'Guess there’s no doubt how the guy died, anyhow,' he said, just for the sake of conversation.
'There’s always doubt.' Winston sounded weary.
'I don’t know, Doc.' He knew Winston hated being called Doc. 'Looks to me like the cause of death was proximity to an open flame.'
'He’s burned, all right. Full thickness burns throughout the epidermis and dermis. But that damage could be postmortem. We’ll need to see his trachea. If there’s soot in the airway below the vocal cords, then he lived long enough to inhale smoke.'
The X-ray machine made a prolonged humming sound as the first bite-wing was shot. The image was displayed in black and white on a video screen in the workstation.
'That’s the most likely finding,' Winston went on. 'Plenty of toxins in a chemistry lab. Hydrogen chloride, hydrogen cyanide, benzene, ammonia, sulfur dioxide, you name it. Or just plain old carbon dioxide-the blood samples will tell us his carboxyhemoglobin level, and if it’s over fifty percent, we’ve got a winner.'
'You enjoy your work too fucking much, Doc.' The f-word just slipped out. He normally didn’t curse around female colleagues if there was any chance he could get them into bed, and he hadn’t entirely given up on Winston. She might not be a dyke. Maybe he’d just asked her out on the wrong day of the month. PMS made women crazy.
'I’m simply aware of all the possibilities,' Winston said, unruffled. 'Smoke inhalation is only one of them. Thermal trauma to the larynx is another. It can cause spasms that bring on suffocation. Or there’s vagal inhibition, which produces reflex cardiac death-'
'Okay, okay.'
She shrugged. 'I don’t like making assumptions.'
'Yeah, I get that impression.' He tried a little wit. 'Maybe you should have your own TV series. Winston, ME.'
She actually smiled, a rare thing. 'I’ve heard worse ideas.' To her assistant: 'Okay, take the other bite- wing.'
The radiograph machine hummed again. It was something called an MDIS-Mobile Digital Imaging System. The rotating arm of the device could be moved manually to shoot the subject from various angles.
'We’re lucky his damn teeth didn’t burn up,' Dodge said, for no particular reason.
'Teeth burn only at temperatures exceeding one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Fillings last even longer. They can survive temperatures of up to sixteen hundred degrees.'
'Learn something new every day on this job.' He didn’t mean to sound sarcastic, but he did anyway. He tried to compensate by adopting a friendlier tone. 'You ever see one this bad?'
'I’ve seen everything. This one is nasty, though.' Winston looked over the body with professional detachment. 'Third-degree burns over more than seventy percent of the anterior body surface. Tissue desiccation and avascularization, skin blackening and contraction, probable artifactual fractures of the carpi and metatarsals-'
'Fractures?'
'Postmortem. Caused by the shortening of the ligaments attributable to thermal injury. The small bones crack under the strain.'
'But no sign of foul play?'
She smiled again. 'I thought you said the cause of death was obvious.'
'Like you, Doc, I don’t make assumptions.'
'A wise policy. So far, I don’t see anything to suggest that John Doe was a victim of anything other than bad luck or his own stupidity. But I could be wrong.'
'You are,' a voice said from behind them.
Dodge and Winston both turned. A woman in a gray suit and a string tie stood in the doorway of the room. It took Dodge a moment to remember where he’d seen her.
The elevator in the Federal Building. Special Agent Tess McCallum, the lady fed who’d brushed him off.
Now here she was, stepping right back into his life.
Interesting.
26
Tess had spent the past two hours following a zigzag path that had led her, without knowing it, closer and closer to this room in the morgue.
Her first stop after leaving the MiraMist had been the Santa Monica Police Department, where she’d cornered the watch commander in his office, flashed her FBI creds, and asked about any crimes reported within the last twelve hours that involved chemicals, chemical supply companies, or labs-break-ins, burglaries, anything. She was particularly interested in the theft or unauthorized use of equipment meant for analyzing unknown substances.
The watch commander had nothing. He seemed relieved when she left. She supposed she was acting a little feverish. She was on the hunt, and it felt good. She felt…hell, she felt alive, and that had been a rare feeling for her in the past two years.
Her next stop was the LAPD’s West Los Angeles divisional station on Butler Avenue. Another watch commander, another office. Same question. This time she got results.
Since midnight there had been three incidents within LA city limits that met her criteria. One was the theft of chemicals-but no equipment-from a San Pedro warehouse. The second was a break-in at a North Hollywood laboratory, which sounded promising until Tess learned that it was a photographic lab and the burglar, a teenager, had been caught in the act, thanks to a silent alarm.
That left the most serious incident, a fire in a basement chem lab on a university campus. Tess wasn’t sure what to make of the fire. If Mobius had entered the lab to use or steal some equipment, why torch the place? Then she was told that an unidentified corpse, possibly a student, had been found in the debris. And things started to make sense.
From the Butler Avenue station she went into Westwood, visiting Fire Station 37. Most of the crew who had worked the blaze had gone off duty-platoon change was at seven A.M.-but she found one fireman working a double shift, filling in for a buddy with weekend plans. He hadn’t discovered the body himself, but he’d seen it. No, he hadn’t seen any sign of foul play, but the remains had been in bad condition. Arson? The fire department had sent a team from the arson unit to check it out, but he and his crew had left before the squad arrived. They had seen only the two LAPD detectives working the scene.
Tess knew the detectives’ names from the report-Alan Bradley and James Dodge. The names seemed familiar, but she wasn’t sure why.
She drove to the crime scene but found it guarded by campus security guards who would not let her go inside even after they looked at her badge. This was a local crime. The feds had no jurisdiction here.
Quartz lights were positioned near the outside windows, and Prosser pumps sucked out standing water through thick hoses. The guards told her that some people from the city fire department’s arson unit were at work in the laboratory. Eventually one of the guards condescended to see if the chief investigator would talk with her.
He came up wearing heavy canvas fatigues, knee-high rubber boots, and thick gloves, with a crowbar clutched in one hand and a camera hanging by a strap around his neck. His face was sooty and streaked with sweat, and he looked more like a coal miner than an investigator of any kind.
The investigator said his team had been working the site for three hours and had at least another hour to go. They had determined the site of origin in the middle of the room and were checking nearby electrical appliances and connections for signs of an overload. Most fires originated with electrical faults. 'But even if we find a problem with the wiring, it doesn’t prove much. A fire this hot will burn the insulation right off the wires and cause a short circuit.'
'It was a hot, fast fire, then?'
'With the fuel load in that room? You better believe it.'
'So you can’t say it was arson?'
'Can’t say much of anything yet. Normally what we look for is evidence of an accelerant at the origin point.
