‘Ouch.’
‘Then you’ll come to me with your bladder bursting, and you’ll say, “Luther, my God, why didn’t you warn me about these people?”‘
‘No, no. I promise to crawl away somewhere, all by myself, and let my bladder burst in silence. I promise — swear — not to bother you.
‘Yeah, because you’d rather let your bladder burst than have to hear me say I told you so.’
Luther was sitting at the lab table on a wheeled stool. Dan pulled up another stool and sat down in front of him. ‘Okay. Hit me with the dazzling scientific insights, Doctor Williams. You have three special customers from last night. McCaffrey, Hoffritz, and Cooper.’
‘They’re scheduled for autopsy this evening.’
‘They haven’t been done already?’
‘We have a backlog here, Danny. They kill ’em faster than we can cut ’em open.’
‘Sounds like a violation of free-market principles,’ Dan said.
‘Huh?’
‘You’ve got a lot more supply than you have demand.’
‘Isn’t that the truth? Would you like to go into the cooler, see the tables where we have all the stiffs stacked on top of one another?’
‘No thanks, but it sounds like a charming excursion.’
‘Pretty soon, we’ll have to start piling them in the closets with bags of ice.’
‘You at least seen the three I’m interested in?’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘Can you tell me anything about them?’
‘They’re dead.’
‘As soon as the totalitarians take over, they’re going to do away with all smartass black pathologists, first thing.’
‘Hey, that’s what I’m telling you,’ Luther said.
‘You’ve examined the wounds on those three?’
His dark face darkening even further, the pathologist said, ‘Never seen anything like it. Each corpse is a mass of overlapping contusions, scores of them, maybe hundreds. Such a mess. Jesus. Yet no two of those blows have the same configuration. Dozens of points of fracture too, but there’s no pattern to the bone injuries. The autopsy will tell us for sure, but based on just a preliminary examination, I’d say the bones sometimes look snapped, sometimes splintered, sometimes … crushed. Now, there’s no damn way a blunt instrument, used as a club, can pulverize bone. A blow will crack or splinter bone, but that’s strictly impact. Impact doesn’t crush — unless it’s tremendous impact, like you get when a car rams a pedestrian and pins him against a brick wall. Generally, you can only crush bone by applying pressure, by squeezing, and I’m talking a lot of pressure.
‘So, what were they hit with?’
‘You don’t get me. See, when somebody’s bashed as hard and as many times as these guys were, you’ll find a pattern of the striking face — rough, smooth, sharp, rounded, whatever. And you’ll be able to say, “This fella was wasted with a hammer that had a round striking surface, one inch in diameter, with a gently beveled edge.” Or maybe it’s a crowbar, the dull end of a hatchet, a bookend, or a salami. But once you’ve examined the wounds, you’ll usually be able to put a name to the instrument. But not this time. Every contusion has a different shape. Every injury appears to’ve been made by a different instrument.’
Pulling on his left earlobe, Dan said, ‘I suppose we can rule out the possibility that the killer walked into that house with a suitcase full of blunt instruments just because he likes variety. I don’t see the victims standing still while he traded the hammer for a shovel and the shovel for a lug wrench.’
‘I’d think that was a safe assumption. The thing is.. . I didn’t notice one wound that looked exactly like a hammer blow or like the mark from a crowbar or a lug wrench. Each contusion was not only different from other contusions, but each was unique, oddly shaped.
‘Any ideas at all?’
‘Well, if this were an old Fu Manchu novel, I’d say we have a villain who’s invented a fiendish new weapon, a compressed-air machine that has more force than Arnold Schwarzenegger wielding a sledgehammer.’
‘Colorful theory. But not too damned likely.’
‘You ever read Sax Rohmer, those old Fu Manchu books?’ Hell, they were full of exotic weapons, far-out methods of murder.’