suicide vs murder

"Groovy," Butters said. He walked back over to me and offered me the packet of papers. "Names and addresses of the deceased," he said.
I frowned and flipped through them: columns of text, much of it technical; ugly photographs. "The victims?"
"Officially, they're the deceased." His mouth tightened. "But yeah. I'm pretty sure they're victims."
"Why?"
He opened his mouth, closed it again, and frowned. "You ever see something out of the corner of your eye? But when you look at it, there's nothing there? Or at least, it doesn't look like what you thought it was?"
"Sure."
"Same thing here," he said. "Most of these folks show classic, obvious suicides. There are just a few little details wrong. You know?"
"No," I said. "Enlighten me."
"Take that top one," he said. "Pauline Moskowitz. Thirty-nine, mother of two, husband, two dogs. She disappears on a Friday night and opens up her wrists in a hotel bathtub around three A.M. Saturday morning."
I read over it. "Am I reading this right? She was on antidepressants?"
"Uh-huh," Butters said, "but nothing extreme, and she'd been on them and stable for eight years. Never showed suicidal tendencies before, either."
I looked at the ugly picture of a very ordinary-looking woman lying naked and dead in a tub of cloudy liquid. "So what's got your scalpel in a knot?"
"The cuts," Butters said. "She used a box knife. It was in the tub with her. She severed tendons in both wrists."
"So?"
"So," Butters said. "Once she'd cut the tendons on one wrist, she'd have had very little controlled movement with the fingers in that hand. So what'd she do to cut them both? Use two box knives at the same time? Where's the other knife?"
"Maybe she held it with her teeth," I said.
"Maybe I'll close my eyes and throw a rock out over the lake and it will land in a boat," Butters said. "It's technically possible, but it isn't really likely. The second wound almost certainly wouldn't be as deep or as clean. I've seen 'em look like someone was cutting up a block of Parmesan into slivers. These two cuts are almost identical."
"I guess it's not conclusive, though," I said.
"Not officially."
"I've been hearing that a lot today." I frowned. "What's Brioche think?"
At the mention of his boss, Butters grimaced. "Occam's razor, to use his own spectacularly insensitive yet ironic phrasing. They're suicides. End of story."
"But your guess is that someone else was holding the knife?"
The little ME's face turned bleak, and he nodded without speaking.


White Night Chapter 3, Page 22-23