CHAPTER 11

Carlyle was in his element. For one thing, it was approaching noon on Sunday, and he’d been ensconced in the basement autopsy room of the Newcastle Police Department since well before seven A.M. For another, he’d been examining the city’s most recent homicide victim, an unidentified body, to boot, and one where the cause of death wasn’t as obvious as a cobblestone to the head. The third piece of this satisfactory equation was that Carlyle was not alone. Al Lever was in the morgue with him, having been forced to relinquish his treasured Sunday morning tee time in favor of this chummy tête-à-tête. That solitary fact provided Carlyle with more than a little sadistic glee.

He smiled to himself as he stared at the cadaver lying blue and exposed on an icy metal table, then jotted a few notes in quick, cribbed shorthand, and finally resumed eating a cheeseburger with his ungloved left hand. Droplets of ketchup threatened to spill from the greasy, yellow paper. “Good,” he said, although it was abundantly clear to Al Lever that the medical examiner’s pleasure was not derived from the folks at the local Burger King.

“I don’t know how you can do that,” Lever said. He was smoking furiously. Veteran cop though he was, Al couldn’t stomach the smell of the autopsy room. Methane gas and butyric acid, he told himself repeatedly; they’re natural; they’re organic compounds. But the exhortation did nothing to dispel the churning of his stomach. Lever took another long drag on his cigarette and reiterated his comments on Carlyle’s peculiar dining habits.

“Hmmm?” The medical examiner didn’t look up.

“Eat …? I don’t know how you can eat that stuff down here.”

Carlyle gave Lever the briefest of glances. “Yeah,” he admitted, “burgers gets cold real fast in the lab. I shouldn’t have bolted the fries first, but hell, they’re no fun cold, either … one of life’s unpleasant little decisions.” He opened his mouth for another mammoth bite, chewed and swallowed noisily, then returned to perusing his clipboard.

“Yep. Blunt trauma,” he announced smugly. “Just as I surmised during my initial examination.” He polished off the cheeseburger, crushed its tomato-speckled wrapper, and wiped his fingers on a paper napkin, which he then rather fussily balled up and disposed of with a slam dunk into a corner trash can. The attention given to tidying away his meal seemed disproportionate to his concern for the corpse. Lever sensed an unwillingness on Carlyle’s part to make eye contact.

“X rays don’t lie, Lieutenant. Especially when we can zap ’em with those deep, fifteen-minute exposures. Nice not to worry about radiation overload, not on folks who are already demised. Bottom line: your lady took a hard whack from behind. A relatively quick death, like I said. Hanging can be a lot messier. People don’t like to admit it, but that’s the truth—”

“So we can rule out any possibility of strangulation?”

“Absolutely.” Carlyle chuckled, keeping his gaze lowered but shaking his head from side to side as if he were dealing with a fifth-grader.

Al focused on the tube lights that hung in pairs throughout the room; he concentrated on the independent ventilation system, the security locks, the motion detectors; what he avoided was the pervasive odors of human remains, fried hamburger meat, and greasy fries.

“Could the weapon have been similar to the one that killed Freddie Carson? A cobblestone, a brick, possibly a tire jack?”

“You found a tire jack at the scene?” Carlyle asked, finally allowing his eyes to meet Lever’s.

“No, it’s just something that popped into my head.”

“Well, it could’ve been a jack handle maybe, but there’s no way this was done with a brick or stone; otherwise, we would’ve had skin abrasions, blood.…” Carlyle pointed at the corpse. “The weapon made contact here, at the base of the skull. We’ve got eight pairs of cervical nerves protected by the first few cervical vertebrae. You crush one of those bones, and the party’s over. Whatever did the damage was round and smooth, like a pipe or something. Jones lifted hair samples from the nape of her neck for analysis.…” Carlyle shrugged. “Everything leaves a trail … a footprint. It may take Abe a few days, but he’ll be able to determine if the weapon was a baseball bat, a tire jack, or a golf club. I hear tell golfers can be touchy people.”

Lever didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, he stubbed out his cigarette in a glass petri dish that had been designated as morgue ashtray. “I’m trying to make a connection here, Carlyle. Are we looking at a serial situation? Someone who’s stalking individuals bedded down on the streets for the night? Both cases involved blows to the head—”

“Who knows? Speculating on motive and method isn’t my field. But you get two people without ID turning up dead in deserted areas of Newcastle on two consecutive days.… If you and your boys don’t make the connection, you can bet the newspapers will.… But, hey, why not ask Polycrates? I’ll bet he has plenty of thoughts on the subject … for what they’re worth.” True to form, Carlyle had grown truculent in a second. He resumed concentrating on the body lying on the table.

“Time of death?”

Carlyle’s ghoulish smile flickered to life. “Well, that’s another tricky issue, Lever. Algor mortis? Usually we’re talking a drop of—give or take—one degree Celsius per hour—”

Lever interrupted, “English, please, Carlyle.”

“A body cools down at a fairly predictable rate. Around here, this time of year, we can count on about two degrees Fahrenheit an hour.”

“And …?”

“Well, this gal was stone cold when I arrived at the bus station, which confused me somewhat. Obviously, rigor mortis had come and gone. I suppose I should have picked that up at the scene, but I was fooled by the date on the Sentinel … which, I think we all were.…” Again, his eyes darted around the room but avoided Lever. “My point being: this lady was dead long before that newspaper you found under her head was ever printed.”

“What?!”

“Jones said the daily Sentinel rolls into town at four … five A.M., correct?”

Lever nodded.

“Jane Doe here was discovered Saturday morning, with her head resting on Saturday’s paper, but my calculations now put her death thirty-six to forty-eight hours earlier, maybe longer. Rigor mortis sets in after about six hours, disappears usually in thirty. My tissue analysis revealed a presence of adipocere; it’s a substance that’s formed during the decomposition of the body, and—”

“But then how did the Saturday Sentinel get—?”

“I’m just the ME, Lieutenant. I ain’t no detective, but common sense says Miss Doe didn’t die behind the bus station.… She was kept on ice for a while and dumped there.”

When Belle’s doorbell rang, she was in the process of scooping the last remaining tablespoonful of a whipped mayonnaise and egg yolk filling from a red glass bowl and sliding it into a twelfth hard-boiled egg white. She called out, “Just be a minute,” as she licked the mixture from her fingertips and smiled at her handiwork: a dozen perfect deviled eggs. Who could ask for a more glorious luncheon? She crossed to the kitchen sink, rinsed off her hands, and walked to her front door, happily flicking a dish towel as she went.

“Sorry,” she said, opening the paneled outer door, “I was cooking … well, not really cooking, but—”

There was no one there.

Belle undid the latch on her screen door and peered across an empty porch toward the street. Not a soul was in sight; not a person strolling by, not a car, not a truck, only three robins diligently scratching for worms in her front yard.

“Hello …?” she called. “Hello?”

She stepped out onto the porch and almost fell over a long white flower box extravagantly beribboned in blue and cream. It was a package that shouted, A dozen long-stem roses.

Belle bent down, lifted the box into her arms, and removed the greeting card from its miniature envelope. It read, “For Belle, from a Secret Admirer.”

“Rosco?” she called. “Rosco …? I made deviled eggs.” With no response, she raised her voice. “You’re going to get hungry lurking around in the shrubbery!”

Again, she was greeted by absolute silence. Belle chuckled. “You’re a swell guy!” she sang out. “And one terrific fiancé! I’m leaving the door open just in case you turn peckish.”

Humming to herself, she walked back inside with her prize. “Hmmm, feels a little light,” she murmured as she reentered the kitchen, set the box on the counter, and then noted with dismay that the white cardboard had been nicked in several places as if badly jostled in delivery. I hope the flowers are okay, she thought as she carefully slid the ribbon aside and pulled off the lid. Nestled in a bed of green tissue paper lay neither rose nor spray of lilac nor exotic orchid stem. What she found instead was a neatly hand-drawn crossword puzzle.

Belle shook her head and smiled afresh. “Another of Rosco’s romantic inventions … although I think I would have preferred flowers.”