8

      Belafonte stared into her Earl Grey. I think it’s where her eyes needed to rest after studying Kylie Sandoval’s morgue photos.

      “Who’d do such a thing?” she said.

      I pushed my remaining pastries aside. Seeing the shots again had killed my appetite. “Maybe the perp thought burning the body would hide Kylie’s ID, or destroy evidence of his involvement. Or it could be darker.”

      The eyes lifted from the mug. “What does that mean?”

      “The burning satisfied a psychological need. There was also damage to the skull and the face. The postmortem will tell the full story.”

      “When’s that?”

      I looked at my watch. “Forty-seven minutes. We’ve got a ringside seat.”

      She froze, eyes wide. “I’ve never, uh … do I have to be present?”

      “I can go it alone, but one of us should be there.” I stood and shuffled the photos into my briefcase, clicked it shut. “I’ll get in contact later in the day and let you know what we found.”

      Belafonte and I walked back through to the atrium where she went her way, me mine. I had no ill feelings toward Belafonte for leaving me alone with the post. Harry hadn’t cared much for the procedure himself, part of our division of labors: I took the bulk of the autopsies, and Harry handled the majority of courtroom work, testifying in cases we’d worked. It was a perfect division since he resembled a mustached James Earl Jones down to a bass rumble of a voice and, when it came to resembling actors, I’d been more often aligned with Jason Bateman. My courtroom testimony tended to meander into concept and supposition, while Harry’s sounded like a pronouncement from Zeus.

      And, truth be told, I liked to look into the machinery that was us, the bags and tubes and glistening orbs of multicolored meats that formed our engineering. I was fascinated by the intricacy of the systems and at the same time awed that this assemblage of material – not much different from the systems that powered pigs and cattle – had managed to create glorious paintings, send men to the moon, discover subtle mathematics, build towering structures, create majestic symphonies … There was something different in the us. I had no idea what it was, but suspected we contained more than complex chemical engineering in bipedal configuration.

      Those weren’t, however, my thoughts as I pulled into the morgue lot, the sun high in a sky of scudding cumulus, the advance ranks of a nearing shower; I was thinking only of a dark cocoon found on a lonely strand of beach, stinking of scorched meat and chemical accelerant and sending some poor beachcomber screaming back to his hotel, pausing only to vomit in the sand.

      Dr Ava Davanelle was on duty and I found her preparing in an autopsy suite, pulling the blue gown into place. The body was on the table, a mosaic of red flesh mingled with char, the burning uneven. Ava looked up, saw me, registered surprise.

      “I thought I’d see someone from Miami-Dade.”

      “They’re busy.”

      It took two beats to register. “Menendez,” she said.

      “The cops are running full-tilt boogie.”

      “I met Ms Menendez a couple months ago at a city-county function. She seemed both smart and sweet, a lovely person.”

      “She had a lot of friends,” I said, looking down at the corpse. “But this girl had very few, I think.”

      “But she now has you,” Dr Davanelle said quietly, picking up a wicked-looking scalpel. I walked to a chair against the white wall and sat. My history with Ava Davanelle had started a dozen years ago in Mobile, where she had been my girlfriend, a newbie pathologist with lyrical hands and a fierce addiction to alcohol. She was drawn into a case I was working and almost killed. Ava had also met my brother Jeremy back then, when he was incarcerated at the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior and being studied by Dr Evangeline Prowse, who was fascinated by my brother’s brilliance.

      Time and events travel roads we can never suppose. Jeremy had escaped from the Institute years ago, placed on every Wanted listing between Mexico City and Nome, Alaska. Last year a man of Jeremy’s height and weight had been pulled from a river in Chicago, the corpse’s DNA matching my brother’s. He was now dead and long gone from the listings.

      Or maybe not.

      In reality, my brother – after a lengthy hiding-out period in an isolated cabin in the Kentucky mountains – was now living in a huge house in Key West and picking stocks based on a simple but bizarre equation developed during his years in hiding: The financial market had but two true states, scared child or blustering drunkard, all else just states of transition.

      He’d made millions from his insight.

      And the DNA sample taken from the corpse in Chicago? It had been supplied by the pathologist performing the autopsy, one Dr Ava Davanelle, who had been my brother’s secret girlfriend for years, though both Jeremy and Ava disdained the characterization, saying their relationship was far more complex.

      “Interesting,” I heard Ava say, looking up as she leaned over a resected section of upper arm, the bicep splayed open as she studied through a magnifying lens. She cued a communications link to the room where the techs worked. Seconds later a ponytailed young woman in a lab jacket whisked through the door and nearly ran to Ava, who handed over bags of labeled tissue.

      “Stain and check these for hemorrhage, Branson. I’m also looking for differentiation between intravital and postmortem trauma. Look close.”

      “You found something?” I said.

      “Just a supposition,” she said, turning back to her work.

      After