The chill of the air crawled in through his clothes as it always did down here. It was an unnatural cold, the cold of a place that has never been warm. The cold of death. Dr. Hovde hurried past the row of refrigerated drawers to the pathology lab.
Kermit Breedlove sat at a battered old desk in one corner of the room. His chair was tilted back, his long legs stretched out with the feet propped on a pulled-out lower drawer. He was reading a paperback Western. The ever-present toothpick jiggled in a corner of his mouth.
On one of the autopsy tables lay a human form covered with a sheet. Dr. Hovde judged it to be a man, six feet five or six feet six, and about 240 pounds.
"Hello, Kermit," Hovde said. He gestured at the sheeted body. "This the one you told me about?"
Dr. Breedlove turned down a page comer and laid the paperback aside. "That's him." He got up and ambled over to the table where he stood beside Hovde. "I opened him up this morning and found some mighty interesting things inside."
"Can we have a look at him?"
"Sure." The pathologist grasped the sheet at the top of the table. Then he hesitated and said in a tone that was more serious than his usual offhand banter. "This is a bad one, Warren."
Hovde nodded his understanding and stood back to watch while Breedlove peeled away the sheet.
The body was a big man, thick through the waist and powerfully muscled at the chest and shoulders. The Y-shaped autopsy incision across the chest and abdomen had been closed and stitched together. All these details Hovde took in on his second and third impressions. All he could look at when the sheet was stripped away was the man's head. It was battered and crushed like a rotten melon. The face was all askew. All traces of blood had been washed away, and the splintered skull was clearly visible through the lacerated scalp. The brain, Hovde could see, must have bulged through half a dozen fissures before it was removed for the autopsy.
"No need to ask the cause of death on this one," he said.
Breedlove eyed him cagily. "You think not? Would you like to make a little bet?"
Hovde recalled the pathologist's words over the phone: "The guy seems to have died twice." He said, "Tell me about it."
"They brought him in about midnight last night. Apparent homicide. When I came in this morning I didn't like the looks of the body at all. And I don't mean the head."
"What do you mean?" Hovde prompted.
"The condition of the corpse didn't jibe with the time of death on the report. I don't know why nobody else picked up on it. They probably never looked past the busted-open skull."
"I can understand that," Hovde put in.
"Right away I saw there were signs of postmortem decomposition that wouldn't have been evident until a body was dead at least twenty-four hours. Want me to run over them for you?"
"I know the signs of putrefaction on a dead body." Hovde said.
"Okay. His identity was established through papers he was carrying-driver's license, credit cards, and that stuff. We verified it by checking his fingerprints with the DMV. When we knew there were no close relatives, I cut into him."
Breedlove paused to probe at a molar with the toothpick."
"Kermit, will you get on with it?"
"Sure, sure. When I got inside I found the gastrointestinal evidence and the degree of blood-cell breakdown confirmed what I thought when I first saw him. The guy died some time Friday, and not Sunday night. I don't care how many witnesses there were. Then I remembered the similar case of the crazy woman driver in Westwood, and it occurred to me that the name of the girl in the house was the same as the one the woman almost ran over. Your patient. So I gave you a call."
"I'm glad you did," Hovde said. He gazed down at the dead man with the long, roughly sewn scar running down the middle of his trunk. "If the blows to the head didn't kill this man, what did?"
"Suffocation."
"You're serious?"
"Serious as the Pope. You can see that the face, what's left of it, still has the dusky plum color associated with asphyxiation. The organs I took out were cyanotic and congested. There were small hemorrhages in the thymus, lungs, pericardium, and pleura. Internal bruising of the larynx suggests to me that he choked on something he swallowed."
"No foreign material in the laryngeal aperture?"
"Not when I opened him, but I'll guarantee something was in there and cut off his air long enough to kill him."
"On Friday."
"No later."
"Do you have the police report handy?"
Dr. Breedlove strolled back to the desk and shuffled through the papers scattered haphazardly across the top. He came up with a carbon copy of the typed police report and handed it to Hovde.
Slipping on his reading glasses, Hovde skimmed through the information in the blocks at the top of the sheet. He confirmed that the apparent homicide did indeed occur at an address on Beachwood Drive occupied by Joana Raitt. He read quickly through the narrative description, then stopped suddenly.
"Glen Early," he said aloud.
"What's that?" said Breedlove.
"The 'assailant' here, the one who delivered the blows to the head, I know him. He lives in the same apartment complex that I do."
"Some coincidence."
"Not really," said Hovde, more to himself than to the pathologist. "No coincidence at all."
He quickly finished reading the report, then went back and read it again more thoroughly.
When he had finished, Hovde laid the report flat on one of the unoccupied autopsy tables and thought about it. This new attack on Joana, following the woman in the car last Thursday, plus the accident in the swimming pool and Joana's weird story, added up to a conclusion he did not like, but one he could no longer deny. Whatever was going on here was beyond the scope of medicine, or any other of the natural sciences. There was only one possible conclusion. Walking dead people were trying to kill Joana Raitt.
"Peculiar set of circumstances, isn't it?" said Dr. Breedlove.
"Peculiar, to say the least," Hovde agreed. "What are you going to do about it?"
"Do? What do you mean do about it?"
"Jesus, Kermit, you've got findings here to show that this man, as you put it to me on the telephone, died twice. Same thing with the woman driver last week. Aren't you going to take this to the Board?"
"Hell no. I don't want any part of it."
"How can you say that? This could be one of the biggest medical stories of our time."
"Yeah, and it could be a great big can of worms. Leave me out."
"That's a hell of an attitude."
"Maybe so, but that's the way I feel." The pathologist pretended to get busy with some of the papers on his desk, but when Hovde continued to stare at him he turned back with a sigh of resignation. "Look, Warren, I could take this to the Board, sure. 'Excuse me,' I say, 'I've got a couple of people on ice downstairs who appear to have been walking around and doing things for quite some time after they were dead. Then they died again and were brought in here, and I thought I'd mention it.'
"I see two possible reactions from the Board. One, they fall all over each other laughing, or, two, they schedule me for a rubber room and one of those jackets that buckle in the back. No, make that three possibilities. They might listen to me, believe every word, then tell me to forget it if I want to keep my job here. Don't make waves."
Hovde started to argue, but he realized that what Breedlove said was essentially true. It was an outlandish story to lay on anyone cold. And the Board of Directors of the West Los Angeles Receiving Hospital were not the most open-minded of bodies. They put great store in not making waves.
"You could take the story to somebody else," he said. "The newspapers. Television."