‘What do you want me to do?’ Lou asked.
‘You just stand there and make sure we don’t steal anything,’ Jack
scoffed.
Jack pulled out several of the file drawers, but closed them quickly.
The full-body X rays that were taken by the morgue came in large
folders. It wasn’t something easily hidden.
‘This looks promising,’ Laurie called out. She’d found a stash of X rays
in the cabinet directly under the view box. Lifting the folders out onto
the library table, she scanned the names. She found Franconi’s and
pulled them free of the others.
Returning to the basement level, Jack got the X rays of the floater and
took both folders back to the autopsy room. He gave Bingham’s office
keys to Daryl and thanked him. Daryl merely nodded.
‘Okay, everybody!’ Jack said walking over to the view box. ‘The critical
moment has arrived.’ First he slipped up Franconi’s X rays and then the
headless floater’s.
‘What do you know,’ Jack said after only a second’s inspection. ‘I owe
Laurie five dollars!’
Laurie gave a cry of triumph, as Jack gave her the money. Lou scratched
his head and leaned closer to the light box to stare at the films. ‘How
can you guys tell so quickly?’ he asked.
Jack pointed out the lumpy shadows of the bullets almost obscured by the
mass of shotgun pellets in the floater’s X rays and showed how they
corresponded to the bullets on the Franconi films. Then he pointed to
identical healed clavicular fractures that appeared on the X rays of the
two bodies.
‘This is great,’ Lou said, rubbing his hands together with enthusiasm
that almost matched Laurie’s. ‘Now that we have a corpus delicti, we
might be able to make some headway in this case.’
‘And I’ll be able to figure out what the hell’s going on concerning this
guy’s liver,’ Jack said.
‘And maybe I’ll go on a shopping spree with my money,’ Laurie said,
giving the five-dollar bill a kiss. ‘But not until I figure out the how
and the why this body left here in the first place.’
Unable to sleep despite having taken two sleeping pills, Raymond slipped
out of bed so as not to disturb Darlene. Not that he was terribly
worried. Darlene was such a sound sleeper that the ceiling could fall in
without her so much as moving.
Raymond padded into the kitchen and turned on the light. He wasn’t
hungry but he thought that perhaps a little warm milk might help to
settle his roiling stomach. Ever since the shock of having been forced
to view the terrible sight in the trunk of the Ford, he’d been suffering
with heartburn. He’d tried Maalox, Pepcid AC, and finally Pepto-Bismol.
Nothing had helped.
Raymond was not handy in the kitchen, mainly because he didn’t know
where anything was located. Consequently, it took him some time to heat
the milk and find an appropriate glass. When it was ready, he carried it
into his study and sat at his desk.
After taking a few sips, he noticed that it was three-fifteen in the
morning. Despite the fuzziness in his brain from the sleeping pills, he
was able to figure out that at the Zone it was after nine, a good time
to call Siegfried Spallek.
The connection was almost instantaneous. At that hour, phone traffic
with North America was at a minimum. Aurielo answered promptly and put
Raymond through to the director.
‘You are up early,’ Siegfried commented. ‘I was going to call you in
four or five hours.’
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ Raymond said. ‘What’s going on over there? What’s
the problem with Kevin Marshall?’
‘I believe the problem is over,’ Siegfried said. Siegfried summarized
what had happened and gave credit to Bertram Edwards for alerting him
about Kevin so that he could be followed. He said that Kevin and his
friends had been given such a scare that they wouldn’t dare go near the
island again.
‘What do you mean `friends’?’ Raymond asked. ‘Kevin has always been such
a loner.’
‘He was with the reproductive technologist and one of the surgical
nurses,’ Siegfried said. ‘Frankly, even that surprised us since he’s
always been such a schlemiel, or what do you Americans call such a