‘A little toast with jam?’ he asked as he did every morning.
‘I ate at the hotel, thanks.’ I gave the same reply as he sat behind his desk.
‘Never stops me from eating again.’ He smiled, slipping on glasses. ‘I’ll just go over your schedule, then. You lecture at eleven this morning, then again at one P.M. Both at the college, in the old pathology building. I should expect about seventy-five students for each, but there could be more. I don’t know. You’re awfully popular over here, Dr Kay Scarpetta,’ he cheerfully said. ‘Or maybe it’s just that American violence is so exotic to us.’
‘That’s rather much like calling a plague exotic,’ I said.
‘Well, we can’t help but be fascinated by what you see.’
‘And I guess that bothers me,’ I said in a friendly but ominous way. ‘Don’t be too fascinated.’
We were interrupted by the phone, which he snapped up with the impatience of one who answers it too often.
Listening for a moment, he brusquely said. ‘Right, right. Well, we can’t place an order like that just yet. I’ll have to ring you back another time.
‘I’ve been wanting computers for years,’ he complained to me as he hung up. ‘No bloody money when you’re the dog wagged by the Socialist tail.’
‘There will never be enough money. Dead men don’t vote.’
‘The bloody truth. So what’s the topic of the day?’ he wanted to know.
‘Sexual homicide,’ I replied. ‘Specifically the role DNA can play.’
‘These dismemberments you’re so interested in.’ He sipped tea. ‘Do you think they’re sexual? I mean, would that be the motivation on the part of whoever would do this?’ His eyes were keen with interest.
‘It’s certainly an element,’ I replied.
‘But how can you know that when none of the victims has ever been identified? Couldn’t it just be someone who kills for sport? Like, say, your Son of Sam, for example?’
‘What the Son of Sam did had a sexual element,’ I said, looking around for my pathologist friend. ‘Do you know how much longer she might be? I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a hurry.’
Shaw glanced at his watch again. ‘You can check. Or I suppose she may have gone on to the morgue. We have a case coming in. A young male, suspected suicide.’
‘I’ll see if I can find her.’ I got up.
Off the hallway near the entrance was the coroner’s court, where inquests for unnatural deaths were held before a jury. This included industrial and traffic accidents, homicides and suicides, the proceedings in camera, for the press in Ireland was not allowed to print many details. I ducked inside a stark, chilly room of varnished benches and naked walls, and found several men inside, tucking paperwork into briefcases.
‘I’m looking for the coroner,’ I said.
‘She slipped out about twenty minutes ago. Believe she had a viewing,’ one of them said.
I left the building through the back door. Crossing a small parking lot, I headed to the morgue as an old man came out of it. He seemed disoriented, almost stumbling as he looked about, dazed. For an instant, he stared at me as if I held some answer, and my heart hurt for him. No business that had brought him here could possibly be kind. I watched him hurry toward the gate as Dr Margaret Foley suddenly emerged after him, harried, her graying hair disarrayed.
‘My God!’ She almost ran into me. ‘I turn my back for a minute and he’s gone.’
The man let himself out, the gate flung open wide as he fled. Foley trotted across the parking lot to shut and latch it again. When she got back to me, she was out of breath and almost tripped over a bump in the pavement.
‘Kay, you’re out and about early,’ she said.
‘A relative?’ I asked.
‘The father. Left without identifying him, before I could even pull back the sheet. That will foul me up the rest of the day.’
She led me inside the small brick morgue with its white porcelain autopsy tables that probably belonged in a medical museum and old iron stove that heated nothing anymore. The air was refrigerated-chilly, modern equipment nonexistent except for electric autopsy saws. Thin gray light seeped through opaque skylights, barely illuminating the white paper sheet covering a body that a father could not bear to see.