Moments later Marino returned to us shaking his head, and Roche was gone. I was relieved, and it showed.
“Good God,” I said. “What’s his story?”
“He thinks with the head God gave him,” Marino said.
“The one between his legs.”
“Like I said,” Danny replied, “he’s been down here a couple of times before, bothering Dr. Mant about things.
But what I didn’t tell you is he always talked to him upstairs. He never would come down to the morgue.”
“I’m shocked,” Marino drolly said.
“I heard that when he was in the police academy he called in sick the day they were supposed to come down here for the demo autopsy,” Danny went on. “Plus, he just got transferred over from juvenile. So he’s been a homicide detective for only about two months.”
“Oh, now that’s good,” Marino said. “Just the kind of person we want working something like this.” I asked him, “Can you smell the cyanide?”
“Nope. Right now all I smell is my cigarette, which is exactly how I want it.”
“Danny?”
“No, ma’am.” He sounded disappointed.
“So far I’m seeing no evidence that this is a diving death. No bubbles in the heart or thorax. No subcutaneous emphysema. No water in the stomach or lungs. I can’t tell if he’s congested.” I cut another section of heart. “Well, he does have congestion of the heart, but is it due to the left heart failing the right-just due to dying, in other words? And he does have some reddening of the stomach wall, which is consistent with cyanide.”
“Doc,” Marino said, “how well did you know him?”
“Personally, really not at all.”
“Well, I’m going to tell you what was in the bag because Roche didn’t know what he was looking at and I didn’t want to tell him.”
He at last slipped out of his coat and looked for a safe place to hang it, deciding on the back of a chair. He lit another cigarette.
“Damn, these floors kill my feet,” he said as he went to the table where hookah and hose were piled, and leaned against the edge. “It must kill your knee,” he said to Danny.
“Totally kills it.”
“Eddings’ got a Browning nine-millimeter pistol with a Birdsong desert brown finish,” Marino said.
. “What’s Birdsong?” Danny placed the spleen in a hanging scale.
“The Rembrandt of pistol finishes. Mr. Birdsong’s the guy you send your weapon to if you want it waterproofed and painted to blend with the environment,” Marino answered. “What he does, basically, is strip it, sandblast it and then spray it with Teflon, which is baked on. All of HRT’s pistols have a Birdsong finish.”
HRT was the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. I felt sure that given the number of stories Eddings had done on law enforcement, he would have been exposed to the FBI Academy at Quantico and its finest trained agents.
“Sounds like something Navy SEALs would have, too,” Danny suggested.
“Them, SWAT teams, counterterrorist, guys like me.”
Marino was looking again at the hookah’s fuel line and intake valves. “And most of us have Novak sights like he’s got, too. But what we don’t have is KTW metal-piercing ammo, also known as cop killers.”
“He’s got Teflon-coated ammo?” I glanced up.
“Seventeen rounds, one in the chamber. All with red lacquer around the primer for waterproofing.”
“Well, he didn’t get armor-piercing ammo here. At least not legally, because it’s been outlawed in Virginia for years. And as for the finish on his pistol, are you certain it’s Birdsong, the same company the Bureau uses?”
“Looks like Birdsong’s magic touch to me,” Marino replied. . “Course, there are other outfits that do similar work.”
I opened the stomach as Marino continued to close like a fist. Eddings had seemed such a fan of law enforcement. I had heard he used to ride along with the police, and go to their picnics and their balls. He had never struck me as gung-ho about weapons, and I was stunned that he would have loaded a pistol with illegal ammunition notorious for being used to murder and maim the very people who were his sources and perhaps his friends.