I pushed the thoughts from my mind. There was nothing I could do to change the outcome for Garcia or Miranda, and there was no reason to burden Emert with my worries. “Okay,” I said, “so let’s talk strategy here. How do we get the saw out of the pool and into the trash can really quick?” I pointed to the swimming pool’s ladder. “That only goes halfway down the side of the pool, and you know that the concrete’s got to be slick as glass.”
“We’re way ahead of you, Doc,” he said. He pointed to the fence behind him. A long aluminum pole lay there, a lifeguard’s version of a shepherd’s crook. “We’ll just hook that through the guard bar,” he said, “and hoist it up. Rescue complete.”
A moment later, I nudged him. The curving, tubular guard bar of the saw came into view as the water receded. It was followed by the top of the saw’s orange casing, its brightness dulled considerably by a layer of slime.
The firefighter picked up the pole and threaded the crook through the guard bar. Spreading his feet wide for balance, he raised the pole with a hand-over-hand motion, almost as if he were reeling in a fish. As the saw cleared the edge of the pool, I took hold of it—slime and all—and unhooked it from the pole, then lowered it, engine first, into the clear water in the trash can. “The gods be praised,” I said.
“I’ll be damned,” Emert said.
I looked at him, puzzled, but he wasn’t addressing me. He was addressing the bottom of the pool, where the water, as it continued to recede, was revealing the unmistakable outline of another corpse. Protruding from its chest was the handle of a knife.
PART THREE
I feel we have blood on our hands.
—Robert Oppenheimer to President Harry S. Truman, October, 1945
Never mind. It’ll all come out in the wash.
—Truman’s response to Oppenheimer
CHAPTER 33
EMERT, THE FIREFIGHTER, AND I STARED DOWN AT the body in the pool, the knife jutting from the chest. The first thing Emert did—after letting a few more cusswords fly—was call Hank Strickland at REAC/TS and say, “You got that Geiger counter handy?” Evidently Hank did. “Could you come check out another body for us? I don’t want to turn another medical examiner into a human gamma detector.” Emert had his phone in one hand and his personal radiation monitor in the other. The chirper remained reassuringly quiet, even when Emert stretched it out over the pool.
Hank arrived fifteen minutes later. By then the parking lot was filling with police cars and fire trucks. “Have gadget, will travel,” Hank said.
“Your office is only two blocks away,” I said, pointing down the hill to the hospital. “You call that traveling?” Hank shrugged. “How come it took you fifteen minutes to travel two blocks?”
“I was in the middle of a very important email,” he said. “A chain letter, only it’s email. Break the chain, you’re in for seven years of bad luck.” He looked at the body in the pool. “Maybe this guy broke the chain.”
“I’d say a knife in the chest is more like seven seconds of bad luck,” I said.
“I’d say it’s more like bad karma,” Emert said. “Somebody catches a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting, that’s bad luck. Somebody catches a dagger in the left ventricle, that’s probably not so random.”
“So answer me this,” said Hank. “How come Novak’s body was frozen in the ice, but this guy sank to the bottom? And don’t tell me it’s because he had a chainsaw for an anchor. The chainsaw was a postmortem decorative accent, if the story I heard is true.” He grinned at me.
“True,” said Emert, “every word. Doc, you got a scientific explanation?”
“Maybe he’s got rocks in his pockets,” I said. “Or just denser bones. Novak was ninety-three, after all. His bones were probably pretty porous. But some people are floaters, and some are sinkers. I’ve got a friend who bobs like a cork, but I’m like a shark—if I don’t keep swimming, I sink to the bottom.”
Hank stretched the Geiger counter’s wand out over the edge of the pool; he set the detector for gamma radiation first, then beta, then alpha. The instrument emitted only the slow, comforting ticking I’d come to recognize as the sign of background radiation. Armed with that reassurance, he ventured down into the pool, with the help of a ladder off one of the fire trucks, and surveyed the body at close range. Satisfied that it posed no hazard, he climbed out.
Next to descend the ladder was Emert, who donned his coroner’s hat long enough to confirm that the man who’d been submerged for days or weeks with a knife in his heart was indeed dead. I couldn’t help thinking of the scene in The Wizard of Oz where the coroner in Munchkinland pronounces the witch crushed by Dorothy’s house to be “not only merely dead,” but “really most sincerely dead.”