him, a dozen brains, resembling a bushel of cauliflower, waited their turn.
I told him where I’d been and what I’d done, skipping only the part where I hurled chunks onto the big cop’s shoes, and he took the brain he’d been working on and gently placed it back in the bucket. He listened and occasionally asked a question. As we talked, several assistant medical examiners stopped by to pay their respects. Though retired, Charlie was still a legend among canoe makers in the red-brick death house.
A mustachioed man in a lab coat asked Charlie to examine thirty-three stab wounds on a murdered prostitute. We stepped over to a chrome tray that held what had been an overweight woman in her thirties. Her torso and thighs bore multiple puncture wounds. Her arms were sliced where she had tried to defend herself. Chunks of her flesh were missing where the M.K. had taken dissections to follow the track of the blades. No weapon had been found. The young M.K. was confused by the different-shaped tracks and thought there had to be three weapons. That would be unusual and would probably indicate at least two assailants.
After a moment, Charlie said, “Two weapons only. A long-bladed vegetable knife, mistakenly called a butcher’s knife by most policemen. That’d cover the large wounds. The small ones were likely made by an ice pick.” Charlie examined a slide of the wound. “This one from her abdomen is the vegetable knife again. It just went in the same wound twice. The first time, the assailant pushed the blade down, the second time up. That’s what gives it the saber-like appearance, but it’s just a vegetable knife.”
The young doc thanked the old doc, who turned back to me. “What are you going to do now?”
“Bring down Nicky Florio before he brings me down.”
“How?”
We were interrupted by an Oriental woman in a white lab coat with an I.D. badge on a chain around her neck. She held a skull that resembled a coconut bashed by a sledgehammer. “Dr. Ling,” Charlie said, with a slight bow.
“I’m having trouble determining which perforating gunshot wound was the initial one,” she said.
Together, they examined the cracks in the eggshell-like fissures in the skull. From their conversation, I gathered that the victim was struck by two bullets from different guns. The victim was an innocent bystander in a shoot-out with police, and the good folks in the state attorney’s office wanted to know if a cop or a robber pulled the trigger on the fatal shot. “It’s the windowpane effect,” Charlie said. “Imagine that you strike a pane of glass and get a fracture line. Hit the glass again in a different place, and the second fracture will stop where it meets the first fracture.” Charlie traced an index finger over the longer crack. “Here’s your trail of death.”
Dr. Ling expressed her thanks, tucked the skull under her arm, and cheerfully headed back to her lab table.
“Now where were we?” Charlie asked, turning back to me.
“I was about to tell you how I was going to get Florio. First, by lining up some allies. The Micanopy Tribal Council won’t be too pleased with Florio when they learn how he hoodwinked them out of their full ten percent.”
“You’re going to violate your client’s confidence.”
“Hey, I’ve done it before. Besides, we weren’t in an attorney-client relationship at the time. More like murderer and accessory.”
He chewed that over and didn’t seem to disagree. “Okay, so what can the Micanopies do to help?”
“They can get me back to Florio’s house in the Glades. No way I could find it otherwise. I’ll take you along to sift and scrape, and maybe we’ll find some speck of Rick Gondolier that can be used as evidence. Maybe the tribe can give me some manpower, help bring in Tiger and Diaz. If we’ve got the physical evidence, and if Diaz would roll over, I could nail both Tiger and Florio for the murder of Gondolier.”
Charlie was cleaning his fingernails with a scalpel as he thought about it. “Too many ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes.’”
“But that’s not all. There’s something else Florio is up to. He kept pressing me on what Gina had told me about his project in the Glades. Then she asked if Nicky told me about ‘the rest of it.’ There’s something else Florio is hiding, something big.” My eyes roamed around the lab. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s out there somewhere.”
“Then go find it,” Charlie said.
“I intend to, but I don’t mind telling you that I’m more than a little worried.”
“Worried?”
“Okay, scared. I had a nightmare last night that a head rolled across a table into my lap. When I looked down, it was my head.”
“The dinosaurs may be back, Jake.”
“Huh?”
“And we may be gone.”
For a moment, I thought Charlie might have sliced too many brains, including his own. He produced a pipe from a pocket in his lab coat and sucked on the cold stem. “An asteroid may have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, but it was an earlier one that led to their emergence.”
“What does that have to do with Nicky Florio and-”
“Hush, now.” Charlie removed his pipe and gestured toward space. “About two hundred million years ago, an asteroid hit a forest in Canada, creating a fireball fourteen hundred miles wide. Billions of tons of soot poured into the atmosphere. Years of darkness followed. The animals starved or froze when the temperatures plunged. Then the enormous amounts of carbon dioxide led to global warming, and in some untold thousands of years, the plants returned and dinosaurs developed. Millions of years go by, and another giant asteroid hits, and again much of life is wiped out, including the dinosaurs.”
“Is there a point to this, Charlie?”
“Same as always. We’re all going to die. Our species will undoubtedly be wiped out when the next huge asteroid hits, if we don’t do it to ourselves first. The end may come next year or a thousand years from now. Our individual lives are puny, meaningless. So do the right thing. Seek the truth, quaere verum, and don’t be afraid.”
He gave me the keys to his pickup truck and wished me Godspeed. I told him I’d see him tomorrow, or if not, when the dinosaurs came home.
Chapter 20
Charlie’s old Dodge pickup had muddy fenders, a jouncy ride, and squeaky shocks. It hadn’t had a wheel alignment since Zsa Zsa Gabor was an ingenue. The radio was set on a big-band AM station, and the front seat was littered with week-old newspapers and a couple of paperback books. I threw the papers in a trash can, tossed a dog-eared copy of The Corpse Had a Familiar Face by Edna Buchanan into the glove compartment, and headed west on Tamiami Trail, playing tug-of-war with the steering wheel, which kept pulling right toward a muddy canal.
I fell in behind an eighteen-wheeler, which soon chugged ahead of me. I let a kid in a Trans Am zoom by me on the two-lane road. Going fifty in Charlie’s truck on a straightaway was exciting enough. It also gave me time to figure what I was going to say to the chief.
The stiff breeze was rattling the thatched fronds of the chickee huts in the Micanopy village. The doll-making and basket-weaving booths were empty. Precious few tourists had paid their five dollars to observe Indian women sew their patchwork quilts or watch a husky young man wrestle a bored gator. It looked as if cobwebs were growing on the eight-passenger airboat-half-hour ride, seven dollars-and the restaurant wasn’t dishing out much Indian fry bread.
Inside the information center, a one-story concrete-block building, I asked a dark-haired, heavyset girl in a turquoise skirt where to find the chief. She smiled, told me I meant the chairman of the tribe, and pointed down the corridor. I followed her directions, knocked on the thin, paneled door, and he coughed me inside.
Henry Osceola sat in his windowless office sucking on a cigarette. The office was decorated in no-frills clutter. Metal filing cabinets, mica desk, the walls bare except for a calendar from a Naples bank and a faded print of a marshy hammock at sunset.
