him a detailed analysis before she peeled off her gloves and walked to a drafting table in another corner of the room.
The table itself was already about to be thrown away by the same university where Santina worked as a Professor but the other party was resourceful enough to think about something she could use it for so she took it instead.
It was originally used by the film students for drawing cartoons but Santina was now using it as her improvised film scanner
On its center was a translucent circle made of hard but removable plastic and underneath it was a light bulb.
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