Was it murder?

One of the good parts about this job is that we only work ten days a month.  One of the bad things is that they only pay us peanuts.  So as a result, almost every one of us has a second (and sometimes third) job.  Most of us work at the hospital or in security.  My pal Scotty from A shift happens to help out down at the morgue.  We were supposed to play basketball last night after he got off work.  He texted me and asked me if I could pick him up there; there was something he wanted me to see.

“Did you see on the news about that evangelist that died over the weekend?” Scotty asked when I got there.  I had.  There had been a revival group meeting down in the city square for the last week at a pavilion they call The Scaffold.  Sunday night, a preacher by the name of Arthur Dimmesdale stood up and instead of giving a sermon he confessed to a relationship with a married woman and fathering a child with her.  He then promptly fell over and died right there.  His body was now at the morgue and Scotty had helped with his autopsy.  I asked Scotty if they had a cause of death.  They didn’t, nothing had turned up in the exam.  But he did have a theory.  Scotty asked me if I had ever heard of SLUDGE?  I had.  It’s a constellation of signs and symptoms we see in certain cases of poisonings and this guy fit the bill.  To boot, his roommate was this MD named Chillingworth.  Who else would have had known how to poison someone and not get caught?  They were still waiting on toxicology reports to come back, but Scotty was putting his money down that the guy had been poisoned.  But that’s not why he wanted to see me.  We went back into the cold room and Scotty said that he wanted my opinion on something.  He pulled Dimmesdale’s body out and asked me what I thought about this, pointing to a red mark on his chest.  To me it looked just like the letter A.  He agreed but everyone at the morgue had a theory about how it got there.  One pathologist thought it was just a birth mark, one thought it had been burned or branded into his flesh.  Too me it looked like it had been cut into an A with a knife.  Whatever it was, it was weird.   Scotty rolled him over and asked me to look at his back too.  There on his back were multiple “scars” for lack of a better word.  We both looked at them for a minute trying to figure out what they were.  They almost looked like puncture wounds, perhaps he was into self-mutilation, or maybe his poisoner did it.  Either way this was a weird case.  All I could think of is “Great!”.  Now I’m going to be stuck rolling this over in my mind for days.  That’s what I do, I think about this.  I’m anxious to hear back about his toxicology report.  This is almost worthy of novel.  A man of God, an improper relationship, possibly murder.  Maybe someone should write one.  It probably would be pretty good.