I had serious problems with his assumptions and one important detail. My Mercedes had anti lock brakes. When Lucy hit the brakes she should not have gone into the sort of skid Officer Sinclair had described.
I left my office and went downstairs to the morgue. My deputy chief. Fielding, and two young female forensic pathologists I had hired last year had cases on the three stainless steel tables. The sharp noise of steel against steel rose above the background thunder of water drumming into sinks, air blowing, and generators humming. The huge stainless steel refrigerator door opened with a loud suck as one of the morgue assistants rolled out another body.
“Dr. Scarpetta, can you look at this?” Dr. Wheat was a woman from Topeka. Her intelligent gray eyes peered out at me from behind a plastic face shield speckled with blood.
I went to her table.
“Does this look like soot in the wound?” She pointed a bloody gloved finger at a bullet wound to the back of the neck.
I bent close.
“It’s got burned edges, so maybe it’s searing. Was there clothing?”
“He didn’t have a shirt on. It happened in his residence.”
“Well, this is an ambiguous one. We need to get a microscopic.”
“Entrance or exit?” Fielding asked as he studied a wound from his own case.
“Let me get your vote while you’re here.”
“Entrance,” I said.
“Me, too. Are you going to be around?”
“In and out.”
“In and out of town or in and out of here?”
“Both. I’ve got my Skypager.”
“It’s going all right?” he asked, his formidable biceps bunching as he cut through ribs.
“It’s a nightmare, really,” I said. It took half an hour to get to the Texaco gas station with the twenty-four-hour towing service that had taken care of my car. I spotted my Mercedes in a corner near a chain link fence, and the sight of its destruction tightened my stomach. I got-weak in the knees. The front end was crumpled up against the windshield, the driver’s side gaping like a toothless mouth. Hydraulic tools had forced open the doors, which had been removed along with the center post. My heart beat hard as I got close, and I jumped when a deep drawl sounded behind me.
“May I help ya?”
I turned to face a grizzled old man wearing a faded red cap with purina over the bill.
“This is my car,” I told him.
“I sure as hell hope you wasn’t the one driving it.”
I noticed the tires were not flat and both air bags had deployed.
“It sure is a shame.” He shook his head as he stared at my hideously mangled Mercedes-Benz.
“Believe this is the first one of these I’ve seen. A 500E. Now, one of the boys here knows Mercedes and tells me Porsche helped design the engine in this one and there aren’t but so many around. What is it? A ’93? I don’t reckon your husband got it around here.”
I noticed that the left taillight was shattered, and near it was a scrape that was smudged with what appeared to be greenish paint. I bent over to get a closer look as my nerves began to tensely hum. The man talked on.
“Course, with as few miles as you had on it, it’s more’n likely a ’94. If you don’t mind my asking, about how much would one like this cost? About fifty?”
“Did you tow this in?” I straightened up, my eyes darting over details that were sending off alarms, one right after another.
“Toby brought it in last night. I don’t guess you’d know the horsepower.”
“Was it exactly like this at the scene?”
The man looked slightly befuddled.
“For example,” I went on, “the phone’s off the hook.”
“I guess so when a car’s been flipping and slams into a tree.”
“And the sunscreen’s up.”
He leaned over and peered in at the back windshield. He scratched his neck.
“I just figured it was dark because the glass is tinted. I didn’t notice the screen was up. You wouldn’t think someone’d put it up at night.”
I carefully leaned inside to look at the rearview mirror. It had been flipped up to reduce the glare of headlights from the rear. I got keys out of my pocketbook and sat sidesaddle on the driver’s seat.