“He the one?” Serge’s big eyes, behind his black-framed glasses, were wide. “Make sure, Aimée.”
She steeled herself and looked down. Flaps of the peeled-back scalp were draped over a portion of the exposed base of the skull. Beside the head, a blue bucket held the brain. The Serb’s back was white as aspirin but his arms were covered with blue tattoos. Crudely needled Cyrillic letters. “I’d recognize that tattoo with the wolf anywhere.” And she wished she hadn’t.
A tag hung over the dirt-ridged nail of his big toe: FELIKS.
“I hadn’t started the autopsy yet when you called. So I drew blood prior to opening him up,” Serge said. “I sent it for an expedited analysis, ran tests for the usual drugs of choice: opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, and alcohol.” He consulted the clipboard again. “A slow day, so for once they expedited the tests. All negative.”
“So he wasn’t high or stoned?”
Serge shook his head. “Notice those incisions I made in the neck and vertebrae. Not the optimal way to remove the spinal cord.” He shrugged. “But a way to look for subtle injuries to his neck.” Serge pushed his glasses on his forehead, moved forceps out of the way. “But I found nothing.”
Was that good? Or bad?
“You want the good news first?”
Hopeful, she nodded. “You found something else in the blood test, Serge?”
“First, explain your interest in this tattooed Serb, Aimée,” he said. “And why I’m helping you out again.”
“Saj ran over this Feliks,” she said, motioning to the toe tag. “Killed him, or so the flics think. I’m not so sure.”
Serge moved the scalpels and knives to the next cutting board. “A little difficult to argue, given the tire tracks on his fractured arm.”
“But the lack of blood bothered me,” she said. “And his expression—blank, even as he hit the windshield. Seemed so strange.” She made herself look down again at the scraped, tattooed torso. “Sounds stupid, since my closest experience to seeing someone get run over by a car was a rabbit René ran over near Charles de Gaulle once.”
“A rabbit?” He lifted his arm. “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”
The whole scenario from last night smelled, and she needed to air it out. “Can’t you give me the autopsy results now, Serge? I need ammo to shove in the flics’ faces to clear Saj.”
“Clear him?”
Why did he pretend not to understand? His pager buzzed. After a quick glance he shook his head. “I’ve got to make a call. Let me get back to you later.”
“Saj could sit in garde à vue under suspicion for involuntary homicide while.…” She took a deep breath. A nauseating sickish-sweet filled her nostrils. Bad move.
“What if I throw in overnight babysitting, chez moi? You know, twelve uninterrupted hours of freedom for you and your wife.” He wouldn’t be able to turn that down. But she didn’t own a TV. Somehow she’d figure out how to entertain the twins. Or take them to Martine’s.
Serge set the autopsy report down near the bucket containing the liver. “Make it quick. You were pre-med—figure it out yourself. And I never did this, compris?”
After the door closed, she picked up the clipboard and concentrated on trying to decipher the autopsy-ese:
1. Right forearm fracture, with relatively little hemorrhage.
2. Abrasions on front and back torso, arms, face consistent with scraping on street cobbles, again relatively bloodless.
3. In terms of the head, no hemorrhages beneath the scalp, skull fractures, or collections of blood around the brain—epidural, subdural and subarachnoid hemorrhages, or contusions of the brain itself. No lacerations in the ponto-medullary junction where one might expect.
She looked up as Serge entered.
“Zut alors, we ran over a dead man?”
Serge gave a small nod.
What the hell had happened? What had they gotten into? Between this news and the nauseating smells, her knees went weak. She grabbed at the table. Felt the corpse’s leather-cold flesh, gasped and let go.
Serge cleaned his glasses with the edge of his lab coat. “The medic reports the victim was still warm upon resuscitation attempts, no rigor mortis or lividity until later. His heart could have stopped anywhere from five minutes to an hour before.”
He turned the corpse over.
Aimée stared down at those half-lidded eyes. They looked exactly as they had when pressed against the windshield in front of her. Dead. “That accounts for his expression. No look of pain. No blood from the cuts on his face.”
Serge pointed his ballpoint pen at the pale bruise on the Serb’s shoulder. “I’d say he bounced off the windshield here. After he landed, his arm was run over, as the fracture indicates.”
“But if Feliks the Serb was already dead, how could he fall in front of the car?”
“Good question. The whole thing bothers me. Let’s look at the prelim crime scene photos.” Serge rustled through a folder. “This one shows the angle. Do you recall any parked cars, a tree, a motorcycle—anything he could have fallen off of?”
“It happened so fast, although it felt like slow motion at the time.” She studied the photos. The position of René’s Citro?n. “A white van pulled ahead of us.…” Her index finger stabbed at the photo. “Here. If the Serb was standing between this parked truck and this motorcycle.…” She paused to think for a moment. “He could have caught his sleeve on the truck’s side mirror. For reasons unknown, his heart stopped. Then the car’s vibrations on the cobbles caused him.…”
“To fall.” Serge nodded. “His accumulated weight could have torn his jacket pocket, and he landed as you drove by.”
Serge pointed to the photo of the body on the cobbles. The ripped jean jacket pocket.