“Take her to X ray first,” Stavely said.
The guy steered the gurney in a new direction and headed for a closed room off the side of the lab. Reacher stepped ahead and pulled the door for him. It felt like it weighed a ton.
“Lined with lead,” Stavely said. “We really zap them in there. Big, big doses, so we can see everything we want to see. Not like we have to worry about their long-term health, is it?”
The technician was gone for a moment and then he stepped back into the lab and eased the heavy door closed behind him. There was a distant powerful hum which lasted a second and then stopped. He went back and came out pushing the gurney again. It was still making tracks across the tile. He stopped it alongside the examination table.
“Roll her off,” Stavely said. “I want her facedown.”
The technician stepped beside him and leaned across the table and grasped the nearer edge of the bag with both hands and lifted it half off the gurney, half onto the table. Then he walked around to the other side and took the other edge and flipped it up and over. The bag flopped zipper-side down and the mass inside it sucked and rolled and wobbled and settled. Paint oozed out onto the polished steel. Stavely looked at it and beyond it to the floor, which was all crisscrossed with green tracks.
“Overshoes, people,” he said. “It’ll get everywhere.”
They stepped away and Harper found pairs of plastic footwear in a locker and handed them out. Reacher slipped his on and stepped back and watched the paint. It seeped out through the zipper like a thick slow tide.
“Get the film,” Stavely said.
The technician ducked back to the X-ray room and came out with large gray squares of film which mapped Alison Lamarr’s body. He handed them to Stavely. Stavely fanned through them and held them up against the light from the ceiling.
“Instant,” he said. “Like Polaroid. The benefits of scientific progress.”
He shuffled them like a dealer and separated one of them and held it up. Ducked away to a light box on the wall and hit the switch and held the film against the light with his big fingers splayed.
“Look at that,” he said.
It was a photograph of the midsection from just below the sternum to just above the pubic area. Reacher saw the outlines of ghostly gray bones, ribs, spine, pelvis, with a forearm and a hand lying across them at an angle. And another shape, dense and so bright it shone pure white. Metal. Slim and pointed, about as long as the hand.
“A tool of some sort,” Stavely said.
“The others didn’t have anything like that,” Poulton said.
“Doc, we need to see it right away,” Blake said. “It’s important.”
Stavely shook his head. “It’s underneath her body right now, because she’s upside down. We’ll get there, but it won’t be real soon.”
“How long?”
“Long as it takes,” Stavely said. “This is going to be messy as hell.”
He clipped the gray photographs in sequence on the light box. Then he walked the length of the ghostly display and studied them.
“Her skeleton is relatively undamaged,” he said. He pointed to the second panel. “Left wrist was cracked and healed, probably ten years ago.”
“She was into sports,” Reacher said. “Her sister told us.”
Stavely nodded. “So we’ll check the collarbone.”
He moved left and studied the first panel. It showed the skull and the neck and the shoulders. The collar-bones gleamed and swooped down toward the sternum.
'Small crack,” Stavely said, pointing. 'It’s what I’d expect. An athlete with a cracked wrist will usually have a cracked collarbone too. They fall off their bike or their Rollerblades or whatever, throw out their arm to break their fall, end up breaking their bones instead.”
“But no fresh injuries?” Blake asked.
Stavely shook his head. “These are ten years old, maybe more. She wasn’t killed by blunt trauma, if that’s what you mean.”
He hit the switch and the light behind the X rays went out. He turned back to the examination table and knitted his fingers again and his knuckles clicked in the silence.
“OK,” he said. “Let’s go to work.”
He pulled a hose from a reel mounted on the ceiling and turned a small faucet built into its nozzle. There was a hissing sound and a stream of clear liquid started running. A heavy, slow liquid with a sharp, strong smell.
“Acetone,” Stavely said. “Got to clear this damn paint.”
He used the acetone sluice on the body bag and on the steel table. The technician used handfuls of kitchen towel, wiping the bag and pushing the thick liquid into the drain. The chemical stink was overpowering.
“Ventilator,” Stavely said.
The technician ducked away and twisted a switch behind him and the fans in the ceiling changed up from a hum to a louder roar. Stavely held the nozzle closer and the bag began to turn from wet green to wet black. Then he held the hose low down on the table and set up a swirling rinse under the bag straight into the drain.
“OK, scissors,” he said.
The technician took scissors from a cart and snipped a corner of the bag. Green paint flooded out. The acetone swirl caught it and it eddied sluggishly to the drain. It kept on coming, two minutes, three, five. The bag settled and drooped as it emptied. The room went quieter under the roar of the fan and the hiss of the hose.
“OK, the fun starts here,” Stavely said.
He handed the hose to the technician and used a scalpel from the cart to slit the bag lengthwise from end to end. He made sideways cuts top and bottom and peeled the rubber back slowly. It lifted and sucked away from skin. He folded it back in two long flaps. Alison Lamarr’s body was revealed, lying facedown, slimy and slick with paint.
Stavely used the scalpel and slit the rubber around the feet, up alongside the legs, around the contours of the hips, up her flanks, close to her elbows, around her shoulders and head. He pulled away the strips of rubber until the bag was gone, all except for the front surface, which was trapped between the crust of paint and the steel of the table.
The crust of paint was top down to the table, because she was upside down. Its underside was bubbled and jellified. It looked like the surface of a distant alien planet. Stavely started rinsing its edges, where it was stuck to her skin.
“Won’t that damage her?” Blake asked.
Stavely shook his head. “It’s the same stuff as nail polish remover.”
The skin turned greenish white where the paint washed off. Stavely used his gloved fingertips to peel the crust away. The strength in his hands moved the body. It lifted and fell, slackly. He pushed the hose underneath her, probing for stubborn adhesions. The technician stood next to him and lifted her legs. Stavely reached under them and cut the crust and the rubber together, peeling it away up to her thighs. The acetone ran continuously, rinsing the green stream into the drain.
Stavely moved up to the head. Placed the hose against the nape of her neck and watched as the chemical flooded her hair. Her hair was a nightmare. It was matted and crusted with paint. It had floated up around her face like a stiff tangled cage.
“I’m going to have to cut it,” he said.
Blake nodded, somber.
“I guess so,” he said.
“She had nice hair,” Harper said. Her voice was quiet under the noise from the fan. She half turned and backed off a step. Her shoulder touched Reacher’s chest. She left it there a second longer than she needed to.
Stavely took a fresh scalpel from the cart and traced through the hair, as close to the paint crust as he could get. He slid a powerful arm under the shoulders and lifted. The head came free, leaving hair matted into the crust like mangrove roots tangled into a swamp. He cut through the crust and the rubber and pulled another section free.
“I hope you catch this guy,” he said.
“That’s the plan,” Blake said back, still somber.
