“Race?”
“White. But I’ll have to verify that.”
“How confident do you feel?”
“Pretty confident. The nasal opening is narrow, the bridge steepled, the cheekbones tight to the face. The skull looks classically European.”
“Age?”
“Skeletal maturation is complete in the fingers, the teeth show little wear, the cranial sutures minimal closure.”
Rinaldi pulled a leather-bound notepad from his shirt pocket.
“Meaning?”
“Adult.”
Rinaldi jotted it down.
“There is one other little thing.”
Both men looked at me.
“There are two bullet holes in the back of the head. Small caliber. Probably a twenty-two.”
“Cute, saving that for last,” said Slidell. “Don’t suppose you found a smoking gun?”
“Nope. No gun. No bullets. Nothing for ballistics.”
“Why’s Larabee cutting free?” Slidell tipped his head toward the parked cars.
“He’s giving a talk tonight.”
Rinaldi underlined something in his notes and slid the pen into its slot.
“Shall we go inside?” he asked.
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
I stood, listening to rain tick the magnolia leaves overhead, unconsciously putting off the inevitable. Though the scientist in me wanted to know whom we’d pulled from the privy, another part of me wanted to turn away, to take no part in the dissection of another murder.
Friends often ask, “How can you constantly deal with the remains of death? Doesn’t that debase life? Make brutal death commonplace?”
I shrug off the queries with a stock response about media. Everyone knows about violent death, I say. The public reads about the stabbings, the shootings, the airline disasters. People hear the statistics, watch the footage, follow the trials on Court TV. The only difference? I see the carnage closer up.
That’s what I say. But the truth is, I think a lot about death. I can be fairly philosophical about the hard cases who do each other in as part of doing business. But I can never avoid the sense of pity for the young and the weak who simply happened to get in the way of some psychopath listening to voices from another planet, or some druggie in need of fifty dollars for a fix, or for the genuinely innocent who through no fault of their own happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were subsumed by events of which they had no understanding.
My friends interpret my reluctance to discuss my work as stoicism, or professional ethics, or even as a desire to spare their sensitivities. That’s not it. It’s more a concern for me than them. At the end of the day, I need to leave those cadavers cold and silent on their stainless steel. I need to not think about them. I need to read a book, or see a movie, or discuss politics or art. I need to reestablish perspective and remind myself that life offers much more than violence and mayhem.
But with certain cases, the emotional fire wall is harder to maintain. With certain cases, my mind loops back to the pure horror of it, no matter what rationalizations I make.
As I watched Slidell and Rinaldi walk toward the house, a tiny voice sounded in my head.
Be careful, it whispered. This may be one of the rough ones.
The wind kicked up, agitating the dried magnolia leaves and blossoms at our feet and whipping the kudzu into undulating green waves.
Boyd danced around my legs, looking from me to the house, then back again.
“What?”
The dog whined.
“You wimp.”
Boyd’ll take on a rottweiler without batting an eye, but storms scare him silly.
“We going in?” Ryan asked.
“We’re going in!” I replied in a Walter Mitty contralto.
I bolted for the house. Ryan followed. Boyd overtook us.
As I bounded onto the porch, the screen door opened and Slidell’s face appeared in the gap. He’d abandoned the cigarette and was now chewing on a wooden toothpick. Before speaking, he rolled the toothpick with his thumb and index finger.
“You’re gonna shit your Calvin Klein’s when you see what’s in here.”
