“Where are the janitors?” Jack asked.
“In the pit last time I looked,” Marvin asked. “Seriously, what’s up?”
“An identity crisis,” Jack quipped.
Jack led the others to the autopsy room and cracked the door. Marvin had been right. Both janitors were busy mopping the expansive terrazzo floor.
“I assume you guys have keys to the chiefs office,” Jack said.
“Yeah, sure,” Daryl Foster said. Daryl had been working for the medical examiner’s office for almost thirty years. His partner, Jim O’Donnel, was a relatively new employee.
“We’ve got to get in there,” Jack said. “Would you mind opening it?”
Daryl hesitated. “The chiefs kind’a sensitive about people being in his office,” he said.
“I’ll take responsibility,” Jack said. “This is an emergency. Besides we have Lieutenant Detective Soldano with us from the police department, who will keep our thievery to a minimum.”
“I don’t know,” Daryl said. He was obviously uncomfortable, as well as unimpressed, with Jack’s humor.
“Then give me the key,” Jack said. He stuck out his hand. “That way you won’t be involved.”
With obvious reluctance, Daryl removed two keys from his key chain and handed them to Jack. “One’s for the outer office, and one is for Dr. Bingham’s inner office.”
“I’ll have them back for you in five minutes,” Jack said.
Daryl didn’t respond.
“I think the poor guy was intimidated,” Lou commented as the three rose up to the first floor in the elevator.
“Once Jack is on a mission, look out!” Laurie said.
“Bureaucracy irks me,” Jack said. “There’s no excuse for the X ray to be squirreled away in the chiefs office in the first place.”
Jack opened the front office’s outer door and then Dr. Bingham’s inner door. He turned on the lights.
The office was large, with a big desk beneath high windows to the left and a large library table to the right. Teaching paraphernalia, including a blackboard and an X-ray view box, were at the head of the table.
“Where should we look?” Laurie asked.
“I was hoping they’d just be on that view box,” Jack said. “But I don’t see them. I tell you what, I’ll take the desk and the file cabinet, you look around the view box.”
“Fine,” Laurie said.
“What do you want me to do?” Lou asked.
“You just stand there and make sure we don’t steal anything,” Jack scoffed.
Jack pulled out several of the file drawers, but closed them quickly. The full-body X rays that were taken by the morgue came in large folders. It wasn’t something easily hidden.
“This looks promising,” Laurie called out. She’d found a stash of X rays in the cabinet directly under the view box. Lifting the folders out onto the library table, she scanned the names. She found Franconi’s and pulled them free of the others.
Returning to the basement level, Jack got the X rays of the floater and took both folders back to the autopsy room. He gave Bingham’s office keys to Daryl and thanked him. Daryl merely nodded.
“Okay, everybody!” Jack said walking over to the view box. “The critical moment has arrived.” First he slipped up Franconi’s X rays and then the headless floater’s.
“What do you know,” Jack said after only a second’s inspection. “I owe Laurie five dollars!”
Laurie gave a cry of triumph, as Jack gave her the money. Lou scratched his head and leaned closer to the light box to stare at the films. “How can you guys tell so quickly?” he asked.
Jack pointed out the lumpy shadows of the bullets almost obscured by the mass of shotgun pellets in the floater’s X rays and showed how they corresponded to the bullets on the Franconi films. Then he pointed to identical healed clavicular fractures that appeared on the X rays of the two bodies.
“This is great,” Lou said, rubbing his hands together with enthusiasm that almost matched Laurie’s. “Now that we have a corpus delicti, we might be able to make some headway in this case.”
“And I’ll be able to figure out what the hell’s going on concerning this guy’s liver,” Jack said.
“And maybe I’ll go on a shopping spree with my money,” Laurie said, giving the five-dollar bill a kiss. “But not until I figure out the how and the why this body left here in the first place.”
Unable to sleep despite having taken two sleeping pills, Raymond slipped out of bed so as not to disturb Darlene. Not that he was terribly worried. Darlene was such a sound sleeper that the ceiling could fall in without her so much as moving.
Raymond padded into the kitchen and turned on the light. He wasn’t hungry but he thought that perhaps a little warm milk might help to settle his roiling stomach. Ever since the shock of having been forced to view the terrible sight in the trunk of the Ford, he’d been suffering with heartburn. He’d tried Maalox, Pepcid AC, and finally Pepto-Bismol. Nothing had helped.
Raymond was not handy in the kitchen, mainly because he didn’t know where anything was located. Consequently, it took him some time to heat the milk and find an appropriate glass. When it was ready, he carried it into his study and sat at his desk.
After taking a few sips, he noticed that it was three-fifteen in the morning. Despite the fuzziness in his brain from the sleeping pills, he was able to figure out that at the Zone it was after nine, a good time to call Siegfried Spallek.
The connection was almost instantaneous. At that hour, phone traffic with North America was at a minimum. Aurielo answered promptly and put Raymond through to the director.
“You are up early,” Siegfried commented. “I was going to call you in four or five hours.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Raymond said. “What’s going on over there? What’s the problem with Kevin Marshall?”
“I believe the problem is over,” Siegfried said. Siegfried summarized what had happened and gave credit to Bertram Edwards for alerting him about Kevin so that he could be followed. He said that Kevin and his friends had been given such a scare that they wouldn’t dare go near the island again.
“What do you mean ‘friends’?” Raymond asked. “Kevin has always been such a loner.”
“He was with the reproductive technologist and one of the surgical nurses,” Siegfried said. “Frankly, even that surprised us since he’s always been such a schlemiel, or what do you Americans call such a socially inept person?”
“A nerd,” Raymond said.
“That’s it,” Siegfried said.
“And presumably the stimulus for this attempted visit to the island was the smoke that’s been bothering him?”
“That’s what Bertram Edwards says,” Siegfried said. “And Bertram had a good idea. We’re going to tell Kevin that we’ve had a work crew our there building a bridge over the stream that divides the island in two.”
“But you haven’t,” Raymond said.
“Of course not,” Siegfried said. “The last work crew we had out there was when we built the landing for the extension bridge to the mainland. Of course, Bertram had some people there when he moved those hundred cages out there.”
“I don’t know anything about cages on the island,” Raymond said. “What are you talking about?”
“Bertram has been lobbying lately to give up on the island isolation idea,” Siegfried said. “He thinks that the bonobos should be brought to the animal center and somehow hidden.”
“I want them to stay on the island,” Raymond said emphatically. “That was the agreement I worked out with GenSys. They could shut the program down if we bring the animals in. They’re paranoid about publicity.”
“I know,” Siegfried said. “That’s exactly what I told Bertram. He understands but wants to leave the cages there just in case. I don’t see any harm in that. In fact, it is good to be prepared for unexpected contingencies.”