At nine o’clock, they buzzed into the secure area behind the reception desk in the ME suite, and soon he was standing next to Rachel Levy in front of a portable cold storage chamber, a quad unit that held four bodies. The door on the top right was Grassley’s compartment. Cain looked behind him and nodded to Nagata. Then he took the evidence key from Dr. Levy and unlocked the chamber. He opened the door and rolled the cadaver tray out on its sliders. He and Jim Braun took the head, and Dr. Levy and Frank Lee took the feet. They moved Grassley’s tray onto the cart and rolled him into the autopsy suite.
Cain stood back with Nagata and Fischer and watched Dr. Braun pull the sheet off. The natural instinct, the human impulse, would be to turn away from the sight of his dead friend. But when the sheet came off, Cain didn’t even let himself blink.
Grassley was naked, his skin pale with death. His mouth was open and his tongue bulged out, as if he’d been choking for air as he died. His throat was cut from ear to ear, a toothless second mouth that opened beneath his chin. One of the morgue assistants had washed the body already, and the only blood was around the wound itself. The edges were clean, the layers of tissue visible. Cain didn’t need Dr. Levy to tell him that it had been an unusually sharp blade.
Next to him, Lieutenant Nagata took his hand, gripping it hard. He pressed back, and didn’t let go, but never took his eyes from Grassley. Dr. Levy was speaking into her hanging microphone, but he wasn’t listening. He looked at Grassley’s hands. There were no cuts or bruises on the knuckles, no blade slashes on his forearms or outer wrists. He hadn’t thrown any punches, hadn’t picked up a defensive wound fending off the knife. But on the right side of his neck, and on his shoulder, there were dozens of small cuts. Most of them had barely gone deep enough to draw blood.
Cain let go of Nagata’s hand and stepped around so that he was standing behind Grassley’s head.
“What are these?” he said, interrupting Dr. Levy’s narration of the surface examination.
She stepped back, then nodded at Jim Braun. He hit a switch on the wall, which paused the recorder.
“What were you pointing to?”
Cain pointed again at the clusters of blade marks on Grassley’s neck. Frank Lee came around and studied the cuts. He wrote something in his notebook, then flipped the page.
“These aren’t from a fight. They’re too shallow,” Frank Lee said. “And look at them—they’re parallel. All the blade marks are side by side.”
Grassley was Frank’s case now. They would pursue their investigations separately, and if they came together and landed on the same person, so much the better.
“Superficial pressure cuts,” Dr. Levy said.
“How’d they get there?”
“Hold a blade against your arm sometime. Press down, but don’t pull it back and forth. We’re not talking about a slicing wound.”
Fischer asked the next question for Cain.
“If a right-handed man was standing behind him, holding a knife on his neck—threatening, waving the blade around and then putting it back—you’d get marks like this?”
“Yes.”
“It was a hostage situation,” Fischer said. “Maybe even a standoff. Chun had the gun, and the guy had Grassley.”
“That must be it,” Frank said. He wrote something else in his notebook. “That’s what happened.”
“Can I start again?” Dr. Levy asked.
Cain nodded to Dr. Braun, and he hit the wall switch to resume the recording. Dr. Levy continued her surface examination, but Cain wasn’t paying attention anymore. There was something about the pressure wounds he didn’t like. They didn’t make sense, didn’t fit some piece of the story he’d been telling Fischer.
He was sure that he’d just hit on something important. But that kind of certainty never lasted long.
“Cain?” Fischer said. “Did you hear her?”
“What?”
“Back up,” she whispered. “She’s going to open him up now.”
He looked at her, not understanding at first. He was too far away from this, grasping too hard at the solution he thought he’d glimpsed. Then he saw Dr. Levy standing over Grassley with the autopsy saw, and he understood. He wasn’t wearing any protective gear. No lab coat over his suit, no safety glasses, no mask. They didn’t want him standing here when Dr. Levy put the blade against Grassley’s navel and started cutting.
When it was over, he went with Nagata and Fischer and they sat on a smoking bench that faced a chainlink fence and the San Francisco County Jail. None of them smoked, but that didn’t matter. They just needed to sit. A strong wind funneled between the jail and the Hall of Justice, and it carried a hard spatter of rain. That didn’t matter either.
“I’d like to go see Chun,” Cain said. “Can you get me in?”
“She’s not out of it yet.”
“But can you get me in?”
“I can try,” Nagata said.
“That’s all I want.”