The coolness was the first thing that hit him when Leo walked into the basement of the coroner’s office. That and the death smell. A lump rose in his throat even before the smell registered. He knew it was just his imagination, but Leo believed that he could actually taste the decay in the air. He walked through several swinging doors deeper and deeper into the morgue, until he found Vedder in the last autopsy room. Vedder stood hunched over the body of an elderly man. Leo couldn’t help but notice that the cadaver suffered from the same male-pattern baldness as he did, only the top of the cadaver’s bald skull was separated from the rest of him. He watched as Vedder pulled a dripping organ from the gaping hole in the cadaver’s chest and plopped it into the grooved scale that hung over the examining table. Leo felt the lump in his throat move up an inch or two. The scale always bothered him. It reminded him of the one in the butcher shop his mother used to drag him to when she did her Saturday shopping. In the butcher’s case, Leo would stare horrified at the tripe and cow’s tongue offered for sale. Occasionally, the butcher would have pig brains for sale behind the cold glass. And speaking of brains, it looked like that was what was going on Vedder’s scale next. Leo had to massage his throat to keep the gorge down.
“Hey, Travis, anything unusual on the Lee woman?”
Vedder put down his scalpel and picked up a foam cup with his bloody, gloved hand. He peeked out at Leo over the rims of his glasses and spat into the cup.
“Unusual? No.”
“What were your findings.”
“You can’t read?”
“Yes, despite the rumors, I can read. But I like hearing it from your smiling face.”
“It must really suck.”
“How’s that, Travis?”
“To have been the big man. And now you’re the little man. They won’t even let you read the autopsy reports. That must really suck.”
“Yeah, you know what, Travis? It does suck. It sucks like you wouldn’t believe. Thanks for reminding me. Oh, and by the way, fuck you.”
Leo turned to leave, his nausea momentarily eclipsed by his anger.
“Wait.”
Leo turned back to Vedder and followed the stoop-shouldered man to a wall of cadaver drawers. Vedder pulled out one of the drawers and unzipped the plastic body bag that held Rachel Lee’s corpse.
“So whadda ya wanna know?”
Leo looked down at the body. He could feel the coldness radiating off it. The absence of life.
“I want to know what happened.”
“She got hit on the head.”
“No kidding. I thought maybe she had a heart attack.”
Vedder spit into his cup and wiped a spidery thread of tobacco juice from his chin. Leo thought, I wonder if it’ll fuck up my image if I faint?
“Nope, impact to skull resulting in depressed fracture. Traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage.”
Vedder pulled a huge magnifying glass from his pocket and positioned it over the wound in Rachel Lee’s head.
“See this?”
Leo worked to steady his voice. “Yeah. It’s a great big gash in her head. So?”
“Look closer. Around the edges of the wound.”
Leo, very much against his better judgment, leaned in closer, and then, under the magnifying glass, he thought he could see faint threads of what could only be tiny shards of glass. “It’s glass. So?”
“Not glass, crystal. Very expensive crystal.”
“The kid hit her with a crystal ashtray. I know that already.”
“How am I supposed to know what you know and what you don’t know?”
“Well, what else can you tell me? Is there anything unusual? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“Generally speaking, I would say that being killed by a crystal ashtray is out of the ordinary.”
“Well, surely to God there’s more you can tell me than that.”
“Actually, there is. Stand back a little. Look at the wound as a whole.”
Leo did just that, but all he got for his efforts was a little sicker to his stomach. “What?”
“The angle, the degree, the location. What does it tell you?”
“That she got hit hard.”
“That whoever hit her, hit her from behind, was taller than she was, and was probably left-handed.”
“That’s not exactly a bloody glove.”
Vedder shrugged and spit into his cup. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”