“He’s going downstairs, and his name’s Haresh,” I replied.
Bones and small wheels clattered quietly as Marino and his grinning companion followed me to the elevator, attracting amused glances from several members of my staff. Haresh did not get out very often, and as a rule, when he was spirited away from his corner, his abductor was not motivated by serious intent. Last June I had walked into my office on the morning of my birthday to find Haresh sitting in my chair, glasses and lab coat on, a cigarette clamped between his teeth. One of the more preoccupied forensic scientists from upstairs – or so I had been told – had walked past my doorway and said good morning without noticing anything odd.
“You’re not going to tell me he talks to you when you’re working down here,” Marino said as the elevator doors shut.
“In his own way he does,” I said. “I’ve found having him on hand is a lot more useful than referring to diagrams in Gray’s.”
“What’s the story on his name?”
“Apparently, when he was purchased years ago, there was an Indian pathologist here named Haresh. The skeleton is also Indian. Male, fortyish, maybe older.”
“As in Little Bighorn Indian or the other kind that paint dots on their foreheads?”
“As in the Ganges River in India,” I said as we got out on the first floor. “The Hindus cast their dead upon the river, believing they will go straight to heaven.”
“I sure as hell hope this joint ain’t heaven.”
Bones and wheels clattered again as Marino rolled Haresh into the autopsy suite.
On top of a white sheet covering the first stainless steel table were Deborah Harvey’s remains, gray dirty bones, clumps of muddy hair, and ligaments as tan and tough as shoe leather. The stench was relentless but not as overpowering, since I had removed her clothes. Her condition was made all the more pitiful by the presence of Haresh, who bore not so much as a scratch on his bleached white bones.
“I have several things to tell you,” I said to Marino. “But first I want your promise that nothing leaves this room.”
Lighting a cigarette, he looked curiously at me. “Okay.”
“There’s no question about their identities,” I began, arranging clavicles on either side of the skull. “Pat Harvey brought in dental X rays and charts this morning – ” “In person?”
he interrupted, surprised.
“Unfortunately,” I said, for I had not expected Pat Harvey to deliver the records herself – a miscalculation on my part, and one I wasn’t likely to forget.
“That must’ve created quite a stir,” he said.
It had.
When she pulled up in her Jaguar, she had left it illegally parked by the curb and appeared full of demands and on the verge of tears. Intimidated by the presence of the famous public official, the receptionist let her in, and Mrs. Harvey promptly set off down the hall in search of me. I think she would have come down to the morgue had my administrator not intercepted her at the elevator and ushered her into my office, where I found her moments later. She was sitting rigidly in a chair, her face as white as chalk. On top of my desk were death certificates, case files, autopsy photographs, and an excised stab wound suspended in a small bottle of formalin tinted pink by blood. Hanging on the back of the door were bloodstained clothes I was intending to take upstairs when I made evidence rounds later in the day. Two facial reconstructions of unidentified dead females were perched on top of a filing cabinet like decapitated clay heads.
Pat Harvey had gotten more than she had bargained for. She had run head-on into the hard realities of this place.
“Morrell also brought me Fred Cheney’s dental records,” I said to Marino.
“Then it’s definitely Fred Cheney and Deborah Harvey?”
“Yes,” I said, and then I directed his attention to X rays clipped to a view box on the wall.
“That ain’t what I think it is.”
A look of amazement passed over his face as he fixed on a radiopaque spot within the shadowy outline of lumbar vertebrae.