“I am not.”
“You’re muttering, you’re getting crazy.”
“I am not! You better keep your mouth shut.”
“All right, but I’m telling you that this case is going to eat away at you.” He suddenly turned to face her. The movement made her swerve the car— she had the absurd notion that he was going to kiss her. But his face was twisted into a look almost of pain. “It’s eating at me is the reason I say that. I mean, I don’t know what happened out there but it’s really getting to me.”
“You mean you’re pissed off about it, scared of it—what?”
He considered for a moment, then said very quietly, “It scares me.” Never before had Wilson said such a thing. Becky kept her eyes on the traffic, her face without expression.
“Me too,” she said, “if you want to know. It’s a weird case.” Extreme caution was called for in this conversation—Wilson could be telling the truth or he could be egging her on, trying to get her to reveal her inner emotions, to force her to admit that she was overinvolved in her work in an unprofessional way. Although she felt secure enough in their partnership she could never be certain that Wilson hadn’t concocted some plot to get rid of her. Not that it mattered —nowadays they were waiting in line to work with her, but somehow she wanted to keep the partnership going. Wilson was hard to take but the two of them were so good together it was worth preserving. “It’s hard but it’s good,” he said suddenly. “What’re you talking about?”
“Us. You’re thinking about us, aren’t you?” The way he sounded they might as well have been lovers. “Yes, I am.”
“See, that’s why it’s good. If it wasn’t so good, I never would have known.”
She took a deep breath. “We’re here. Maybe we’ll find out they were poisoned and this’ll turn into a normal case again.”
“We won’t.”
“Why not? I don’t think we can assume—oh, of course, the dogs ate the organs and there are no dead dogs, therefore there was no poison in the organs, therefore et cetera.”
“You got it, sweetheart. Let’s go up and watch old prickface pretend to be a master sleuth.”
“Oh, Wilson, why don’t you let the poor man alone. He’s just as good at what he does as we are at what we do. Your whole thing with him is personalities.”
“Can’t be. He hasn’t got one.” The Chief Medical Examiner’s office was housed in a gleaming modern building across the street from Bellevue Hospital. This “office” was really a factory of forensic pathology, equipped with every conceivable piece of equipment and chemical that could be of use in an autopsy. Literally everything there was to know about a corpse could be discovered in this building. And the Medical Examiner had been responsible for solving many a murder with his equipment and his most considerable skill. Bits of hair, flecks of saliva, fingernail-polish fragments—all had figured prominently in murder trials. A conviction had once been obtained on the basis of shoe polish left on the lethal bruises of a woman who had been kicked to death.
The Chief M. E. excelled at making such findings. And if there was anything to be found in this case, he would surely uncover it. He and his men would go over the bodies inch by inch, leaving nothing to chance. Still, there was that fear…
“They’d better come up with something or this case is going to drive me crazy,” Becky said on the way up in the elevator. It was new and rose silently with no sense of motion.
“I hate this elevator. Every time I ride in it it scares the hell out of me.”
“Imagine how it would be to be trapped in this elevator, Wilson, no way out—”
“Shut up! That’s unkind.” Wilson was mildly claustrophobic, to add to his list of petty neuroses.
“Sorry, just trying to amuse you.”
“You tell me I’m such an s.o.b., but you’re really the nasty side of this partnership. That was a rotten thing to do to me.”
The doors opened and they stepped into the odor of disinfectant that pervaded the M. E.’s office. The receptionist knew them, and waved them past her desk. Doctor Evans’s incredibly cluttered office was open but he wasn’t inside. House rules were that you didn’t go any farther into the complex without an escort, but as usual there wasn’t a soul to be seen or heard. They started toward the operating room when the receptionist yelled Wilson’s name. “Yeah?”
“You got a message,” she hollered. “Call Underwood.”
“OK!” He stared at Becky. “Underwood wants me? Why the hell does Underwood want me? I don’t remember trying to get you fired recently.”
“Maybe you did and forgot.”
“Better call, better call.” He picked up the phone in Evans’s office and dialed the Chief of Detectives. The conversation lasted about a minute and consisted on Wilson’s part of a series of yessirs and thankyous. “Just wanted to tell us we’re a special detail now, reporting directly to him, and we have the facilities of the department at our disposal. We move to an office at Police Headquarters in Manhattan.”
“That’s very nice. We get carte blanche as long as some of the credit rubs off on him, and the Commissioner gets left in his ivory tower.”
Wilson snorted. “Listen, as long as it looks like this case is solvable every parasite from here to the Bulgarian Secret Service is going to try to horn in on the credit. But you just wait. If we don’t get it together, we’ll be all alone.”
“Let’s go to the autopsy. I can hardly wait.” Her voice was bitter; what Wilson had said could not have been more true.
“Come on, ghoul.”
On the way to the operating room Becky wished to hell that Wilson would pull out a bottle of something alcoholic. Unfortunately he rarely drank, and certainly never while he was working—unless events called for it, which they often did about six P.M. But now it was after six.
“I thought you people didn’t come back here unless you were invited,” Evans growled. He was on his way into the surgery. He stank of chemical soap; his rubber gloves were dripping. “Or don’t those rules count where you two are concerned?”
“This is the man who invites us on his cases. How sweet.”
“I only give you cases that are too easy for me to bother with. Now come on in if you want to, but it won’t do a bit of good. And I warn you, they’re fragrant.”
Becky thought immediately of the families. When she was a child she had been at a funeral where you could smell the corpse—but nowadays they had things for that, didn’t they? And anyway, the coffins wouldn’t be opened. But still… oh, God.
The two bodies lay on surgical tables under merciless lights. There was none of the haphazardness and confusion of the scene out at the auto pound; here everything was neat and orderly except the bodies themselves, which carried their violence and horror with them.
Becky was struck by the sheer damage—this attack had been so unbelievably savage. And somehow she found that reassuring; nothing from nature would do this. It had to be the work of human beings, it was too terrible to be anything else.
“The Forensics lab hasn’t found a single thing except dog hairs, rat hairs and feathers,” Doctor Evans said mildly. He was referring to the results of the examination of the area where the deaths had occurred at the auto pound. “No human detritus that didn’t belong to the victims.”
“OK,” Wilson said, but he took the information like a blow. It was not good news.
Evans turned to Becky. “Look, we’re about to start. What do you think it’ll take to get Wilson out of here?”
“You can’t. There might be something,” she replied.
“Something I’d miss?”
“Something we’d see.”
“But not him. He won’t be able to take it.”
“I’ll be fine. Just do your job, Doctor.”
“There will be no repeat of the Custin mess, Detective Wilson.” During the Maude Custin autopsy Wilson had lost his lunch. The reference to his embarrassment hurt his feelings, but he was too proud to acknowledge it before Evans.