So she’d left. Andrus’s driver had chauffeured her back to the MiraMist, where her car was parked. She’d thought about revisiting the crime scene, but there was nothing for her to do up there.
So she had gone for a walk along the bluffs, wondering what to do next. She thought about informing Michaelson of the ATSAC meeting. It was an act of insubordination, but at least it would piss off Tennant. Unfortunately, she disliked Michaelson even more than she disliked Tennant. Besides, there was no wiggle room in her orders-Michaelson and the rest of the RAVENKIL task force were to be kept in the dark. They were out of it.
Effectively, so was she. She knew what was going on, but she’d been frozen out.
'Then go it alone,' she murmured to herself.
She had threatened Andrus that she would investigate on her own. Big words, but what sort of investigating could she do without resources in an unfamiliar city?
She stopped at a railing and gazed at the blue mist of the ocean’s horizon.
An unfamiliar city. No Rockies here, a sheer granite wall rising out of the mile-high plateau. No crisp winter mornings when new snow crunched underfoot and the only colors were the achingly pure blue of the sky and the flit of red as a robin hunted for seed. No summer rodeos, no autumn hayrides.
She didn’t know this town.
But she did know him.
Mobius. Her nemesis. The man who had taunted her, hounded her, taken over her life.
In the surveillance room she’d bragged that she had some insight into Mobius’s mindset, that she knew what he was like when he was being himself.
Now was the time to prove it.
Mobius had taken the VX from Amanda Pierce’s suitcase. How had he known about it? Had Amanda told him? Had he tortured the truth out of her?
Unlikely. A room with thin walls in a crowded hotel was not a place for torture. And Amanda Pierce, even in death, had not looked cowed or broken. Tess remembered the glare fixed on her face, the anger in her dead eyes.
Mobius must have taken the canister of VX merely on a hunch. Perhaps he’d felt its liquid contents sloshing inside. Perhaps he’d guessed that Amanda Pierce was not an ordinary tourist.
But there was no way for him to guess what the liquid was. He would need to find out. How?
Taste it, sniff it? If so, he was dead. But he would not be so stupid. Mobius might be insane, but Mobius.
That name. A reference, it was thought, to the Mobius strip. Something that a person trained in math or science would know about.
She had been going about this all wrong. She should not ask what a serial killer would do. She should ask what a scientist would do.
Faced with an unknown substance, a scientist would have it analyzed.
A sailboat drifted past, but Tess didn’t see it.
After a long time she turned away from the railing and headed back toward the MiraMist and her car. She knew what she had to do.
There might be no need to run, but she found herself running anyway, as she retraced her route along the bluffs.
25
The body lay on a steel table under a fluorescent light. Dodge looked at the skin, charred and blackened, and thought about a roast duck he’d ordered in Chinatown. There was the same crinkly quality, the same translucent sheen.
'Something’s up today,' Winston said as she prepped the X-ray machine.
Rachel Winston was a brisk, careful woman who eschewed the crude humor indulged in by most of her colleagues at the Los Angeles County Morgue. She was good-looking in a severe, ice-princess sort of way, and still young enough that her tits were more horizontal than vertical. Dodge had her pegged as a dyke, because he’d asked her out and she’d rebuffed him.
Fuck her, anyway. She probably got off on dead bodies.
'Yeah?' Dodge said. 'Like what?'
'Lot of activity around City Hall. Cars going in and out. Looks very official. Started around ten-thirty this morning.' She glanced at him. 'You don’t have any inside info?'
'Not a clue,' he said, though now that she mentioned it, the West LA station had seemed unusually active when he’d stopped there at one-thirty, an hour ago, and on the drive to downtown LA he’d noticed a surprising number of patrol units on the streets.
'Well, the toilers in the trenches are always the last to know.' Winston nodded at her assistant, a pathology technician with cornrowed hair. 'Guess we’re just about ready.'
They were standing together in the morgue’s radiography room, conveniently down the hall from where the dead bodies were stored. In the movies, the dead were always filed away in cabinets, but in actuality they were more likely to be stacked on gurneys or piled up in corners, awaiting inspection. There was a lot of death in LA County, and the cabinets were all full.
Another thing about the movies-the morgue technicians always wore surgical masks. So did the cops, when they were played by somebody like Brad Pitt or Robert De Niro. But this was real life, and nobody wore a fucking mask. They would think you were a wuss if you wore a mask. You just stood there breathing whatever germs and shit were there to be breathed, and you were stoic about it.
Dodge had visited the morgue many times, because it was often necessary for at least one detective working a case to observe an autopsy. Today he had drawn the detail while Al Bradley had gone back to Reseda. Truth was, he didn’t mind. He still thought there was a story here, one that might be worth another two grand from Myron Levine.
Besides, he had no problem with taking a trip to the morgue. Sort of liked it, in a way. The place impressed him-all these pathologists working with quick efficiency, unpacking their lifeless patients, taking samples of fluids and organs, dictating comments into microphones suspended overhead. The comments would be typed up into transcripts attached to the official reports, the vials of fluid and plastic containers of heart and lung tissue would be sent to the lab for analysis, and the lab reports would go into the file as well.
It was fucking incredible, really, how the county of Los Angeles had succeeded in making the autopsy an assembly-line process-dissection on a mass scale, an army of doctors and lab technicians all working together to reduce body after body to its raw components, while reducing the fact of death itself to a sheaf of paperwork.
Every time he came here, he had the same thought: This is how it ends. This is all there is.
He didn’t give a shit about religion and all that metaphysical crap. Death was a pile of flesh on a sheet of steel with gutters to carry off the sluice of blood. Nothing else. Just that.
Today, though, he wasn’t going to witness an actual autopsy. There was always a backlog of corpses in the morgue. An autopsy was almost never scheduled until at least twenty-four hours after the deceased had been found. All that was happening now was a postmortem radiology session. Winston was going to shoot X rays of the victim’s teeth, then compare them with the antemortem dental records of Scott Maple, who remained missing and unaccounted for.
Had the dead man been a South Central gangbanger-or, for that matter, a South Central honor student-there wouldn’t have been any rush to identify his remains. But when the victim was presumed to be a lily-white college student in lily-white Westwood-an affluent kid with affluent parents attending an affluent school in an affluent neighborhood-well, pull out all the goddamn stops, fast-track this case, get it cleared.
'We’ll do a full set of radiographs,' Winston said as she pried open the corpse’s mouth with a wedging instrument. 'Put on your aprons and gloves.'
Dodge and the assistant complied. You weren’t a wuss for wearing a lead apron in the X-ray room. There were your nuts to worry about. Radiation caused impotence or sterility or something.
