"It was a very high-velocity round and would most likely have snapped the head in this direction," Petish said, mimicking the movement by grasping the dead man's stiffened neck and jerking it toward one pale shoulder. When he turned Ferris's head back the other way, an exit wound four times the size of the hole on the other side yawned ragged and blackened with dried blood in the area of the jaw.
"Any way to guess the caliber?" Nick said, letting the doctor make an assumption instead of making it himself.
"Yes. A.308, if I am not mistaken," Petish said while sneaking a peek at Nick and smiling at his raised eyebrows. "Oh, they recovered the round, Mr. Mullins. I am good, but certainly not that good."
Nick instinctively reached for a notebook from his back pocket, but then simply scratched a spot on his thigh, recalling Petish's rules.
"If the marksman was only just lucky, he could not have been more accurate," Petish said. "To enter the skull from this point and the expansion of bore diameter damage as it enters the brain would have the effect of instant cessation of all motor and neurologic response."
"Dead before he hit the ground," Nick said.
"Precisely," the doctor said as he pointed out other discolored spots on the body.
"My external examination of the deceased shows a number of bruises both anterior and posterior. Some very old, some more recent, but none that would have been administered in the last few days," Perish began as if he were reading into a report recorder.
"Jailhouse jostle," Nick said, thinking of the status Ferris would have had at MDCC as a child molester.
"Possibly," the M.E. said as he positioned a scalpel over the body's chest and began making his incisions.
Nick concentrated on the tattoos that Ferris had obviously gotten while he was inside. Serpents in dark ink that now stood out on the pale insides of both forearms. Somewhat crude but detailed enough to see the fierceness of eyes and sharpness of claw. Nick wondered if Ferris had paid a prison artist to do them so he could project his toughness or whether it was an expression of what was inside his head.
Petish worked quickly and meticulously, cutting away inside the chest cavity, with deft strokes slicing the connective tissue of major organs and carefully weighing each before unceremoniously dropping them into a five-gallon bucket on the floor nearby. In the air, the Adderley brothers played a buoyant riff of 1930s blues in stark juxtaposition to what was going on at the table. Nick asked an occasional anatomy question and watched as the doctor took tiny samples of the organs and slipped them into test tubes for later microscopic examinations.
"Don't you think that hole in his head makes a pretty good case for cause of death?" Nick said, only half joking as the physician pointed out a darkened portion of lung tissue, snipped and bottled it.
Petish looked up for the first time. "Really, Mr. Mullins. Have you known me to be anything other than completely thorough?"
Nick kept quiet but had to turn his head away when the doctor removed the lower intestines from the corpse. After the weighing, the M.E. misjudged the bucket below and one end of the colon caught an edge, flipping a stream of liquid through the air and against one wall. Those who thought they'd witnessed autopsies by watching CSI: Miami were missing this part unless they had scratch-and-sniff TV. The odor was nearly intolerable. But Nick was bothered more by the growing disdain he was building in his head by going back to the serpents and then recalling Ferris's crime scene: the little house, the small body bags. Instead of the scientific atmosphere he usually held to at these proceedings, he could feel a hate building. Fucking deserved it was on his lips when Petish said, "There it is."
Nick stepped closer to look at the cutting board that Petish had lain on top of the chest and realized the M.E. had Ferris's heart out and was snipping an artery with a pair of scissors.
"What? He had a heart attack," Nick said and then realized his voice was much too anxious.
Petish shook his head with a look of smiling exasperation. "No, no, no, Mr. Mullins. Yes, you can see the hardening of the artery here. But no. I was speaking of the recording."
He was now pointing the scissors at the CD player and the band was just launching into "We Dot" and Cannonball had just made reference to a young man named Ray Charles.
"Ha!" said the doctor. "A young man. Yes. Did you hear?" It was three AM when Nick shook hands with the doctor, minus the latex gloves, and made his way across the darkened parking lot. A false dawn was showing in the east and even though he knew what time it was, and could feel the dry tiredness in his eyes like a parchment on his irises, the possibility of daybreak encouraged him. He got behind the wheel and sat for a while in the quiet, trying to gauge the anger he was still holding for the dead man inside. Why be pissed at a guy who took one through the brain and had just been eviscerated in front of you? Hell, wasn't that enough? But Nick was transferring and he knew it. The face of the man who had killed half his family was the one he'd wanted to see on that table.
He'd almost gotten over it, the anger, the raw feeling for revenge. Or at least he'd pushed it back into a dark spot in his brain so he could get back to work, get back to Carly. Then he'd heard last week that Robert Walker was out. Then he'd called in a marker with a friend at the Department of Corrections and Parole to find out where Walker was living. He knew that he'd put his own ass in trouble if anyone found out that he was stalking the man. But he shook off the argument and started his car, rolled down the window and let the moist night air sweep in around him as he started east along a route and a destination he now knew by heart.
Chapter 9
Nick slowed and drove down Northwest Eighteenth Terrace, past Highsmith's Tool amp; Die on the corner, past Willow Manor, the oddly located Cuban nursing home where the poorer old folks went to die. He turned off his headlights and slid down warehouse row with only his parking lights on. Under the dirty white cast of high streetlights a handful of cars, a couple of pickup trucks and some delivery trucks were parked in front of the line of corrugated steel buildings. He stopped two blocks down and then backed into a spot next to the big Dumpster in front of Flynn's Awnings and Rain Gutters. From here he could see across the roadway to the painted green door of Archie's Tool Sharpening Shack and still use the Dumpster as cover. He turned off the ignition and listened to the ping of cooling metal for several minutes until the silence wrapped around the car, and then he reached for the coffee. He had stopped at an all-night 7-Eleven and bought the twenty-four-ounce cup, loaded it with cream and sugar and also bagged two donuts as an afterthought. He started on the chocolate glaze and sipped at the steaming cup and checked the end of the street. If a police sector car came through on the overnight shift, he would have to explain himself. But he'd done this three times since tracing Walker's work address and no cops had come by yet. It was probably just off their regular radar, but this week it had become the late-night center of his. He checked his watch-four fifteen-and made sure the alarm was on and then stared out at Archie's sign and before the first donut was done, he fell asleep. He dreamed the dream he always did, the one where he is sitting back in the third seat of the family van while his dead wife is driving. His dead child watches vigilantly out a side window, counting the lighted deer she spies among the Christmas decorations. Carly is at the other window, trying to outdo her sister. It is dark outside. "The girls," which is what he calls all three, are out cruising through the local neighborhoods on Christmas Eve. In snowless South Florida, the garishness of the colored displays seems profoundly out of place, lights strung in palms, the white-wired deer bending their heads and munching at grass that is eternally green. The girls are laughing at some observation Carly has made about a deer that has lost the electrical current from all his bulbs but the single red one at his nose and a broken strand running down one leg. But Nick is in the back, realizing that his wife seems oblivious to the fact that she is driving in a constant loop, around and around the traffic circle near their house, going nowhere, seeing the same houses, the same deer, over and over.