"I believe you. I'm just saying I can't see where you've got any kind of criminal charge looking at you. What put Markham there in the first place was someone running him down in a car. That's who this guy Bracco's looking for, the driver of the car." But an earlier phrase that had nagged suddenly surfaced. "Did you say you knew Mrs. Markham?"
Kensing's shoulders slumped visibly as the world seemed to settle on him. He looked down at the scarred hardwood floor, then back up. "You don't know? That's the other thing."
Hardy waited.
"Apparently something happened last night." He paused. "She's dead. And the rest of her family, too."
"Lord." Hardy suddenly felt pinned to the sofa.
Kensing continued. "It went around the offices sometime late this morning. I was seeing patients and didn't hear until about noon. Then, a little after that, Bracco called to make sure I'd be around. He wanted to come by and talk about it."
"So you talked to him today, too?"
Kensing shook his head. "It might have been a mistake, but I had my receptionist tell him I wasn't in. Pico called about the same time with his shark. I don't see patients Wednesday afternoon anyway, and I didn't want to talk to the police until I could sort some of this out. So I came over here, to the aquarium, and essentially hid out, walking Francis-"
"Francis?"
"The shark. Pico named it Francis. So I just hung out until I'd come up with a plan, which was get a lawyer. And Pico knew you." He made a face, apologetic and confused. "So here we are. And now what?"
Hardy nodded and sat back. Remembering his pint, he reached for it and took a drink. "Well, you're going to talk to the police, whether you want to or not."
"So what do I tell them about my wife if they ask?"
Hardy had already answered that, but this was the beginning of hand-holding time. "I'd just tell the truth and try not to panic. But if they look at all, they'll know about Markham and your wife, right? So be straightforward and deal with it. It doesn't mean you killed anybody."
Kensing let the reality sink in. "Okay. It's not going to matter if they're looking for the driver of the hit-and-run car anyway, right?"
"That's how I see it." Hardy looked across into Kensing's face. His eyes were hollow with fatigue. "Are you all right?"
He managed a weak chuckle. "I'm just tired, but then again, I'm always tired," he said. "I've been tired for fifteen years. If I wasn't exhausted beyond human endurance, I wouldn't recognize myself."
Hardy leaned back into the couch and realized he wasn't exactly in the mood for dancing, himself. "But still, you're out on your afternoon off walking sharks for Pico?"
"Yeah, I know," Kensing said. "It doesn't make any sense to me, either. I just do it."
"That was me, too." Hardy had walked his own sharks at the low point of his life, at the end of a decade of sleepwalk following the death of his son Michael, his divorce from Jane. It made no more sense to him then than it did to Kensing now. But for some reason walking his sharks had seemed to mean something. And in a world otherwise full of nothing, that was something to cling to.
Both men stood up. Hardy gave Kensing his card and along with it a last bit of advice. "You know, they might just show up at work or your house. They might knock on your door with a warrant or a subpoena. If any of that happens, say nothing. Don't let them intimidate you. You get the phone call."
Kensing's mouth dropped a fraction of an inch. He blew out heavily, shaking his head. "This is starting to sound like serious hardball."
"No. Hardball's a game." Hardy might be all for client reassurance, but he didn't want Kensing to remain under the illusion that any part of a homicide investigation was going to be casual. "But from what I've heard, we're okay. You weren't driving the car, and that's what killed him. His wife has nothing to do with you, right? Right. So the main thing is tell the truth, except leave out the part about the kneecaps."
10
John Strout worked through his lunchtime conducting the autopsy on Tim Markham. The damage done to the body from its encounter with the hit-and-run vehicle and then the garbage can was substantial. The skull was fractured in two places and multiple lacerations scored what the medical examiner thought might have been an unusually handsome face in life-a broad brow, a strong jawline with a cleft chin.
Markham had been struck on the back left hip bone, which broke on the impact, along with its attached femur. Apparently, the body snapped back for an instant against the car's hood or windshield, and this might have accounted for one of the skull fractures. The other probably occurred, Strout surmised, when the body ended its short flight. The right shoulder had come out of its socket and three ribs on the right side were broken.
Among the internal organs, besides the digestive tract, only the heart, the left lobe of the lung, and the left kidney escaped injury. The right lung had collapsed, and the spleen, liver, and right kidney had all been damaged to greater or lesser degrees. Strout, with forty years of medical experience, was of the opinion that it was some kind of miracle that Markham had survived to make it to the emergency room. He thought that blood loss or any number of the internal injuries, or the shock of so many of them at once, should have been enough by themselves to cause death.
But Strout was a methodical and careful man. Even if Tim Markham hadn't been an important person, the medical examiner wasn't putting his signature on any formal document until he was satisfied that he'd as precisely as humanly possible identified the principal cause of death. To that end, he had ordered the standard battery of tests on blood and tissue samples. While he waited for those results, he began a more rigorous secondary examination of the injuries to the internal organs.
A particularly impressive hematoma on the back of the liver was commanding his complete attention, but he was subliminally aware of his assistant Joyce making her way back through the length of the morgue. When she stopped next to him and hovered, he continued with his examination for a moment, then drawled, "This here could'a done it by its lone self." Then, looking up and seeing her expression of worried concern, he pulled away from his work. "Is something wrong, darlin'?"
Joyce was new to the staff, but not as new as the equipment they'd recently bought to upgrade the lab. For the past few days, Strout had been supervising Joyce as she conducted tests to calibrate these machines, which ran sophisticated scans on blood and tissues. Since he had Tim Markham's body on the slab this afternoon, he'd given Joyce samples from his body.
Now she appeared extremely nervous, and for a moment Strout thought she must have broken one of the expensive new toys. "Whatever it is, it can't be that bad," he told her. "What's the problem?"
She held up a slip of paper, the results from the lab tests she'd been running. "I don't think I could have done this test right. I mean, the machine…" She let the thought hang.
Strout took the paper and squinted at the numbers, saw what she was showing him, and pulled off his sanitary gloves. "That the right number?"
"That's what I wanted to ask you. Could that be right? I ran it twice and I think I must have done something wrong."
His eyes went to her face, then back to the paper, which he now took in his hand and studied with great care. "This is from Mr. Markham's blood?"
"Yes, sir."
"Dang," he whispered, mostly to himself.
From the morgue, Strout walked down the outside corridor that connected his office with the back door of the Hall of Justice. A biting afternoon breeze had come up, but he barely noted it. After passing through the guards and the metal detector, he decided to bypass the elevators. Instead, he turned directly right to the stairs, which he took two at a time. Glitsky wasn't in his office. As was the norm in the middle of the day, there were only a couple of inspectors pulling duty in the detail, and neither had seen the lieutenant all day. Strout hesitated a second, asked the inspectors to have Abe call him when he got in, then turned on his heel and hit the stairway again.