‘Implying what, exactly?’ I asked.
‘That it’s political.’ He resumed work, collecting fibers and bits of debris. ‘A homicide.’
‘Lord, let’s hope not,’ I said, walking away. ‘What it is now is bad enough.’
On a steel counter in a remote corner of the morgue was a portable electric heater where we defleshed and degreased bones. The process was decidedly unpleasant requiring the boiling of body parts in a ten-percent solution of bleach. The big, rattling steel pot, the smell, were dreadful, and I usually restricted this activity to nights and weekends when we were unlikely to have visitors.
Yesterday, I had left the bone ends from the torso to boil overnight. They had not required much time, and I turned off the heater. Pouring steaming, stinking water into a sink, I waited until the bones were cool enough to pick up. They were clean and white, about two inches long, cuts and saw marks clearly visible. As I examined each segment carefully, a sense of scary disbelief swept over me. I could not tell which saw marks had been made by the killer and which had been made by me.
‘Jack,’ I called out to Fielding. ‘Could you come over here for a minute?’
He stopped what he was doing and walked to my corner of the room.
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
I handed him one of the bones. ‘Can you tell which end was cut with the Stryker saw?’
He turned it over and over, looking back and forth, at one end and then the other, frowning. ‘Did you mark it?’
‘For right and left I did,’ I said. ‘Beyond that, no. I should have. But usually it’s so obvious which end is which, it’s not necessary.’
‘I’m not expert, but if I didn’t know better, I’d say all these cuts were made with the same saw.’ He handed the bone back to me and I began sealing it in an evidence bag. ‘You got to take them to Canter anyway, right.’
‘He’s not going to be happy with me.’ I said.
6
MY HOUSE WAS built of stone on the edge of Windsor Farms, an old Richmond neighborhood with English street names, and stately Georgian and Tudor homes that some would call mansions. Lights were on in windows I passed, and beyond glass I could see fine furniture and chandeliers, and people moving or watching TV. No one seemed to close their curtains in this city, except me. Leaves had begun to fall. It was cool and overcast, and when I pulled into my driveway, smoke was drifting from the chimney, my niece’s ancient green Suburban parked in front.
‘Lucy?’ I called out as I shut the door and turned off the alarm.
‘I’m in here,’ she replied from the end of the house where she always stayed.
As I headed for my office to deposit my briefcase and the pile I had brought home to work on tonight, she emerged from her bedroom, pulling a bright orange UVA sweatshirt over her head.
‘Hi.’ Smiling, she gave me a hug, and there was very little that was soft about her.
Holding her at arm’s length, I took a good look at her, just like I always did.
‘Uh oh,’ she playfully said. ‘Inspection time.’ She held out her arms and turned around, as if about to be searched.
‘Smarty,’ I said.
In truth, I would have preferred it had she weighed a little more, but she was keenly pretty and healthy, with auburn hair that was short but softly styled. After all this time, I still could not look at her without envisioning a precocious, obnoxious ten-year-old who had no one, really, but me.
‘You pass,’ I said.
‘Sorry I’m so late.’
‘Tell me again what it was you were doing?’ I asked, for she had called earlier in the day to say she could not get here until dinner.
‘An assistant attorney general decided to drop in with an entourage. As usual, they wanted HRT to put on a show.’
We headed to the kitchen.
‘I trotted out Toto and Tin Man,’ she added.
They were robots.
‘Used fiber optics, virtual reality. The usual things, except it’s pretty cool. We parachuted them out of a Huey, and I maneuvered them to burn through a metal door with lasers.’