Augustine and Bonnie Lamb followed the doctor to another table. Here the cause of death was no mystery. The second John Doe had been in a terrible accident. He was scalped and his face pulverized beyond recognition. A black track of autopsy stitches ran from his breast to his pelvis.
Bonnie stammered, “I don’t know, I can’t tell-”
“Look at his hands,” the medical examiner said.
“No wedding ring,” Augustine observed.
“Please. I want her to look,” the medical examiner said. “We remove the jewelry for safekeeping.”
Bonnie dazedly circled the table. The bluish pallor of the dead man’s skin made it difficult to determine his natural complexion. He was built like Max-narrow shoulders, bony chest, with a veined roll of baby fat at the midsection. The arms and legs were lean and finely haired, like Max’s….
“Ma’am, what about the hands?”
Bonnie Lamb forced herself to look, and was glad she did. The hands were not her husband’s; the fingernails were grubby and gnawed. Max believed religiously in manicures and buffing.
“No, it’s not him.” She spoke very softly, as if trying not to awaken the man with no face.
The doctor wanted to know if her husband had any birthmarks. Bonnie said she hadn’t noticed, and felt guilty-as if she hadn’t spent enough time examining the details of Max’s trunk and extremities. Couldn’t most lovers map their partner’s most intimate blemishes?
“I remember a mole,” she said in a helpful tone, “on one of his elbows.”
“Which elbow?” asked the medical examiner.
“I don’t recall.”
“Like it matters,” said Augustine, restlessly. “Check both his arms, OK?”
The doctor checked. The dead man’s elbows had no moles. Bonnie turned away from the body and laid her head against Augustine’s chest.
“He was driving a stolen motorcycle,” the doctor explained, “with a stolen microwave strapped to the back.”
Augustine sighed irritably. “A hurricane looter.”
“Right. Smacked a lumber truck doing eighty.”
“Now he tells us,” said Bonnie Lamb.
The wash of relief didn’t hit her until she was back in Augustine’s pickup truck. It wasn’t Max at the morgue, because Max is still alive. This is good. This is cause to be thankful. Then Bonnie began to tremble, imagining her husband gutted like a fish on a shiny steel tray.
When they returned to the neighborhood where Max Lamb had vanished, they found the rental car on its rims. The hood stood open and the radiator was gone. Augustine’s note on the windshield wiper was untouched-a testament, he remarked, to the low literacy rate among car burglars. He offered to call a wrecker.
“Later,” Bonnie said, tersely.
“That’s what I meant. Later.” He locked the truck and set the alarm.
They walked the streets for nearly two hours, Augustine with the .38 Special wedged in his belt. He thought Max Lamb’s abductor might have holed up, so they checked every abandoned house in the subdivision. Walking from one block to the next, Bonnie struck up conversations with people who were patching their battered homes. She hoped one of them would remember seeing Max on the morning after the hurricane. Several residents offered colorful accounts of monkey sightings, but Bonnie spoke with no one who recalled the kidnapping of a tourist.
Augustine drove her to the Metro police checkpoint, where she contacted a towing service and the rental-car agency in Orlando. Then she made a call to the apartment in New York to get her messages. After listening for a minute, she pressed the pound button on the telephone and handed the receiver to Augustine.
“Unbelievable,” she said.
It was Max Lamb’s voice on the line. The static was so heavy he could have been calling from Tibet:
“Bonnie, darling, everything’s OK. I don’t believe my life’s in danger, but I can’t say when I’ll be free. It’s too hairy to explain over the phone-uh, hang on, he wants me to read something. Ready? Here goes:
“‘I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity-I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples.'”
After a scratchy pause: “Bonnie, honey, it sounds worse than it is. Please don’t tell my folks a thing-I don’t want Dad all worked up for no reason. And please call Pete and, uh, ask him to put me down for sick leave, just in case this situation drags out. And tell him to stall the sixth floor on the Bronco meeting next week. Don’t forget, OK? Tell him under no circumstances should Bill Knapp be brought in. It’s still my account….”