From Potter`s Field

'So the bay could have been empty at that time.'

'Yes, ma'am. I guess it could have been.'

'And when you held the door open a few minutes later so the body could be rolled in, you didn't notice a van in the bay?'

'That's when I did notice it,' he said. 'I just thought it belonged to your office. It looked like one of your vans. You know, dark blue with no windows except in front.'

'Let's get back to the man rolling the body inside the refrigerator and your locking up,' Marino said. 'Then what?'

'I figured he'd leave after he finished his paperwork,' Evans said. 'I went back to the other side of the building.'

'Before he'd left the morgue.'

Evans hung his head again.

'Do you have any idea at all when he finally left?' Marino then asked.

'No, sir,' the security guard quietly said. 'I guess I can't swear he ever did.'

Everyone was silent, as if Gault might this minute walk in. Marino pushed his chair back and looked at the empty doorway.

It was Evans who next spoke. 'If that was his van, I guess he shut the bay door himself. I know it was shut at five because I walked around the building.'

'Well, it don't exactly require a rocket scientist to do that,' Marino said unkindly. 'You just drive out, go back inside and hit the damn button. Then you walk out through the side door.'

'The van certainly isn't in there now,' I said. 'Someone drove it out.'

'Are both vans outside?' Marino asked.

'They were when I got here,' I said.

Marino asked Evans, 'If you saw him in a lineup, could you pick him out?'

He looked up, terrified. 'What did he do?'

'Could you pick him out?' Marino said again.

'I think I could. Yes, sir. I sure would try.'

I got up and quickly walked down the hall. At my office I stopped in the doorway and looked around the same way I had last night when I had walked inside my house. I tried to sense the slightest shift in the environment - a rug disturbed, an object out of place, a lamp on that shouldn't be.

My desk was neatly stacked with paperwork waiting for my review, and the computer screen on the return told me I had mail waiting. The in basket was full, the out basket empty, and my microscope was shrouded in plastic because when I had last looked at slides I was about to fly to Miami for a week.

That seemed incredibly long ago, and it shocked me to think Sheriff Santa had been arrested Christmas Eve, and since then the world had changed. Gault had savaged a woman named Jane. He had murdered a young police officer. He had killed Sheriff Santa and broken into my morgue. In four days he had done all that. I moved closer to my desk, scanning, and as I got near my computer terminal I could almost smell a presence, or feel it, like an electrical field.

I did not have to touch my keyboard to know he had. I watched the mail-waiting message quietly flash green. I hit several keys to go into a menu that would show me my messages. But the menu did not come up, a screen saver did. It was a black background with CAIN in bright red letters that dripped as if they were bleeding. I walked back down the hall.

'Marino,' I said. 'Please come here.'

He left Evans and followed me to my office. I pointed to my computer. Marino stared stonily at it. There were wet rings under the arms of his white uniform shirt, and I could smell his sweat. Stiff black leather creaked when he moved. He was constantly rearranging the fully loaded belt beneath his full belly as if everything he'd amounted to in life was in his way.

'How hard would that be to do?' he asked, mopping his face with a soiled handkerchief.

'Not hard if you have a program ready to load.'

'Where the hell did he get the program?'

'That's what worries me,' I said, thinking of a question we didn't ask.

We returned to the conference room. Evans was standing, numbly looking at photographs on the wall.

'Mr. Evans,' I said. 'Did the man from the funeral home speak to you?'

He turned around, startled. 'No, ma'am. Not much.'

'Not much?' I puzzled.

'No, ma'am.'

'Then how did he convey what he wanted?'

'He said what he had to say.' He paused. 'He was a real quiet type. He spoke in a real quiet voice.' Evans was rubbing his face. 'The more I think about it, the stranger it is. He was wearing tinted glasses. And to tell you the truth' - he stopped - 'well, I had my impressions.'

'What impressions?' I asked.

Evans said, after a pause, 'I thought he might be homosexual.'

'Marino,' I said. 'Let's take a walk.'

We escorted Evans out of the building and waited until he'd rounded a corner because I did not want him to see what we did next. Both vans were parked in their usual spaces not far from my Mercedes. Without touching door or glass, I looked through the driver's window of the one nearest the bay and could plainly see the plastic on the steering column was gone, wires exposed.

'It's been hot-wired,' I said.

Marino snapped up his portable radio and held it close to his mouth.

'Unit eight hundred.'

'Eight hundred,' the dispatcher came back.

'Ten-five 711.'

The radio called the detective inside my building whose unit number was 711, and then Marino was saying, 'Ten-twenty-five me out back.'

'Ten-four.'

Marino next radioed for a tow truck. The van was to be processed for prints on the door handles. It was to be impounded and carefully processed inside and out after that. Unit 711 had yet to walk out the back door fifteen minutes later.

'He's dumb as a bag of hammers,' Marino complained, walking around the van, radio in hand. 'Lazy son of a bitch. That's why they called him Detective 711. Because he's so quick. Shit.' He glanced irritably at his watch. 'What'd he do? Get lost in the men's room?'

I waited on the tarmac, getting unbearably cold, for I had not changed out of my greens and was without a coat. I walked around the van several times, too, desperate to look in the back of it. Five more minutes passed and Marino got the dispatcher to call the other officers inside my building. Their response was immediate.

'Where's Jakes?' Marino growled at them the instant they came out the door.

'He said he was going to look around,' one of the officers replied.

'I raised him twenty damn minutes ago and told him to ten-twenty-five me out here. I thought he was with one of you.'

'No, sir. Not for the past half hour, at least.'

Marino again tried 711 on the radio and got no answer. Fear shone in his eyes.

'Maybe he's in some part of the building where he can't copy,' an officer suggested, looking up at windows. His partner had his hand near his gun and was looking around, too.

Marino radioed for backups. People had begun pulling into the parking lot and letting themselves into the building. Many of the scientists with their topcoats and briefcases were braced against the raw, cold day and paid no attention to us. After all, police cars and those who drove them were a common sight. Marino tried to raise Detective Jakes on the air. Still he did not answer.

'Where did you see him last?' Marino asked the officers.

'He got on the elevator.'

'Where?'

'On the second floor.'

Marino turned to me. 'He couldn't have gone up, could he?'

'No,' I said. 'The elevator requires a security key for any floor above two.'

'Did he go down to the morgue again?' Marino was getting increasingly agitated.

'I went down there a few minutes later and didn't see him,' an officer said.

'The crematorium,' I suggested. 'He could have gone down to that level.'

'All right. You check the morgue,' Marino said to the officers. 'And I want you staying together. The doc and I will look around the crematorium.'

Inside the bay, left of the loading dock, was an old elevator that serviced a lower level where at one time bodies donated to science were embalmed and stored and cremated after medical students were through with them. It was possible Jakes might have gone there to look. I pushed the down button. The elevator slowly rose with much clanking and complaining. I pulled a handle and shoved open heavy, paint-chipped doors. We ducked inside.