man's hands. White and blue and wrinkled up like claws. Even when you have hands like that, hands of fifty years from now, you'll never again have touched outside this building. Because the only way you can ever touch outside is through Carson. And if you touch him with fire tonight, I swear, it's over.'
She moved the lighter' toward Jeremy and he shrank back, looking between my face and the lighter. I said nothing, this was Ava, skating on the far edge of the ice.
'Look at your hands, Jeremy,' she said. 'The next thing they touch outside of here will be the grave.'
He studied the lighter as if divining entrails. His nostrils flared.
He slapped her hand and the lighter flew across the room. He sat back and crossed his arms and legs, looking away, affecting disinterest.
'Oh, very well. You win, pathologist. But only because you pulled him off me. Good deeds and all that. My own brother wanting to STRANGLE ME.' He smiled, frost over steel, then leaned forward and tapped my hand with a cold finger.
'But just so we understand, Carson, this little, uh, abeyance is only valid for the present purchase. Next time my deal will have all the loopholes negotiated out.'
'Thank you,' Ava said. Jeremy waved her words away.
He remained seated as Ava and I stood. There was something behind his eyes that frightened me, figures moving through smoke. The conclusion was too fast, too simple. Jeremy should have screamed, ranted, weighed Ava's every word and countered with his own maimed logic. Never before had I left without him screaming imprecations or singing foul songs or asking for a final recitation of our mother's pain. Something false rang loud through my head, the dull throb of a leaden bell, and I was followed through the door by its blunted, thudding toll.
'It's my habit,' Clair said the next morning. 'I always let a new path think the first day is going to be nothing more than a get-acquainted day, practices and procedures and learning paperwork. If there's an autopsy, I offer it to them. I like to see how they handle the request.'
It was 8:00 a.m. We were in Clair's office. I'd picked up a box of pastry on the way in. Everything had shifted to Caulfield. I couldn't resolve the words on Burlew's back nor the messages on Nelson and Deschamps all I had was Jeremy's avowal that they were part of Caulfield's internal landscape, and no amount of illumination would render them sensible to a sane mind.
'I was scared to death when you asked me to perform the procedure,' Ava said. 'And when it was over I felt like I was part of the group, the team.'
'It's being asked to cross the deep end on the first day of swimming lessons,' Clair nodded. 'Poor Dr. Caulfield's eye was twitching.' She closed her eyes. 'But he never finished.'
'No one here talks about him,' Ava said. 'Like a curse.'
'It's stuck in the air,' Clair said. 'It was the motivation for renovating the facility. The autopsy suite was sprayed with blood and I used the tragedy to press for a complete renewal. It took months, but it got done.'
'You have Caulfield's address?' I asked Clair.
She nodded and walked toward her office. 'A post office box somewhere in the Talladega Mountains. He receives a monthly check as part of his settlement.'
She was back in a minute with a photo of Caulfield taken for his ID card. He looked like a nice guy, pleasant, like you'd buy him a beer just for standing next to you in a bar.
The steep and rutted road in the Talledega Mountains made me glad I'd spent extra for four-wheel drive, the truck like a boat grinding up a churning stream, prow bouncing, slamming down, veering, leaping again, a wake of gray dust streaming from my stern. After fifteen minutes of punishing my truck and my kidneys, I found Caulfield's house where the kind lady at the post office had said it would be: on a gentle slope to my left, the land rising fast and hard behind it. To the right the mountain dropped like a waterfall. Judging by the condition of the road continuing up the mountain, this was about the end of it.
I pulled in beside a dusty blue Cherokee and rubbed eyes tired from five hours of driving. The house was modest but well kept, a fresh coat of white paint over the wood, the front yard clear of the spent tires and rusting vehicles that seemed to have rained from the sky onto other spreads I'd passed. The woodpile beside the front porch could have won blue ribbon in a wood-stacking contest. There was a rocking chair on the porch with a table beside it, on the table a small pile of magazines. I looked across the valley. The clarity of the mountain air compressed distance and I saw as through a lens. Low in the valley was a town, little more than a cluster of houses peering from green.
Church spires and a few taller, mercantile-looking structures poked from the tree-tops. On the outskirts of the town was a two-story official-looking building with a circular drive and a large, full parking lot; it looked like a medical facility.
A cyclone-fenced perimeter surrounded Caulfield's house, the fence hung with signs: keep out, beware of dog, no trespassing. There were no dog leavings in the yard. I stepped from the truck slowly and stayed behind the protection of the door, which also concealed the nine-millimeter in my hand. I had a.32 strapped to my ankle and a shotgun across the driver's seat.
Something rustled behind me and I turned, ducking. A ground squirrel flashed across the front yard and into the woodpile. My heart raced and I felt foolish as I faced the door. Holding my badge in my left hand I called across the fence. 'Dr. Caulfield. I'm Carson Ryder from the Mobile Police. I'd like to talk with you for a few minutes.'
I watched the door, the windows. Stayed alert for someone running out with a blazing shotgun. Nothing.
'Dr. Caulfield, could you please come to the door, sir.'
I saw it. The merest slitting of curtain. I waved at a solitary eye.
'I mean you no harm. I want to talk about… about the day it all went wrong.'
A minute ticked slowly past. I noticed how loud the woods were with birdsong and insects. The door creaked open a few inches.
'Go away,' the deep voice behind the door said.
'There's something we need to talk about.'
'Find someone else to talk to.'
'This is important, Doctor. It may have to do with what happened to your hand.'
Birdsong and insects again. Then a hand stuck out the door. Or what was left of one. The voice yelled, 'You want to talk about my hand?
There it is. Does it inspire conversation?'
'I've got four dead men, Doctor. Three have no heads and I have no answers. Isn't that what you were trained to do? Help speak for the dead?'
Silence. I watched a jay flit between trees. 'There's big trouble in Mobile, Doctor. I'm begging for your help.'
The cabin door opened slowly and a slight man stepped out onto the wooden stoop. He wore an outsized black sweatshirt over khaki pants, dark hair combed neatly, a handsome face alternating between defiance and puzzlement. The right sleeve of the sweatshirt was rolled to his bicep, the left sleeve hanging loose to covered his damaged hand. Wary of a trick, I studied the sleeve, but the hand I saw couldn't have gripped a weapon.
I said, 'I'd be appreciative of any time you could give me, Doctor.'
He stared at the crown of a tall sycamore for a few seconds, then sighed and turned back to me. 'Time is something I have too much of.
Put away the weapon you think you're hiding and step inside.'
I let myself through the gate and onto the porch, where his empty sleeve flapped me through the door. Passing across the porch I noted the magazines on the table were topped by a copy of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Report, required reading for a clinical pathologist.
'You're right,' he said quietly from his side of the dining-room table.
'I wasn't scheduled to be the pro sector My first procedure was set for the following morning. But when Dr. Peltier asked if I wanted to take the autopsy, what could I say? Of course I said yes.'
Dr. Alexander Michael Caulfield wasn't anything I wanted him to be.
Not wild eyed and babbling, not ice cold and geometrically precise. He neither lurked nor overwhelmed. His tables were laden with medical texts instead of knives. His wall wasn't plastered with photos of Clair or spattered with blood, but hung with black-and-white photos of mountain scenes. A low-fat cookbook on an end table somehow reassured me: Do vengeance-driven killers care about cholesterol? In short, Dr.
