I thought of her wounds and tried to reconstruct how she might have gotten them, and why her fully clothed body had been in the master bathroom. That location, if we were correct about it, was unexpected and odd. Her jeans had not been undone, for when I had recovered the zipper it had been zipped shut, and certainly her buttocks had been covered. Based on the synthetic fabric that had melted into her flesh, I also had no reason to suspect that her breasts had been exposed, not that any of these findings ruled out a sexual assault. But they certainly argued against one.
I was checking the bones through a veil of steam when the telephone rang, startling me. At first I thought it might be some funeral home with a body to deliver, but then I realized that the flashing light was one of the lines for the autopsy room. I could not help but remember what Ruffin had said about spooky early morning calls, and I halfway expected to hear no one on the other end.
‘Yes,’ I said abruptly.
‘Geez, who pissed in your cornflakes?’ Marino answered back.
‘Oh,’ I said, relieved. ‘Sorry, I thought it was someone playing pranks.’
‘What do you mean, pranks?’
‘Later,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’m sitting in your parking lot and was hoping you might let me in.’
‘I’ll be right there.’
In fact, I was very pleased to have company. I hurried to the enclosed bay, and I pushed a button on a wall. The huge door began to crank up, and Marino ducked under it, the dark night smudged with sodium vapor lights. I realized the sky had gotten overcast with clouds that portended rain.
‘Why are you here so late?’ Marino asked in his usual grumpy way as he sucked on a cigarette.
‘My office is smoke-free,’ I reminded him.
‘Like anybody in this joint’s gotta worry about secondary smoke.’
‘A few of us are still breathing,’ I said.
He flicked the cigarette to the concrete floor and irritably crushed it with his foot, as if we had never been through this routine, not even once in our lives. In fact, this had gotten to be a standard act with us that in its own dysfunctional way somehow reaffirmed our bond to each other. I was quite certain that Marino’s feelings would be injured if I didn’t nag him about something.
‘You can follow me into the decomp room,’ I said to him as I shut the bay door. ‘I’m in the middle of something.’
‘I wish I’d known before,’ he complained. ‘I would’ve just dealt with you over the phone.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s not too bad. I’m just cleaning up some bones.’
‘Maybe that ain’t bad to you,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never gotten used to smelling people cook.’
We walked inside the decomposition room and I handed him a surgical mask. I checked the processing to see how it was going and turned the heat down fifty degrees to make sure the water did not boil over and knock bones against each other and the sides of the pot. Marino bent the mask to fit over his nose and mouth and tied sloppy bows in the back. He spotted a box of disposable gloves, snatched a pair and worked them on. It was ironical that he was obsessive in his concerns about outside agents invading his health, when in fact the gravest danger was simply the way he lived. He was sweating in khakis and a white shirt and tie and at some point during the day had been assaulted by ketchup.
‘Got a couple interesting things for you, Doc,’ he said, leaning against a brightly polished sink. ‘We ran the tags on the burned-up Mercedes behind Kenneth Sparkes’s house, and it comes back to an ’81 Benz 240D, blue. The odometer’s probably rolled over at least twice. Registration’s a little scary, comes back to a Dr Newton Joyce in Wilmington, North Carolina. He’s in the book but I couldn’t get him, just his answering machine.’
‘Wilmington is where Claire Rawley went to school, and close to where Sparkes had his beach house,’ I reminded him.