“I’ll leave if it gets to me,” he said, “but not unless it does. We’ve gotta be here and you know it.”
“Just trying to help you, trying to be accommodating.”
“Thank you. Why don’t you get going?”
“That’s what I am doing.”
Evans picked up a scalpel and commenced taking a series of tissue samples. An assistant prepared slides of them at a side table, and sent the slides to the lab. The autopsy proceeded swiftly—there was pitifully little to examine. “The main thing we’re hunting for is signs of poison, suffocation, anything that would give us a more plausible cause of death,” Evans said as he worked. “That good for you two?”
“That’s good for us.”
“Well, we’ll find out all about it from the lab. Look at this.” He held up a sharp white tooth. “Embedded in that busted wrist. You know what it means —really what it confirms?”
“The man was alive when his wrist was bitten. Otherwise the tooth wouldn’t have been wrenched loose.”
“That’s right, which confirms that this one was definitely alive when the dogs attacked him.”
There was a long silence in the room. Wilson seemed to sink into himself, becoming smaller and more square than he already was. Becky felt a dull powerlessness. As the vague outlines of what they were confronting began to take shape Becky could see all lands of nasty problems, not the least of which would be simple crowd control. What do people do when they discover a thing like this in their midst? Their placid, workaday lives are suddenly disrupted by a new terror of the most dangerous type—the unknown. And if it can kill two healthy, alert, armed policemen, the run-of-the-mill citizen isn’t going to have a prayer.
“I think we’d better get downtown as soon as the lab results are in,” Becky said. “Why bother to wait?”
“Confirming, just so we won’t have any loose ends.” Convincing Underwood of this wasn’t going to be especially easy. She didn’t want there to be any stray questions unanswered that might allow him to put off the inevitable decision—admit what killed the cops, seal the area, and kill everything in it that looked faintly like a dog—wild or trained.
The two detectives returned to the M. E.’s office before the autopsies were completed; they didn’t spend any more time observing than they had to. Wilson was visibly grateful to leave; Becky was glad to follow.
Wilson seemed unusually quiet, almost chastened. “What do you think Underwood will do?” she asked just to break the silence.
Wilson shrugged. “Two cops got killed by some kind of dogs. It’s a pretty flimsy story, you ask me. No matter what’s been confirmed, I think we’ve got to keep digging. Somehow or other we’ll uncover a real motive and a real crime.”
Becky felt a twinge of concern—didn’t Wilson believe the evidence? “But if it was dogs and we don’t act pretty fast there could be more deaths. I think we’ve got to make that assumption. That’s certainly where the facts are leading us.”
Wilson nodded. If she wasn’t sure that it couldn’t be true, she almost would have suspected Wilson of knowing something about the case that she didn’t. But they had not been apart since it had happened, not for a minute. Whatever information he had, she also had.
“You know,” he said in a low, angry tone, “you damn well never get over smoking. If you weren’t armed I’d mug you for your cigarettes right now.”
She didn’t reply; she was staring past him, toward the door of the office. Evans walked in carrying a clipboard. “Lab says we might have carbon monoxide poisoning as a secondary factor,” he said, “but the basic cause of death was the injuries. Primarily the throats in both cases.”
“Carbon monoxide? Could those men have been impaired by it?”
“Normally I wouldn’t say so. The levels are very low, just residual. You’ve both probably got higher levels right now just from your drive over here. But it’s absolutely the only abnormal thing we found about these men.”
“Could it have been higher when they were killed and then dissipated?”
“Not likely. These guys were functioning normally when they were hit. It’s just the only other thing.”
Wilson seemed greatly relieved; at the moment Becky couldn’t understand exactly why this was so.
The Chief Medical Examiner put down his clipboard. “It’s as strange as they come,” he said, “the strangest case I have worked on in my entire career.”
“Why so?” Wilson tried and failed to sound unconcerned.
“Well, they were supposedly killed by dogs, right?”
The detectives nodded like twins; Becky was secretly amused by the similarity of the gesture. She wondered what it was that brought the two of them so close to one another. God knows you couldn’t call it love.
“The dogs had to be very unusual. Their mode of attack was extremely clever. It wasn’t until DiFalco went for his gun that they attacked.”
“So what?”
“So when did you ever hear about a dog smart enough to grab a man’s wrist to prevent him from unholstering his gun? Never, is the answer. Dogs don’t think like that. They don’t know what the hell guns are.”
“Maybe and maybe not.”
“Oh, come on, they don’t know. Point a pistol at a dog’s head and not a damn thing will happen. He certainly won’t try to defend himself. Whoever heard of dogs working like that?”
“It was a lucky coincidence. The dog went for the movement of the hand, not to prevent it from reaching the gun. I think we can assume that.” Wilson picked up the phone. “I’m calling Underwood to tell him we’re on the way. His nibs is awaiting us.”
“Now don’t go running him down, Wilson. Word is he’s got the inside track to the big job. Your next Commissioner.”
Wilson dialed. “A lot of difference it makes to me. I’ve been on the promotion list for at least ten years.”
Becky was surprised to hear her partner admit this. His own complete inability to handle department politics had assured that he would never move beyond Detective Lieutenant. No matter the level of his achievement; while good work counted in the scramble for top jobs, pull and ass-kissing counted more. And with Wilson not only did he not try to ass-kiss, people were afraid even to let him try. You don’t let a guy like that get into the delicate politics of the Police Department. Next thing, he’d unwittingly uncover some scandal and embarrass everybody.
That made him a less than ideal senior partner. The brass would hesitate to promote Becky around Wilson. It just wasn’t done unless the senior was completely incompetent—which was far from the case here. So she’d have to sit around as a Detective Sergeant until either she or Wilson rotted, or she was transferred away from him and that was one thing the department would never do. Only Wilson himself in his wisdom would ever consider such a thing. She hated the thought of it right now, too; it could easily mean being moved away from the action, back into the obscurity of a more typical policewoman job.
Wilson muttered into the phone, using no more than a few monosyllables. He had informed the Chief of Detectives that they were coming with just about as much grace as he would inform his building superintendent of a stopped-up toilet.
A wet, shuddering north wind hit them as they left the building; the drizzling cold of the past few days had finally given way to the first real touch of winter. It was seven-thirty and already dark. Thirtieth Street was quiet, with the wind clattering in the skeletons of scrawny trees up and down the block. A few pedestrians hurried past, and out on Fifth Avenue many more figures could be seen amid the flashing lights and the shapes of cars moving slowly downtown. Becky watched the people they passed on their way to her car, looking at the gray, blank faces, thinking about the lives hidden behind those faces, and of how what she and Wilson would soon be telling the Chief of Detectives would affect those lives.