totalled sixteen. Twelve, on January 3rd. Seventeen, before 2000
hours on January 4th. Sixty-two names in total, during the
eighty-six-hour window. Nine of them were civilian delivery
drivers. We crossed them off. Eleven of them were repeats.
They had come in, gone out, come in again. Like commuters.
My night-duty sergeant was one of them. We crossed her off,
because she was a woman. And short. Elsewhere we deleted
the second and any subsequent entries in each case.
We ended up with forty-one individuals, listed by name, rank
and initial. No way of telling which were men and which were
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women. No way of telling which of the men were tall and strong
and right-handed.
‘I’ll work on the genders,’ Summer said. ‘I’ve still got the
basic strength lists. They have full names on them.’
I nodded. Left her to it. Got on the phone and scared up the
pathologist and asked him to meet me in the mortuary, right
away.
I drove our Chevy between my office and his because I didn’t
want to be seen walking around with a crowbar. I parked
outside the mortuary entrance and waited. The guy showed up
inside five minutes, walking, from the direction of the O Club.
I probably interrupted his dessert. Or maybe even his main
course. I slid out to meet him and leaned back in and took the
crowbar out of the back seat. He glanced at it. Led me inside.
He seemed to understand what I wanted to do. He unlocked his
office and hit the lights and unlocked his drawer. Opened it and
lifted out the crowbar that had killed Carbone. Laid it on his
desk. I laid the borrowed specimen next to it. Pulled the tissue
paper off it. Lined it up at the same angle. It was exactly
identical.
‘Are there wide variations?’ the pathologist asked. ‘With crow
bars?’
‘More than you would think,’ I said. ‘I just had a big crowbar
lesson.’
‘These two look the same.’
‘They are the same. They’re peas in a pod. Count on it.
They’re custom made. They’re unique in all the world.’
‘Did you ever meet Carbone?’ 5fery briefly,’ I said.
‘What was his posture like?’
‘In what way?’
‘Did he stoop?’
I thought back to the dim interior of the lounge bar. To the
hard light in the parking lot. Shook my head.
‘He wasn’t tall enough to stoop,’ I said. ‘He was a wiry guy,
solid, stood up pretty straight. Kind of on the balls of his feet.
He looked athletic.’
‘OK.’
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‘Why?’
‘It was a downward blow. Not a downward chop, but a
horizontal swing that dipped as it hit. Maybe it was just below
horizontal. Carbone was seventy inches tall. The wound was
sixty-five inches off the ground, assuming he wasn’t stooping.
But it was delivered from above. So his attacker was tall.’
‘You told us that already,’ I said.
‘No, I mean tall,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working on it. Mapping it
out. The guy had to be six-four or six-five.’
‘Like me,’ I said.
‘And as heavy as you, too. Not easy to break a skull as badly
as that.’
I thought back to the crime scene. It had been pocked with
small hummocks of dead grass and there were wrist-thick
branches here and there on the ground, but it was basically a flat area. No way one guy could have been standing higher than
the other. No way of assuming a relative height difference when
there really wasn’t one.
‘Six-four or six-five,’ I said. ‘Are you prepared to go to bat on
that?’
‘In court?’
‘It was a training accident,’ I said. ‘We’re not going to court.
This is just between you and me. Am I wasting my time looking
at people less than six feet four inches tall?’
The doctor breathed in, breathed out.
‘Six-three,’ he said. ‘To be on the safe side. To allow a margin
for experimental error. I’d go to bat on six-three. Count on it.’
‘OK,’ I said.
He shooed me out the door and hit the lights and locked up
again.
Summer was sitting behind my desk when I got back, doing
nothing. She was through with the gender analysis. It hadn’t