Burning Time

“Is that what they are?” Emma asked. “All three?”

“What’s the big deal? What’s the matter with you all of a sudden?”

“I hate films that glorify hookers. I really do. Hookers are not wonderful people. They don’t end up happily ever after. I don’t want to be known for my body. It’s—”

“You have to read for this one next week. So look at this first and call me after two.” Ronnie handed over the scripts abruptly. “Don’t make me sick.”

“I have a taping this afternoon,” Emma said.

She was doing a Maalox moment, speaking the voice of the old woman because the old woman cast for the part sounded like a chicken.

“Then read it now.” Ronnie pushed it at her.

Emma took it. It was very thin, only four or five pages. “These are just sides,” she protested.

“So?”

“So where’s the rest of it?” she demanded.

“Emma, don’t fight me. Sometimes they just give sides. They don’t want you to work on the whole goddamn part. They just want to see you do the scene cold, how you see the character from the few words that are written there.”

“Where’s the rest of it? I can’t do it if I don’t know what the story is.”

“You’re making me very upset. You’ve been in this business long enough to know you’re not the one who has leverage at this point. They are the ones who decide on you. You do it, and if they like you, you get the part. You get famous, have fun, and make lots of money. What’s the problem here?”

Emma gathered up her things. Right, get famous and make lots of money. Ronnie was right. She had been working very hard for this for years.

“Okay,” she told Ronnie. “I’ll go for it.” If Jason didn’t like her success, it was his problem.

She watched the lovers get up and leave.

10

“Well, what can you tell me?” Newt Regis leaned back in his chair feeling a little nervous, because Dr. Milt Ferris had bothered to come to his office instead of calling him on the phone with the information Newt had asked for. When Newt wanted a prelim, Milt usually gave him a call with the TOD and COD.

Milton Ferris had been Medical Examiner for a while in the City of San Diego, and had taught pathology for years at the medical school. When he decided he wanted to get away from it all and came out here to write his memoirs, the job of Coroner happened to be open. Milt was persuaded to take it as a stopgap until they could find someone else. So far they were lucky. Four years had passed, nobody ever bothered to look for a replacement, and he hadn’t complained about the work yet.

Milt had changed a few things in Potoway Village.

Before Milt came, Newt was called Newton, which was his real name. Establishing Time of Death was just that, and nothing else. But Milton was a crossword puzzle maniac, and now everything was letters and codes. His idea of a good time was making up a crossword puzzle with just law enforcement and forensic terms in it.

Sometimes Newt complained that Milt had turned him into a salamander and Cause of Death into a fish, but Milt pointed out the KGB, CIA, FBI, and all the other police agencies around the world were the ones that started it, not him. Hey, the FBI now had branches with names like VICAP and IMNAT, absolute necessities for any crossword on the subject.

Milt was smooth all over, bald as an egg, pale, round, not over five foot five. At sixty, his face was still unlined except around the eyes, where there was always something of a smile going on. If he had had some hair, he might have looked a lot like a small Santa Claus. But even without hair, he didn’t look like someone who had spent his life cutting up dead bodies, and then studying the gruesome bits.

He sat heavily, opposite Newt, not smiling now.

“Well?” Newt demanded.

Out there where they found her, Newt and Ray and Jesse had gone over as much ground as they could, looking for some clue as to what happened. A track in the dirt, a scrap of cloth, a weapon, anything. But the girl had no clothes on, and there did not appear to be any disturbance of anything in the area around her. In some other part of the world, they might call in a botanist to examine the plant life under the body to determine, by the changes in the plants, how long the body had been there. But here there was no plant life under her. Milt had initially speculated that whatever happened to her happened somewhere else.

“It looks like she had some injuries, but she didn’t die of them,” he said now.

“What do you mean?” Newt frowned.

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell what happened antemortem, and what might be postmortem injuries,” Milt said.

“Yeah?” Newt said. He knew that.

“She could have died, and then two ribs and an arm were broken when somebody moved her. You know that sometimes happens when ambulance drivers aren’t careful. It can mess up an autopsy report.” Milt shook his bald head.

“But you don’t think that’s what happened?”

“No.”

There was a long pause.

“So, what did she die of?” Newt said impatiently.

“Exposure,” Milt said.

“No kidding.”

“The color and condition of her skin—looks like she was thoroughly burned by the sun. Not just her front, but her back, too. That means she could have been walked around out there. Low temperatures at night. Looks like she starved, fried, and froze.”

“Raped?” Newt asked soberly.

Milt shook his head. “After twenty-four hours with really first-rate samples from a living person, intercourse would be pretty hard to establish, unless there were injuries. Postmortem,” he shook his head again, “not a chance. I do think she was tortured, though.”

“The wounds in her groin?”

“No, that’s postmortem change. That’s what happens in mummification. The skin shrinks. The resulting split sometimes looks like an antemortem knife wound.”

“Mummification?” Newt played with a pencil on his desk. It said Pell’s Apothecary on the side. “Then she must have been there for a while.”

“Nuh-uh.” Milt shook his head again.

“Why so sure?”

“The birds just started. The coyotes hadn’t even gotten there yet. A few days, and there’d only be bones left. In a way we’re lucky.”

“Oh, yeah?” Newt said. “How so?”

“We might still be able to get some prints.”

Milt had finished and didn’t make any going motions.

“What’s bothering you? In particular, I mean?”

“You know that blackened part on her chest?”

“Postmortem artifact?” Newt was proud he knew the word. When he was a rookie years ago, he had seen the blackened patterns on the chest of a person who had died several days before, and thought some madman had murdered him and put them there. It didn’t take long to learn the horrible truth. Humans don’t fare as well as animals in the looks department after death. All kinds of colors and patterns and wounds appear on dead bodies as they go through their many postmortem changes. Sometimes, in three days if the conditions are just right, a human can swell to three times its normal size with gases and putrefaction.

“No, a man-made burn.”