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"Allow me to meddle, Morgan. Do you and your wife love each other?”
"Of course, doctor. What’s the question?”
"I don’t see your eyes twinkling as you answer. When you love someone, your soul must shine.”
"Of course I love my wife, Salas, don’t be picky.”
"Don’t make the same mistake I made, my friend.”
"Be more specific."
"I mean, getting up early when it's dark at night to go to work at the hospital was a hell of a bitch, but it cost me a lot less when someone else was doing the same thing on the other side of the bed. Two cups of coffee are better than one. That when the varnish wears off at the beginning of the exciting stories, the real person comes to the surface, and that's where you must decide if the unvarnished person is for you or not. That in the end, she is always going to be the fire in your eyes, she is also extraordinarily gutsy, and you are the championship asshole, only with one small difference: she will be your chain and ball, and you, the asshole. And that's when, with luck, you'll be able to build a rocky eternity but not enough to end up in court. Fourth lesson.”
Friday, November 10, 2006
The unlikely pair of officers composed of Alfred Horner and Thomas Carroll, waited in the autopsy room for the coroner to appear. They were dressed in the same clothes from the night before, and their tired looks showed that fatigue was beginning to make a dent in them. In a desperate attempt to regain strength after the incidental night, Carroll had managed to get a nod for less than two hours in the back seat of the patrol car. Horner, on the other hand, had not even tried.
The autopsy room of the Oxford forensics was small, cold, and so meticulously clean it almost made him nauseous. It was situated in the basement, so that the sunlight did not reach it. Stainless steel skeletal tables, all free except the one in front of the policemen, occupied the dungeon. Above it, inside a sack of cloth and fastened through its center by a zipper, hid the inert mass of what a few hours ago had been the living body of Mike Lennard.
The two men grimaced, each according to their style, when the coroner entered the room twelve minutes late: Carroll gave a sigh to one side, while Horner, less given to staying in line, gave the newcomer a more sullen gaze "Shit, the Buddha has touched us," he commented under his breath to his companion, who couldn’t suppress a childish chuckle.
The Buddha (a nickname that Horner had just picked from his sleeve, as he did from time to time) was Kurt Payne, the Police Chief of Forensic Science in the City of Oxford. In a small white dressing gown, he was a man with a disproportionate face. He could not be said to be a monster, but the fact was that both his eyes, as his full lips, occupied most of his facial surface, creating the strange effect that something was not in place. It was as if someone had misjudged the scale of certain elements at the time of his conception. Carroll used to say that he was a giant in the body of a human. He had his hair shaved (including his eyebrows), and although he did not lose the rehearsed smile from the door until he reached out to the pair of policemen, the truth was that he did not fool anyone: Payne was a strange man. He rarely interacted with other policemen, collecting unpopular weapons (one day Carroll saw him take out brass knuckles and a collection of ninja stars), and since a few months ago he was associated with some kind of Buddhist sect that had managed to soften his bipolar character in exchange for contributing to enlarge his fame as an strange bird). Horner and Carroll simply did not like him.
They didn’t waste their time in formalities and they went directly to the point: Horner requested to see the body, to which Payne obeyed without resisting by opening the zipper to the neck.
"Fuck..." Snowflake snapped at once, as if it were the first time he saw the grayish mass typical of a corpse to which an autopsy had just been carried out. Alfred swallowed.
The coroner began reciting the findings of the autopsy as if he were in an oral test and he had studied and memorized it the night before, all in a surprisingly high-pitched voice (a giant in the body of a human and with a whistling voice):
"The victim, according to the facts around the hole that pierced the skull when we did the analysis, was killed shortly before midnight yesterday. It was by a firearm that is evident, almost certainly of a small size. A single bullet shot was enough to make him drop dead.
"When you say facts, do you mean...?" Horner asked, betrayed by a subtle gleam of fear in his eyes.
“Larvae.” The coroner rushed to finish the question with the answer, with a tone that made them think he was enjoying the two policemen’s discomfort. “It’s a joke. I was teasing you. These bugs take a minimum of 48 hours to appear in a decomposing body.”
The detectives glanced sideways to confirm their irritation at Payne's caustic sense of humor.
"All right, go on," Horner snapped.
"As you can see, once the body was cleaned of its own dried blood, we found a deep groove in the throat.” He added the comment to the damaged area with his index finger. “Despite being an important wound, it doesn’t reach the trachea, so it appears that the homicide tried to strangle the victim before shooting him with the gun.”
"Let us take care of rebuilding the scene, and you go and look for insects, will you, Kurt?" Alfred took the first opportunity to leap against the coroner.
Carroll broke the tension with police philosophy:
"Fuck... we cops live the worst twenty minutes of other people’s lives.” He couldn’t stop looking at the gap that almost split the victim's head in two.
After a few seconds of almost ceremonial reflection, Horner asked the usual question in cases of murder by gun:
"When will we know the model of the gun?"
"I'm afraid we won’t know exactly," Kurt said mechanically, wanting to make it clear that he didn’t care at all.
“Like what...?” Carroll was within a tenth of a second of losing his temper when his companion stepped forward.
"It's because they haven’t found the bullet.” Alfred confirmed, more than just said, and then sought confirmation in the coroner's round eyes.
"Exactly," said the Buddhist. “Without the bullet that was fired you cannot know the model of the weapon with precision. Ballistics don’t work miracles, you know.” He let this last remark spill from his tongue. “Let's see, we know it was a small weapon, like a revolver or a small-caliber pistol. In addition, because of the shape of the gap, it is very likely that the shot was projected at a short distance from the target, maybe a meter and a half, or even less. It is all I can say.”
"Then we'll find that bullet and give some work to the ballistics," Carroll promised. “Sometimes we do miracles, did you know that Kurt?”
After the declaration of verbal war, a provocative wink of the policeman's eyes that the coroner received without the slightest symptom of offense in his expression.
"There is something else," he added, with the classic power of the class nerd when a bully pleads for his homework minutes before a surprise test.
Horner's eyes narrowed as if he were blinded by some sunlight, and he paid close attention; something told him that the Trojan horse of the case was about to be revealed.
“Go for it, Kurt.”
The man opened the zipper more, leaving the torso of the corpse in full view, and refrained from commenting, for the image spoke for itself. The agents looked worried as they stared at it. In the area of the chest between the nipples, marked in the same flesh as one carving an inscription in wood with a chisel, you could read a clear message: