fingers.'
'Grease from the burning victim? God… what a sicko.'
The waitress, overhearing their conversation, grimaced, thought better of asking after them, and eased off.
'I'll keep after Fairfax,' Warren promised. 'Soon as we have the prints, we'll run a nationwide search on them.'
'Thanks, Warren, for everything. You're a true friend.'
'I'd still like to show you the desert sky at night.'
'I'd like that, really.'
'Plan on it. I'll pick you up at, say, eight?'
He was a hard man to say no to. 'All right,' she finally said, 'see you then.'
He said his good-byes and left Jessica to her day.
FIVE
Silent as the sheeted dead.
Hours later, Jessica felt an overwhelming despondency regarding the lack of progress in the Chris Lorentian case. Despite all the FBI input and the heat put on the investigation into the heinous murder, nothing had come of all the time put in. Pictures of the young woman remained hard to obtain. Witnesses were nonexistent, and people who knew and saw Chris in the hours before her death were similarly hard to find. Her father, a wealthy hotelier with something of a shady reputation, had gone into a terrible depression on learning of his daughter's fate and was placed on medication.
Still, the newspapers and TV newscasts carried her photo and an artist's sketch of a red-haired man with whom she supposedly had been staying at the hotel. Her car and a rifled bag were located in the underground lot, but this discovery netted zero clues.
A reward for the capture and conviction of the man responsible for the horrid death of Chris Lorentian came from the family. Meanwhile, Jessica located John Thorpe, and together they decided to catch a cab to Lester Osborne's office to determine what, if anything, the autopsy had revealed.
The city crime lab and morgue occupied space with the largest police precinct in Las Vegas, taking up an entire city block, but getting to it would take time, as it was across town.
They talked in the cab as the city that never slept seemed to be yawning in the morning sunlight, street cleaners running up and down.
'So, how did you sleep last night after all the excitement, Jess?' J. T. asked.
'About as well's could be expected. How about you?'
'Well, I admit, I was up pretty late,' he replied, seeing a glint of deprecation in her sparkling eyes. ' 'I mean, after I left you to rest in your room, I joined some of the other revelers at the reception for the convention, but… got to admit… I had little fun without you, dear.'
'It's okay, honey,' she shot back with a smile.
'Tell you what, though: News of what happened on the seventeenth floor spread like wildfire through our little community of forensics experts.'
'Is that so? And how much did you blow on the fire?'
He tried his best to look offended. 'Hey, I didn't have to say a word.'
'But you did?'
He shook his head and added, ''Those guys were putting the pieces together as if playing a whodunit puzzle, for the sport of it all, and by the time I got downstairs, everyone-and I mean everyone with an M.E. at the end of his or her name-had heard about your involvement-you know, the phone call-and that Lester Osborne and Karl Repasi were principal M.E. s on the case, and the poor victim, this Chris Lorentian, she'd been painted as some kind of shadowy figure somehow connected to Vegas's equally shadowy underworld.'
'All that, huh? Damn it, I'd hoped to keep my involvement-my tenuous connection with the killer-to ourselves, J. T. Now look what you've done.'
He held up his hands. 'I swear to you, Jess. Everybody in the community had already heard before I got downstairs, really, honestly.'
'You're sure of that?'
'I swear, Jess. I wouldn't lie to you about that. Most everyone I talked to had the story already.'
'Repasi, you suppose? You suppose he spread it?'
'All it would've taken was a call to one of his pals. As for Chris Lorentian, most are chalking her death up to some sort of Mob-related revenge hit, not so much on young Chris as her father, whose business contacts are said to be serpentine. Oddsmakers are making book on it.'
'Jesus, is there anything in this town they don't bet on?'
'No, no, there isn't.'
The cab pulled around a line and double-parked alongside the civic center and city government building they had come in search of. J. T. and Jessica climbed from the cab and stood in the desert sun as it reflected from the blinding mirrored glass here.
Deep inside the building's multileveled basement, Jessica and J. T. found Osborne and Repasi working diligently over the dead girl's cranial cavity, where they'd cut her open to reveal the brain. 'Fluids completely gone…'
'Dehydrated,' they confirmed for the tape-recorded autopsy report.
Both Repasi and Osborne looked as if they'd gotten even less sleep than had J. T. Each man was tired and exasperated, perhaps as much with one another as with the body, from the sound of things. A third man, a young assistant to Osborne, tried to stay out of the cross fire.
Osborne, his bow tie dangling like a dead bird below his open collar, fired a fresh volley at Repasi. 'Do you really, honestly, think cutting open her chest and snatching out her rack of vital organs is necessary, Dr. Repasi, when we know for a fact she was alive when she was put to the torch?'
'Thoroughness is my watchword, Doctor,' replied Repasi, whose wild shock of hair hung in his face. He'd long since dispensed with his hairnet.
J. T. understood the tension, knowing its creator was in fact the mummified corpse itself, black and clothlike to the touch.
Osborne gritted his teeth, released pent-up air, and replied, 'We have corroboration now. It's no longer just Dr. Coran's word. We have hard evidence she died of her burns! There's the killer's message, left in his own hand…'
Repasi coolly replied, a touch of his Polish-Romanian accent creeping in. He'd worked to control it over the years, but his obvious weariness now got the better of him. ''What about the blow to the temple that I found? I believe in being thorough, and if my name is to be on this autopsy report, then-'
'Then by all means, don't put your bloody name on it. I'll take full responsibility. It is my jurisdiction.'
'And you invited my help, sir!'
'Is that what you call it when you invite yourself in on an autopsy, Doctor?'
Jessica cleared her throat to announce her and J. T.'s presence. They had both gowned up and wore surgical masks and gloves, their shoes wrapped in surgical booties. 'Doctors, how are you?' she asked, not expecting an answer. 'I trust all necessary information has been relayed to FBI headquarters? I put in a call to Eriq Santiva last night, left him a complete and detailed message about what's going on here,' she white-lied, having told Santiva nothing yet about how the killer had contacted her. It wasn't the sort of information one left on an answering machine. 'He's expecting crime-scene pho-'
'All done, Jessica, dear,' assured Karl, his eyes narrowing in mock consternation with her. 'You know I keep
