“More like one in ten million.”
“But it does happen.”
“Not in this case.”
“I saw him! Here. Right here. Tonight.”
He went to her, kissed her on the cheek, took her hand, which was ice-cold. “Listen, Hilary, he’s dead. Because of the stab wounds you inflicted, Frye lost half the blood in his body. They found him in a huge pool of it. He lost all that blood, and then he lay in the hot sun, unattended, for a few hours. He simply couldn’t have lived through that.”
“Maybe he could.”
Tony lifted her hand to his lips, kissed her pale fingers. “No,” he said quietly but firmly. “Frye would have had to die from such a blood loss.”
Tony figured that she was suffering from mild shock, which was somehow responsible for a temporary short circuit of her senses, a brief confusion of memories. She just was getting this attack mixed up with the one last week. In a minute or two, when she regained control of herself, everything would clear up in her mind, and she would realize that the man who had been here tonight had not been Bruno Frye. All he had to do was stroke her a little bit, speak to her in a measured voice, and answer all her questions and wild suppositions as reasonably as possible, until she was her normal self again.
“Maybe Frye wasn’t dead when they found him in that supermarket parking lot,” she said. “Maybe he was just in a coma.”
“The coroner would have discovered it when he did the autopsy.”
“Maybe he didn’t do the autopsy.”
“If he didn’t, another doctor on his staff did.”
“Well,” Hilary said, “maybe they were especially busy that day–a lot of bodies all at once or something like that–and they decided just to fill out a quick report without actually doing the work.”
“Impossible,” Tony said. “The medical examiner’s office has the highest professional standards imaginable.”
“Can’t we at least check on it?” she asked.
He nodded. “Sure. We can do that. But you’re forgetting that Frye must have passed through the hands of at least one mortician. Probably two. What little blood was left in him must have been drained out and replaced with embalming fluid.”
“Are you sure?”
“He had to be either embalmed or cremated to be shipped to St. Helena. It’s the law.”
She considered that for a moment, then said, “But what if this is one of those bizarre cases, the one in ten million? What if he was mistakenly pronounced dead? What if the coroner did fudge on the autopsy? And what if Frye sat up on the embalmer’s table, just as the mortician was starting to work on him?”
“You’re grasping at straws, Hilary. Surely you can see that if anything like that happened, we’d know about it. If a mortician found himself in possession of a dead body that turned out not to be dead after all, that turned out to be a virtually bloodless man urgently in need of medical attention, then that mortician would get him to the nearest hospital in one hell of a hurry. He’d also call the coroner’s office. Or the hospital would call. We’d know about it immediately.”
She thought about what he had said. She stared at the kitchen floor and chewed on her lower lip. Finally, she said, “What about Sheriff Laurenski up there in Napa County?”
“We haven’t been able to get a response out of him yet.”
“Why not?”
“He’s dodging our inquiries. He won’t take our calls or return them.
“Well, doesn’t that tell you that there’s more to this than meets the eye?” she asked. “There’s some sort of conspiracy, and the Napa sheriff is part of it.”
“What sort of conspiracy did you have in mind?”
“I … don’t know.”
Still speaking softly and calmly, still certain that she would eventually respond to his gentle and reasonable arguments, Tony said, “A conspiracy between Frye and Laurenski and maybe even Satan himself? A conspiracy to cheat Death out of his due? An evil conspiracy to come back from the grave? A conspiracy to somehow live forever? None of that makes sense to me. Does it make sense to you?”