“The dissecting ’scope? What for?”
“I didn’t ask and she didn’t tell,” said Peggy. “Just like the military’s policy on gays.”
“Great,” I said, “because hasn’t that approach worked well.”
Peggy’s mention of the morgue made me want to tell Garcia about my visit to the Latham farm, too, so instead of dialing the morgue and asking for Miranda or him, I hopped into my truck and dashed across the river to the rear of the hospital. Parking in the no-parking zone by the morgue’s loading dock, I punched the code to open the door, crossed the garagelike intake area, and threaded my way down the hall to the microscopy lab. The anthropology department had one dissecting ’scope—a stereoscopic microscope, with a micrometer-adjustable stage—but there was sometimes heavy competition for it, so I could understand why Miranda might have come over to use one of the three here at the morgue. She wasn’t in the lab, although I did see her backpack, sitting on a table beside one of the ’scopes. A small, U-shaped bone rested on the stage—a hyoid bone, from a throat—and I guessed Miranda was inspecting it for fractures, possible evidence of strangulation. I flipped on the microscope’s lamp and took a quick look myself. The arc of bone was smooth and unbroken, except by the tiny numerals “49-06,” inked on the bone in Miranda’s neat hand, signifying that the hyoid was from the forty-ninth body back in 2006. Number 49-06 had clearly not been strangled, which was both unsurprising and also somewhat reassuring, since this particular man’s body had been donated, if memory served, by his widow.
Figuring maybe Miranda had gone to the restroom, I went down the hall to Edelberto Garcia’s office to tell him the latest from the Latham case. His door was half open, so I knocked and leaned my head in.
Garcia was standing behind his desk, Miranda leaning over from the other side. On the desk between them, in a circle of light cast by a lamp, was a piece of paper. Miranda’s index finger was tracing a zigzag on the page, which I recognized as a map—the same map I’d seen on her computer monitor. When I walked in, she straightened and removed her hand from the map. She looked embarrassed, and for some reason that made me feel embarrassed, too.
“Oh, excuse me,” I said awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Hello, Bill,” said Garcia, making my name rhyme with “wheel.” “Come in. You’re not interrupting.”
But I was interrupting, I knew; I just couldn’t tell exactly what I was interrupting. “I was on my way to the research facility,” I said to him, “and I wanted to tell you a couple of new things about the Latham case.”
“Yes, please,” he said. “What is it?”
I told him about going out to the impound lot with Art and Darren Cash, and finding the bits of newspaper in the backseat. I also told him about my trip to the farm, and about finding the wire-cinched blob of material and the small oval of burned grass.
“That’s very interesting,” he said. But he didn’t seem as interested as I’d hoped he would. And I no longer felt as interested as I’d been when I bounded into the bone lab. I’d wanted to ask Miranda what she made of all of this, since she knew Stuart Latham, but this didn’t seem the right time or place. A silence hung in the air.
Finally Garcia said, “Was there anything else, Bill?”
“No,” I said, looking from his face to Miranda’s, then back again. “That was it. I’ll see you later.” I withdrew, then leaned partway back in. “Did you want this open or closed?” I heard something in my voice—an undertone of suspicion or hurt feelings—that I didn’t much like. I hoped neither of them heard it.
“Oh, open of course,” said Garcia smoothly.
I turned and retraced my steps down the hall, past the microscope lab, where Miranda’s open backpack still sat. It hadn’t moved, but it had changed—the map she was sharing with him had been printed in the bone lab, I felt sure, and brought to Garcia in the backpack. I drove back to the stadium feeling suddenly guilty and afraid. Afraid of what? I couldn’t have said, but a series of faces flashed in my mind’s eye: Miranda’s. Jess’s. Garland Hamilton’s. Stuart Latham’s. Edelberto Garcia’s. The faces of women I cared for—and men who threatened them, in reality or in my overactive imagination.
CHAPTER 12