“I’ll just sit over here for a minute.” Roche went to the desk near the door.
I swiftly made the Y incision, the blade running from shoulders to sternum to pelvis.
As blood was exposed to air, I thought I detected an odor that made me stop what I was doing.
“You know, Lipshaw’s got a really good sharpener out I wish we could get,” Danny was saying. “It hone-grinds with water so you can just stick the knives in there and leave them.”
What I was smelling was unmistakable, but I could not believe it.
“I was just looking at their new catalog,” he went on.
“Makes me crazy all the cool things we can’t afford.”
This could not be right.
“Danny, open the doors,” I said with a quiet urgency that startled him.
“What is it?” he asked in alarm.
“Let’s get plenty of air in here. Now,” I said.
He moved fast with his bad knee and opened double doors that led into the hall.
“What’s wrong?” Roche sat up straighter.
“This man has a peculiar odor.” I was unwilling to voice my suspicions right then, especially to him.
“I don’t smell anything.” He got up and looked around, as if this mysterious odor might be something he could see.
Eddings’ blood reeked of a bitter almond smell, and it did not surprise me that neither Roche nor Danny could detect it. The ability to smell cyanide is a sex-linked recessive trait that is inherited by less than thirty percent of the population. I was among the fortunate few.
“Trust me.” I was reflecting back skin from ribs, careful not to puncture the intercostal muscles. “He smells very strange.”
“And what does that mean?” Roche wanted to know.
“I won’t be able to answer that until tests are conducted,” I said. “In the meantime, we’ll thoroughly check out all of his equipment to make sure everything was functioning and that he didn’t, for example, get exhaust fumes down his hose.”
“You know much about hookahs?” Danny asked me, and he had returned to the table to help.
“I’ve never used one.”
I undermined the midline chest incision laterally. Reflecting back tissue, I formed a pocket in a side of skin, which Danny filled with water. Then I immersed my hand and inserted the scalpel blade between two ribs. I checked for a release of bubbles that might indicate a diving injury had caused air to leak into the chest cavity. But there were none.
“Let’s get the hookah and the hose out of the boat and bring them in,” I decided. “It would be good if we could get hold of a dive consultant for a second opinion. Do you know anyone around here we might be able to reach on a holiday?”
“There’s a dive shop in Hampton Roads that Dr. Mant sometimes uses.”
He got the numbers and called, but the shop was closed this snowy New Year’s Eve, and the owner did not seem to be at home. Then Danny went out to the bay, and when he returned a brief time later, I could hear a familiar voice talking loudly with him as heavy footsteps sounded along the hallway.
“They wouldn’t let you if you were a cop,” Pete Marino’s voice projected into the autopsy suite.
“I know, but I don’t understand it,” Danny said.
“Well, I’ll give you one damn good reason. Hair as long as yours gives the assholes out there one more thing to grab. Me’? I’d cut it off. Besides, the girls would like you better.”
He had arrived in time to help carry in the hookah and coils of hose, and was giving Danny a fatherly lecture. It had never been hard for me to understand why Marino had terrible problems with his own grown son.
“You know anything about hookahs?” I asked Marino as he walked in. He looked blankly at the body “What?
He’s got some weirdo disease?”
“The thing you’re carrying is called a hookah,” I explained.
He and Danny set the equipment on top of an empty steel table next to mine.
“Looks like dive shops are closed for the next few days,” I added. “But the compressor seems pretty simple a pump driven by a five-horsepower engine which pulls air through a filtered intake valve, then through the lowpressure hose connected to the diver’s second-stage regulator. Filter looks all right. Fuel line is intact. That’s all I can tell you.”