six-two height. Give or take some, Russell. You know that.'
'Blood type?'
'None, but we've got his hair.'
'Latents?'
'Dream on. We've found bits of black acrylic material where we might expect prints.'
'Gloves.'
'Gloves.'
'Semen?'
'He's kept that to himself, so far. Or put it where we haven't found it.'
We stopped short of a stainless-steel table where examiner Glen Yee was working on Mrs. Wynn. The light seemed to dim again. I breathed deeply the sickening chemical-flesh air. You think it's never going to wash out of your nose hairs. My throat felt sudsy.
Yee, elbow-deep, looked up at me and actually smiled. 'All B-I-T,' he said. 'Except for Mr. Wynn.'
I nodded. B-I-T-blunt-instrument trauma. It struck me that it shouldn't take a doctor to figure out that much. But I had been wondering how the Eye had managed two adults and two children with nothing but a club.
I looked at Karen, but she was staring at her own feet, arms crossed, hands clenching and unclenching.
Yee reached into a plastic basin that stood at the head of the table and held up something with his fingers. Between them was the instantly recognizable shape of a. 22 long rifle bullet, slightly mushroomed, lopsided, bent from the middle.
'One in the head for Mr. Wynn,' said Karen without looking up.
'He didn't really have much of a head left,' I said. It wasn't supposed to sound like it did: It was just a numb observation.
'Oh, he did,' said Karen. 'It was just spread around the room. The techs brought it back in bags. Dr. Yee used all his skills to put it back together. Shit.'
Karen, blanched and sweating, hustled across the autopsy room to a big stainless sink, into which she vomited. Yee watched her go by, looked at me, and shrugged, giving a small embarrassed smile. He carefully put the bullet back. The air conditioner-which can run by generator in case of power outage-blew a death-heavy breeze by me. The ceiling came down another foot.
Yee sighed. 'I've never seen anything this traumatic in seventeen years, except the car accidents.'
Karen, her back still to us, shook her head, coughed, spat.
'Did you get a shell to go with that bullet?'
'CS brought in no shell. Revolver, maybe, or a single shot. He used a knife to disembowel.'
I nodded, staring stupidly into the open carcass of Maia Wynn. 'I'm done in here if you are, Karen.'
'Take your time,' she said. 'Don't rush a good thing.
'I said, I was done.'
We passed through the sliding doors and down the hallway, the residual sweetness of formaldehyde lessening in my nostrils. Karen Schultz's heels hit the linoleum with a hurried resolve.
'The bullet we don't release,' she said. 'We don't wanr him ditching the gun. The knife we don't release-same reason. Don't talk about the wall writing or the tapes-we don't want to put any ideas into any other sick heads. We're trying to get a better description from Kim, but she won't tell us anything all. She gave me what she gave you back at the house, then went mute. I've never in my life felt sorrier for another hum being. All she does is stare.'
'Where is she now?'
“No.'
'I won't talk to her unless you say I can.'
'Damn straight you won't. Kim's going to live with what happened last night for the rest of her life. She's not here for you to draw quotes from. And leave her out of the Journal. That's the least you can do.'
'Maybe I could-'
Karen stopped, drove a finger straight at my face, and glared at me with her fatigued green eyes. 'No. No. No. You don't talk to Kim. End of discussion. Besides, I've got more for You in Hair and Fiber.'
I put up my hands in mock surrender. 'Okay. I'm sorry about all this, Karen.'
'Your sorrow doesn't do the Wynns any good.'
'You're not the only one who feels bad here.'
'Stop, Russ. I know. I know. Please, just stop.'
Karen's eyes were filled with neither rage nor sadness, but with a churning, undisguisable fear. 'We should have put together the first two sooner. Maybe this wouldn't have happened.'
The Hair and Fiber section of county Forensic Science Services was presided over by an aging, overweight man named Chester Fairfax Singer-Chet for short. He wore suspenders, white shirts, and bow ties and affected a professorial deliberateness that seemed at first a mark of either arrogance or dullness. He was unhurried, quiet. As I had learned over the years, Chet's bearing wasn't born of arrogance, academic overtraining, or stupidity, but of a broad and genuine gentleness. He was a lifelong bachelor, never mentioned family, seemed to spend virtually all of his free time alone, and though he'd never to my knowledge intimated such a thing to anyone at the county, there was an almost unanimous decision that he was homosexual. But Chet had never been the butt of those secret jokes that follow homosexual men around, especially in the flagrantly hetero world of law enforcement. I think this had less to do with Chester's spotless reputation than with the sense of vulnerability he projected. Chet was a man who'd cried openly when the Challenger went down. Chet was a man who remembered the birthdays of every female who worked in Forensic Services, and honored each with a single white rose-grown himself-in a simple white vase. Chet was a man who arranged to be escorted to his car each night rather than negotiate the dark county- employee parking lot alone. Chet was a man who, despite his sizable quirks, commanded respect.
IChet was a man, I came to understand, who had a secret life. I never got to know him well enough even to guess what it was.
He was sitting on a stool at his light table when Karen and I came in, staring through a swing-out magnifier at something in an evidence bag. He set the bag on the glass and rotate his bulk on the stool, offering me his hand. Chet looked pale and nonvigorous as always, though I knew from my days on the Sheriff's that twelve-hour days were standard for him.
'One of my favorite fellow students,' he said, smiling, was part of a phrase he'd mumbled once to me years ago while working on a perplexing rape case, and I'd reminded him of often: 'We are students of the incomplete.' The other statement of Chet Singer's that I will never forget, he made drunkenly to me over the punch bowl at a department Christmas party back in 1982: 'Violence is the secret language of the race, and we, are its translators.'
Chester and Karen exchanged wary looks, and Karen nodded. 'Winters says we can talk to him,' she said. 'I tell him what to leave out.'
'Of course. Well… where to begin?'
Chet folded his hands over his ball-like midriff and beheld me through the thick lenses of his glasses. 'Let me describe picture for you, and you can tell me what you see.'
Chester's 'picture' of the Midnight Eye was of a tall, right-handed Caucasian male, age thirty-five to forty, with Iong straight red-brown hair and a full beard of a slightly darker shade.
'If we use the 'all hairy' description that Kim gave you, we can say his hair is unkempt-wild-looking,' said Chet. 'Three of the five hair samples are nearly eight inches long. They contain some polymers I suspect are a fixative of some kind. Very thick in places.'
'Hair-spray?' I asked 'Apparently.'
'A genuine sweetheart,' said Karen. Karen was still uncharacteristically pale, the freckles on her nose still standing out in relief against the white skin.
Chet nodded. 'Dina can't match the genetic print of the hair with a blood sample from a suspect unless there's root tissue connected to the follicle. So far, I've found none. I don't feel that we're in a strong position right now for typing.'
'And we've got no suspect,' I said.
'I remain an optimist,' said Chester. 'Though at times, I don't know why.'
According to footprints left in the Ellisons' vegetable garden-through which the Eye had walked-the man
