The man lying on my right was young, uncircumcised, well-muscled. He had a good haircut, and a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. I couldn’t look anymore. I scooted closer to Mike’s shoulder and studied the weave of his tweed jacket until we came to the room at the end of the hall.
“Is there a short-cut out?” I asked.
“No, sorry. Seems to be a full house tonight. Everyone’s working overtime.”
“Where are we going?”
“Right here.” Mike led me into a small side room.
Everything I had seen to this point looked like a public health clinic whose massive client load had been left waiting too long. But upon entering this room we seemed to have moved into something more exclusive, more private. There was one cadaver: a blackened, grotesquely contorted figure.
Mike leaned his face close to mine. “Okay?”
“I’m all right.” I lied.
A woman in green surgical drapes shuffled over to us in her paper booties. She was beyond middle-age, somewhere approaching Hallmark’s version of grandmotherly. It bothered me that I couldn’t see her eyes behind the protective goggles. She held an X-ray film in her left hand.
“Are you Miss MacGowen?” she asked.
“Yes.” I didn’t offer my hand because hers were encased in soiled rubber gloves. “This is Detective Flint.”
“I know.” She nodded. “Hi, Mike. Glad you made it.”
“I could have passed on this one, Winnie,” he said. “What do you know?”
Winnie, whoever she was, chucked the X ray into a light frame. I could see the crushed bones in the pelvis, a grossly fractured femur.
Winnie looked from the X ray to the subject on the table.
“Male,” she said, beginning with the obvious. “Between mid-thirties and late-forties, five-ten to maybe six-one, Caucasian, fair complexion, well-nourished, upper income brackets but nouveau riche, complete asshole.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You lost me on the last two.”
“They were the easiest characteristics to determine,” she said, gesturing me closer to the corpse. With a stainless probe she retracted what was left of the top lip and tapped the front teeth.
“Fused by the fire,” she said, “Good quality enamel caps. He had thousands of dollars of dental work in his mouth to correct problems that should have been taken care of when he was a kid.”
Then she lifted his pinkie finger. It had somehow escaped massive damage. She looked at me and smiled expectantly, but I didn’t see what seemed obvious to her. I shrugged.
“He had a manicure,” she grinned. “Did you ever know a man with capped teeth and a manicure who wasn’t a complete asshole?”
“Never,” I said. “Winnie, I didn’t get the rest of your name.”
“Kasababian,” she said. “Senior pathologist. I was told you might give us some help identifying our friend here.”
The corpse was an abomination. It was a feat of some sort for me to even be in the same room with him. The face looked something like King Tut’s mummy, with its seared skin stretched tight across the skull bones, little tufts of frizzled hair over the ear holes.
Marc and Emily had always been very thin. Their skin seemed tailored to their bones with great precision, nothing loose, nothing left over. I had thought I would be able to recognize their naked skeletons. I could not see anything familiar in one single feature of this dead man.
“How tall did you say?” I asked Winnie.
“The forensic anthropologist will come closer, but my best estimate is five-ten to six-one.”
“My brother was at least six-four,” I said. “Could you stretch your estimate that far?”
“That would be a stretch,” she said. “Wait and see what the anthropologist says.”
She had gone back over to the X ray. Her goggles hung around her neck as she peered closely at it. “We’re considering the possibility this is your brother?”
“Yes,” I said.
“We’ll ask you for the names of the family physician and dentist, but in the meantime, do you remember your brother having any broken bones?”
I thought for a minute. We all take lumps as kids because of the stupid things we do. Marc had been a daredevil par excellence. He had also been a superb athlete, graceful and agile like a cat. And with the same inner gyroscope.
I shook my head. “Sorry. I can’t remember Marc breaking anything.”
“No legs? No elbows?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Nothing.”
“Don’t be sorry.” Winnie smiled. She touched her probe to the right shin of the X-ray subject. “Youthful fracture of the tibia. Well-healed. Heavy calcification. Ditto the elbow. Probably was beginning to cause some pain.”
Em, Marc and I all went to different summer camps, and now and then away by ourselves to friends and relatives for a few weeks, maybe a month or two at a time. One break might have gotten by me. But not two.
“Where were the dogtags found?” I asked.
“In the pelvis,” she said, “mixed with some melted coins and the remains of a seatbelt buckle. I’m not an explosives expert. I don’t know much about debris patterns, and so on. But if you asked my opinion, I would say the dogtags were in the victim’s right front trouser pocket.”
“Not around his neck?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not at the time of the explosion.”
I went over to Mike and put my hand on his shoulder. “He isn’t Marc.”
“What about the dogtags?” he asked.
I think I remember that they were sent home from Vietnam with some of Marc’s personal effects. They used to hang on a statue of the Virgin in my mother’s bedroom. But I haven’t seen them for years.”
“Remember what I told you this afternoon?” Mike asked. “This character we pulled out of the Volvo is someone you knew. Any ideas?”
I went through Winnie Kasababian’s descriptive parameters again. Sort of tall, but not very, not very old, not exactly young. Could fit a lot of candidates.
I have some ideas,” I said. I need more information to make them fit.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
It was late and the Cha Cha Topless Bar on Pico was nearly deserted. A few dedicated drinkers were hanging in, watching without passion as a slender young woman bumped and ground on the small stage behind the bar. The dancer outclassed the clientele by a wide margin – she looked like a graduate student with a night job.
I found Lester Rowland sitting alone at a corner table with his back to the room. He had his hand wrapped around a tall drink-the ice was melted, and the glass was full.
I never liked the man, so I wouldn’t volunteer, but he looked as if he desperately needed a good friend. I was here only be-cause he had called A over town with the message that he wanted to talk to me. As it was, I was willing to talk to just about anyone. I only wished he hadn’t picked such a dive.
The smoky air helped cover the stench of the morgue that still lodged at the back of my throat. I pulled out a chair and sat opposite him. “Hello, Lester.”
He glanced up with vacant, watery eyes. “Maggie.”
“You heard about what happened up at the academy this afternoon?”
I heard.” Everything about him seemed heavy, his shoulders, his voice, even the stagnant smoke-filled air around him. “You okay?”
I touched the patch job on my head. I was okay, but having been given a little time for the adrenaline to pass off, some space to think about what had happened, and what could have happened, I had a bad case of the shakes.
Lester lit a cigarette from the glowing butt in the ashtray and took a long drag. Angrily, he tamped the ash. “I haven’t had a smoke for ten years,” he said.
“You invited me here to talk,” I said. “So talk.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, gruff but earnest. “That’s all I wanted to say. I’m just so damn sorry. If I’d thought for one second that anyone would get hurt, we would have gone about bringing Aleda in a whole lot differently.”