'I command more than six hundred people who wear guns in this violent town of yours. I know why I do what I do, Dr. Scarpetta. I do it because I had no power when I was a boy. I lived with people who had no power and learned that all the evil I heard preached about in church was rooted in the abuse of this one thing I did not have.'
The tempo and choreography of the snow had not changed. I watched it slowly cover the hood of his car.
'Colonel Tucker,' I said, 'it is Christmas Eve and Sheriff Santa has allegedly just shot someone to death in Whitcomb Court. The media must be going crazy. What do you advise?'
'I will be up all night at headquarters. I will make sure your building is patrolled. Would you like an escort home?'
'I would imagine that Marino will give me a ride, but certainly I will call if I think an additional escort is necessary. You should be aware that this predicament is further complicated by the fact that Brown hates me, and now I will be an expert witness in his case.'
'If only all of us could be so lucky.'
'I do not feel lucky.'
'You're right.' He sighed. 'You shouldn't feel lucky, for luck has nothing to do with it.'
'My case is here,' I said as the ambulance pulled into the lot, lights and sirens silent, for there is no need to rush when transporting the dead.
'Merry Christmas, Chief Scarpetta,' Tucker said as I got out of his car.
I entered through a side door and pressed a button on the wall. The bay door slowly screeched open, and the ambulance rumbled inside. Paramedics flung open the tailgate. They lifted the stretcher and wheeled the body up a ramp as I unlocked a door that led inside the morgue.
Fluorescent lighting, pale cinder block and floors gave the corridor an antiseptic ambience that was deceptive. Nothing was sterile in this place. By normal medical standards, nothing was even clean.
'Do you want him in the fridge?' one of the squad members said to me.
'Do you want him in the fridge?' one of the squad members said to me.
'No. You can wheel him into the X-ray room.' I unlocked more doors, the stretcher clattering after me, leaving drips of blood on tile.
'You going solo tonight?' asked a paramedic who looked Latin.
'I'm afraid so.'
I opened a plastic apron and slipped it over my head, hoping Marino would show up soon. In the locker room, I fetched a green surgical gown off a shelf. I pulled on shoe covers and two pairs of gloves.
'Can we help you get him on the table?' a paramedic asked.
'That would be terrific.'
'Hey, guys, let's get him on the table for the Doc.'
'Sure thing.'
'Shoot, this pouch is leaking, too. We gotta get some new ones.'
'Which way do you want his head to go?'
'This end for the head.'
'On his back?'
'Yes,' I said. 'Thank you.'
'Okay. One-two-three heave.'
We lifted Anthony Jones from the stretcher to the table, and one of the paramedics started to unzip the pouch.
'No, no, leave him in,' I said. 'I'll X-ray him through it.'
'How long will it take?'
'Not long.'
'You're going to need some help moving him again.'
'I'll take all the help I can get,' I told them.
'We can hang around a few more minutes. Were you really going to do all this alone?'
'I'm expecting someone else.'
A little later, we moved the body into the autopsy suite and I undressed it on top of the first steel table. The paramedics left, returning the morgue to its usual sounds of water running into sinks and steel instruments clattering against steel. I attached the victim's films to light boxes where the shadows and shapes of his organs and bones brightly bared their souls to me. Bullets and their multitude of ragged pieces were lethal snowstorms in liver, lungs, heart and brain. He had an old bullet in his left buttock and a healed fracture of his right humerus. Mr. Jones, like so many of my patients, had died the way he had lived.
I was making the Y-incision when the buzzer sounded in the bay. I did not pause. The security guard would take care of whoever it was. Moments later I heard heavy footsteps in the corridor, and Marino walked in.
'I would've got here sooner but all the neighbors decided to come out and watch the fun.'
'What neighbors?' I looked quizzically at him, scalpel poised midair.
'This drone's neighbors in Whitcomb Court. We were afraid there was going to be a friggin' riot. Word went down he was shot by a cop, and then it was Santa who whacked him, and next thing there's people crawling out of cracks in the sidewalk.'
Marino, still in dress uniform, took off his coat and draped it over a chair. 'They're all gathered around with their two-liter bottles of Pepsi, smiling at the television cameras. Friggin' unbelievable.' He slid a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket.