'Yes, but law enforcement can see those. That would give us reasonable cause to conduct a search.'
'Fascinating,' the medical examiner said.
McCaskey moved to the mouth. He checked the cheeks. There were no scars, nor any along the gums. Then he checked under the tongue. It was swollen with uncirculated blood. That made the veins underneath it particularly visible. One of them appeared to have a prick mark.
'Look,' McCaskey said.
He pinched the tongue between his index finger and thumb and shone the light into the cavity. Dr. Hennepin looked in.
'I see it,' she said.
The medical examiner retrieved a scalpel and a sterile test tube from the autopsy table. She also grabbed a small tape recorder. Narrating her activities for the official autopsy record, she carefully sliced a piece of skin from the area. When she was finished, she clicked off the recorder.
'I'll get this to the laboratory at once,' she said. 'It will be about two hours before I have the results.'
'Thanks. I'm going to keep looking, if that's all right.'
'Of course,' she said. 'Just don't make any incisions.'
McCaskey said he would not.
The doctor went upstairs to arrange for analysis of the tissue. That left McCaskey alone with the cadaver. The former FBI agent found no other marks on the upper half of the body. He covered Wilson with the sheet and returned him to the cooler. He closed the door.
Wilson was not doing drugs. They would have shown up on the initial lab report. So would injections of insulin or some other medication.
Unless the man had nicked himself on a fish bone at the party, this probably meant that someone stuck him under the tongue.
If William Wilson had been murdered, Washington would be turned into a pop-culture Dallas with public and private investigations and endless conspiracy scenarios about who killed the Internet tycoon.
The medical examiner returned. She took McCaskey's cell phone number as well as his office number and promised to call as soon as she heard something. He thanked her for her help and asked for her complete discretion.
'The autopsy results will be sealed,' she said, 'though in my experience that's as good as saying we have something to hide.'
'In this instance, we may,' McCaskey remarked.
As he left the medical center, McCaskey found something ironic in how this had unfolded. Something that even Bob Herbert might find amusing.
That for a few hours at least, the quintessential team player would be working on this case alone.
TEN
Washington, D.C. Monday, 11:00 a.m.
As the press secretary to Senator Donald Orr, twenty-nine-year-old Katherine 'Kat' Lockley typically reached the office around seven-thirty each morning and stayed until seven or eight at night.
That was fine with her. She loved her work. But it was intense and exhausting, and a midday lunch break was not a luxury, it was a requirement. She liked to get out of the office, go to the Green Pantry down the street, stock up at the salad bar, and do the New York Times crossword puzzle while she ate. Forty-five minutes. That was all she required to recharge her brain.
She would not be getting away from the office today.
Kat did not care about William Wilson personally. The two had barely made eye contact at the party, let alone spoken to one another. When she turned on the BBC news at six a.m.' as she did every day, and learned of his death, Kat's only concern was for Senator Orr and how the software magnate's death would impact them. As
