Cherry Bomb

Knocking On Heaven's Door

Present Day

Cold. The metal slab was cold. The body of Ryan Spencer was cold. The morgue of the local police department was cold. Everything felt cold. The medical examiner was sitting at her desk, reading the reports of Ryan's medical profile, and charting her medical exam of his cold, dead body into the computer system.

The doors opened up and a police officer stepped into the room. She looked behind her, a bald man with a soft shadow on his face. The name tag said, Lorenzo. Anthony Lorenzo was only twenty years into the police force of Bay Port. He was in his thirties. But the number of horrible crime scenes was enough to put his physical appearance into the forties. Lorenzo recently transferred into the homicide department. Before that, he was working with most of the youth who lived in the Bay Port area. Trying to find a way to keep the kids off the streets.

"Anthony Lorenzo, how nice to see you," said the medical examiner. She turned back to her computer and began to click-clack at the keyboard.

"Laura," Lorenzo said. Laura Madison was the recent medical examiner. She had nearly the same amount of experience as Lorenzo, maybe even more. She was fifty and had several tattoos on her body. One of them was a small trinity knot enclosed in a circle on her wrist. You couldn't see the ink of the tattoo because it was white and blended into her skin. She turned around from her computer. Her hair straight and tied back into a ponytail. Lorenzo and Laura both looked at the body. Lorenzo made the sign of the cross.

"He won't come back to life, Anthony," Laura chided. Lorenzo looked over at her and she shrugged. Her hands clasped to a clipboard she picked up from the metal slab. Lorenzo begins to walk around the body. The boy's hair was unusually long, blond, and looked recently bleached. He had a small goatee forming on the front of his face. The Y shaped pattern of stitches and cutting the medical examiner did was visible on the body. The lines still a shade of pink.

"What killed this boy?" Lorenzo asked as he looked further and further into the details of the boy that laid on the table. A bruise on his back about the size of a football could be seen near his ribcage. The rest of his skin was a pure shade of pale.

"The marks were deep on his wrist, enough to inflict enough hours and time to kill him slowly. But if he didn't seek medical attention for the broken rib and punctured lung, he would have been lying there in agony," Laura stated, "There was also water in the lungs but he was already dying that death by drowning has been ruled out."

"You're saying someone hit this kid so badly that he was going to die anyway?"

"Without help, yes. His parents came home a few hours later, way past the time window that anyone could have been able to help him. Had someone not sped up the process by a slight drowning when he couldn't even breathe properly in the first place."

"But why this kid? Why Ryan?"

"That I can't help you with. You are going to need to do the investigation all by yourself. I'm just the person who states the obvious as to how someone dies." She threw the clipboard down on the desk and walks over towards the body. She placed her hands on the cuts that were patched up.

"EMT's did that, they thought he cut himself," Lorenzo said.

"I don't think that is what happened to his boy, the marks were quite deep when I opened the stitches. I saw some marks on the bone, but they seriously did a number on his veins and arteries."

"What are you saying? That Ryan didn't commit suicide?" Laura nodded her head. Lorenzo overlooked her shoulder to see what exactly she was talking about.

"Yeah, I'm seeing finger marks on his skin. I might be able to pull a print. Perhaps that is the clue you came down here to find," Laura commented. She went to her desk and pulled out a fingerprint duster.