The coroner’s office was a red-brick, squat, gritty-looking thing. Institutional. I oughta know, I can smell institutional. Its steel-framed windows were filmed with dirt. Washoe Medical Center was a block south and east, a rambling, discordant, crammed-together collage of styles from old crumbly red brick to hyper-modern antiseptic high-rise topped with partly hidden cooling towers.
Traffic rolled by on Kirman, rattling over potholes. From all around I heard the drone of air conditioners. The temperature was already north of ninety-five and climbing.
Jeri stuck her head out a door and waved to me. I waved back. Annoyed, she waved me in.
To avoid any misunderstanding that might result in bodily harm, I removed the moustache and the hat, got out of the Porsche, and ambled over to the door to see what was up.
She yanked me inside. The sensation was like getting an arm caught in a dredging winch. “I thought you wanted to learn,” she said.
“Learn what? Maybe you forgot, but I’ve seen these two guys already.” I blinked, trying to adjust to the gloom. After a moment I saw a figure standing in deeper shadow.
Jeri ignored me, pulled me closer. “Mort, this’s Ben Ragland.”
I took stock of the kid, mid-twenties, limp brown hair, wearing a white smock over blue jeans. He was trying not to gawk at me or drool over Jeri, but he wasn’t having much luck with either.
He took my hand and pumped it. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir,” he said, grinning foolishly.
An honor? Me? Sir? It took all I had not to laugh. Then I got it. In America we honor our celebrities, even if they’re technically mass murderers and/or cannibals—anyone in the throes of Warhol’s fifteen minutes. Ben hadn’t had his moment yet, so he was honored.
“Mort,” I said, knowing the gesture was hopeless. I was too big a celebrity. Ragland wouldn’t call me Mort after twenty years together on a desert island.
“How much time do we have?” Jeri asked him.
Ben lowered his voice. “Not much. Mr. Carroll’s due back in like ten or fifteen minutes.” He licked his lips, suddenly more nervous than awed.
“Then let’s get rockin’,” Jeri said.
Boyce Carroll was the coroner. New guy. He’d held the position for less than a year. The most I’d seen of him was on TV the past couple of days. He was barrel chested and flinty eyed, smoked cigars, sounded like he knew what he was doing and wouldn’t put up with nonsense, including dumb questions by mindless press corps drones coiffed to within an inch of their pampered lives. I got the impression he wouldn’t approve of one Mortimer Angel darting in for a gander at the former heads of state, so to speak. Or Ms. DiFrazzia, PI, either.
We rode an elevator down one floor to the basement, then Ben led us along an echoey corridor, through double steel-lined doors with gurney marks scuffed onto them at waist level and into a sickly smell of chemicals and ill-concealed death.
On a table with stainless steel gutters, a body lay under a sheet with its feet hanging out, a tag on the right big toe, flesh white as Styrofoam. The floor was damp tile, giving off a stink of ammonia and industrial-strength Lysol. A mop was jammed into a bucket of sudsy liquid, giving me a fair idea of what Ben Ragland did here at the facility. How this special-purpose janitor was supposed to help us, I didn’t know. Maybe Jeri just wanted a look at Mayor Jonnie.
Which we then did.
Ben yanked the latch of a drawer and rolled Jonnie Sjorgen out in a gust of sterile, refrigerated air and a puff of condensation.
“Hell,” Jeri muttered. She turned away, then swiveled back and looked at him.
He wasn’t frosty, as I’d expected. They didn’t freeze them, which I supposed would play hell with the forensics. He had gauze patches over his eyes, held in place with tape. A plastic collar around his neck kept him upright. A strip of adhesive held his mouth shut. He had a deep slash wound on his cheek an inch or so below his left eye that I vaguely remembered seeing when he was in the trunk of Dallas’s car. All I can say is it was a god-awful lousy way to end up.
But as near as I could tell, this was a dead end, pure sideshow. Staring at his head, I didn’t feel one bit closer to figuring out who’d killed him.
“Look,” said Ben, and a glow of conspiracy filled his eyes. He lifted the hair on top of Jonnie’s head. It came away, a circular patch of hair and scalp and bone, exposing the terrible dark hollow of his now-empty skull. I felt a shudder right down to the soles of my feet.
“We don’t have his brain,” Ben said, looking from Jeri to me, back to Jeri.
Jeri appeared not to be breathing. Her eyes were locked on that portal to Jonnie’s vacant skull. “Who does?” she asked at last.
Ben shrugged. He put the lid back on Jonnie’s dome. “Whoever killed him, I guess. He was like this when he came in, except the top was sutured in place.” Like a pumpkin, he didn’t add, but the thought occurred to me, I’m sorry to say.
“They removed his brain?” Jeri said, incredulous.
He grinned. Working in this place, he’d been transformed into someone who could grin at things that would turn the average person green. I figured he’d come a long way since high school. “Yep,” he said. “Guess what they put there in its place?”
Immediately, I didn’t want to know.
“His dick, uh, penis,” Ben said, coloring nicely, unable to meet Jeri’s eyes. “And his balls.”
“And if you mention one goddamned word of that outside this office, I’ll have you thrown in jail,” said the coroner, Mr. Boyce Carroll, glaring at us from a doorway.
* * *
A skeleton hung in Carroll’s office, the kind of thing that might have been found
