Garcia leaned down and peered at the left shoulder, where the collarbone and the shoulder blade had once been connected to the humeral head, the ball at the upper end of the arm. The tissue there had softened and decayed, but not so badly as to erase the original contours of the cut. “Bill,” he said to me,
“could you take a probe and some pickups and expose more of that joint, please?” It pained me that he needed to ask someone to do a simple maneuver that would normally have been an automatic, five-second move for him. “The arms have been severed quite cleanly,” Garcia observed. He looked at the hip joints—more difficult to cut cleanly, because of the tendon that anchored the ball of the hip into the socket. “This amputation was the work of a professional,” he said. “It could have been done by a physician or a medical student. Or maybe,” he added, his eyes looking at me with a sparkle I hadn’t seen since his injury, “an anthropology professor who has a hidden dark side.”
“Ha,” said Miranda. “Who says it’s hidden?”
AFTER WE’D POKED AND PRODDEDat Willoughby’s torso to the satisfaction of Garcia, I turned to Culpepper. “Okay if I pull a couple of teeth now for DeVriess’s DNA test?”
Culpepper shrugged. “Dr. Garcia, do you see any reason why not?” Garcia shook his head. “Go ahead,”
said the detective. “I’d hate to stand between a plaintiff’s attorney and his money—it’s like standing between a dog and a steak bone.”
Willoughby’s lips had been glued together and his jaw sewn shut. Using a scalpel, I slit the lips open and cut the sutures. It took some digging to reach the stitches, as the embalmer had plumped the corpse’s cheeks with mortuary putty, which by now had hardened to the consistency of plaster. Once I’d managed to wrestle the mandible open, I pulled two molars, using a pair of slip-joint pliers whose ridged jaws I cushioned with a bit of paper toweling. Then, with a Stryker autopsy saw, I notched a chunk of bone from the hip. I swabbed the teeth and bone samples with disinfectant and sealed them in a padded FedEx envelope, which I tucked inside a FedEx mailer addressed to GeneTrax, a Dallas DNA lab. By the time I’d packed the samples and dropped the package at the forensic center’s front desk, Culpepper was antsy to head back to KPD. I walked with him to the loading-dock door, where he’d parked, then detoured to the front desk, where I left the Fed Ex envelope with Amy, the receptionist. I met Garcia and Miranda in the hallway; Miranda was pushing the wheelchair, but it was empty, and Garcia was walking.
He seemed reluctant to leave the forensic center and head back upstairs to his hospital room, and I couldn’t blame him for that. Down here in the basement, he was an authoritative professional; up there, despite the deference he received from the hospital staff, he was just a patient. Either place, his injuries were the same, but down here the trauma was incidental to his identity; up there the traumawas his identity. He was a patient, defined as—and reduced to—“the hand-trauma case in 718.”
He invited Miranda and me into his office. Settling weakly into the swiveling leather armchair behind the desk, he said, “Please,” and nodded to the two wing chairs that faced it. We sat. “Would you like something to drink? Perhaps coffee or tea?” We both declined quickly—too quickly, apparently, because he smiled sadly and said, “Please don’t stop using your hands just because you’re with me.” His forearms had been resting on the arms of his chair, slightly below the level of the desktop, but now he shifted them to the desktop and stared at their ravaged ends. “I can say this to you only because you are my friends. It makes me feel more conspicuous if you act incapable of picking up a coffee cup or pushing a button. That makes me feel almost as if I’m contagious—as if I’ve infected and destroyed your hands, too.”
“I’m sorry, Eddie,” Miranda said. Leaning forward, she reached across the desk and gently squeezed his left elbow. “Thank you for telling us.” He smiled again, not as sadly. “Is there anything else we can do that would be helpful,” she asked, “besides, you know, not acting weird?”
“As a matter of fact, there is.” With the two fingers that remained on his right hand, he gestured at the computer occupying a table to one side of the desk. “If one of you wouldn’t mind navigating the Web, I’d like to show you some sites I’ve been looking at. I’d show you myself, but I’m very slow on the keys, pecking with just one finger.”
“That would be Miranda’s department,” I said. “I’d be as slow as you.” As soon as I heard the words, I wished I could reel them back in, but when Miranda snorted and Garcia laughed softly, I relaxed. Miranda moved to a rolling stool parked in front of the computer. As she swiveled into position in front of the keyboard, she made a big show of interlacing her fingers and cracking her knuckles. Then she rubbed her hands briskly together and wiggled her fingers rapidly. “At your service. What’s your wish?”