The Wolfen

do to me.”

The doors opened and they stepped into the odor of disinfectant that pervaded the M.  E.’s office. The receptionist knew them, and waved them past her desk. Doctor Evans’s incredibly cluttered office was open but he wasn’t inside. House rules were that you didn’t go any farther into the complex without an escort, but as usual there wasn’t a soul to be seen or heard. They started toward the operating room when the receptionist yelled Wilson’s name. “Yeah?”

“You got a message,” she hollered. “Call Underwood.”

“OK!” He stared at Becky. “Underwood wants me? Why the hell does Underwood want me? I don’t remember trying to get you fired recently.”

“Maybe you did and forgot.”

“Better call, better call.” He picked up the phone in Evans’s office and dialed the Chief of Detectives. The conversation lasted about a minute and consisted on Wilson’s part of a series of yessirs and thankyous. “Just wanted to tell us we’re a special detail now, reporting directly to him, and we have the facilities of the department at our disposal. We move to an office at Police Headquarters in Manhattan.”

“That’s very nice. We get carte blanche as long as some of the credit rubs off on him, and the Commissioner gets left in his ivory tower.”

Wilson snorted. “Listen, as long as it looks like this case is solvable every parasite from here to the Bulgarian Secret Service is going to try to horn in on the credit. But you just wait. If we don’t get it together, we’ll be all alone.”

“Let’s go to the autopsy. I can hardly wait.” Her voice was bitter; what Wilson had said could not have been more true.

“Come on, ghoul.”

On the way to the operating room Becky wished to hell that Wilson would pull out a bottle of something alcoholic. Unfortunately he rarely drank, and certainly never while he was working—unless events called for it, which they often did about six P.M. But now it was after six.

“I thought you people didn’t come back here unless you were invited,” Evans growled. He was on his way into the surgery. He stank of chemical soap; his rubber gloves were dripping. “Or don’t those rules count where you two are concerned?”

“This is the man who invites us on his cases. How sweet.”

“I only give you cases that are too easy for me to bother with. Now come on in if you want to, but it won’t do a bit of good. And I warn you, they’re fragrant.”

Becky thought immediately of the families. When she was a child she had been at a funeral where you could smell the corpse—but nowadays they had things for that, didn’t they? And anyway, the coffins wouldn’t be opened. But still… oh, God.

The two bodies lay on surgical tables under merciless lights. There was none of the haphazardness and confusion of the scene out at the auto pound; here everything was neat and orderly except the bodies themselves, which carried their violence and horror with them.

Becky was struck by the sheer damage—this attack had been so unbelievably savage. And somehow she found that reassuring; nothing from nature would do this. It had to be the work of human beings, it was too terrible to be anything else.

“The Forensics lab hasn’t found a single thing except dog hairs, rat hairs and feathers,” Doctor Evans said mildly. He was referring to the results of the examination of the area where the deaths had occurred at the auto pound. “No human detritus that didn’t belong to the victims.”

“OK,” Wilson said, but he took the information like a blow. It was not good news.

Evans turned to Becky. “Look, we’re about to start. What do you think it’ll take to get Wilson out of here?”

“You can’t. There might be something,” she replied.

“Something I’d miss?”

“Something we’d see.”

“But not him. He won’t be able to take it.”

“I’ll be fine. Just do your job, Doctor.”

“There will be no repeat of the Custin mess, Detective Wilson.” During the Maude Custin autopsy Wilson had lost his lunch. The reference to his embarrassment hurt his feelings, but he was too proud to acknowledge it before Evans.

“I’ll leave if it gets to me,” he said, “but not unless it does. We’ve gotta be here and you know it.”

“Just trying to help you, trying to be accommodating.”

“Thank you. Why don’t you get going?”

“That’s what I am doing.”

Evans picked up a scalpel and commenced taking a series of tissue samples. An assistant prepared slides of them at a side table, and sent the slides to the lab. The autopsy proceeded swiftly—there was pitifully little to examine. “The main thing we’re hunting for is signs of poison, suffocation, anything that would give us a more plausible cause of death,” Evans said as he worked. “That good for you two?”

“That’s good for us.”

“Well, we’ll find out all about it from the lab. Look at this.” He held up a sharp white tooth. “Embedded in that busted wrist. You know what it means —really what it confirms?”

“The man was alive when his wrist was bitten. Otherwise the tooth wouldn’t have been wrenched loose.”