At the top of the screen were the words Hounsfield Units, the measurements used to describe the radiodensity of a CT scan. Onscreen, a grayscale image appeared showing a full 3-D rendering of Colonel Mint’s body.
In the Dover mortuary, CT scans were still a new thing—instituted back in 2006, when the military decided that every fallen service member from Iraq and Afghanistan required one. It wasn’t out of kindness. The 3-D record was a way to learn how bullets and shrapnel tore through a body. After seeing wound after wound in the same spot on soldiers’ necks, the Army realized that their body armor needed to be redesigned to better cover their necklines.
It’d been a constant for centuries: with every death, governments learn how to make better war.
“These scans are gonna put me outta business one day, aren’t they?” Casper asked, squinting at the laptop.
Onscreen, the CT showed Mint’s organs—lungs, kidneys, heart—in muted gray tones, with precise details, right down to the mazelike squiggles on his brain.
“Are those spots—？”
“Blood,” Zig said, pointing to what looked like gray leopard spots in Mint’s neck, trailing down toward his lungs. “When the bullet pierced his throat, he started inhaling, and— Those final breaths filled his lungs with blood.”
Casper nodded while his hands twisted the wrapper from the Tootsie Roll into a tight braid.
Of course, what jumped out most was the actual wound: bright white spots—tiny supernovas—running from Mint’s cheek diagonally across his neck, leaving a spray of scattered gray gravel in their wake.
“The gray spots are bone and tissue, but these bright white dots are metal—fragments of the bullet,” Zig explained, tapping the tiny supernovas onscreen. Back in his Dover days, Zig used these CT scan images when he was rebuilding a fallen service member’s face—so he’d know where the roughest patches of shrapnel would be.
“Is this supposed to tell us something about the scratches on his hand?” Casper asked.
“Depends who did the scratching,” Zig explained, scrolling up to Colonel Mint’s skull. “According to the Dover medical examiner, the valet was in the front seat, and Colonel Mint was in the back. But with the magic of technology . . .”
Zig clicked on a dropdown menu labeled Imaging and deselected the boxes marked:
? Blood
? Soft tissue
? Muscle
With each click, the CT scan blinked. The leopard spots showing Mint’s blood disappeared. His lungs and the rest of his organs dis appeared. Then his musculature disappeared, eventually leaving only one box unchecked, the sole thing Zig wanted to see: bone.
Onscreen, Mint’s chest became a rib cage, his face now a pale gray Halloween skull, though his empty eye sockets and nose were faded because the CT allowed you to see a full 3-D image that ran all the way through to the back of the head. As before, where the bullet first hit, there were bits of stray bone floating inside Mint’s skull, fragments of Mint’s mandible that got embedded in the soft tissue of his throat. Since the bright white bullet fragments were no longer visible, what jumped out now was . . .
“Ziggy . . .”
“I see it,” he said, eyeing a brand-new set of speckled white dots, like gravel, that were embedded in the side of Mint’s skull. Not on the left side, where the bullet hit. On the right side, just above his ear.
“Are those—？ Is that bullet shrapnel?”
“Not bullet,” Zig said, pointing to the checked box. “It’s bone shrapnel.”
Zig hit another button, zooming in close, the tiny white fragments looking like a dozen broken pencil points, all embedded deep in Mint’s skull. “We couldn’t see it in your regular photos—it was hidden under his hair.”