“Did you find any anal tearing?” I asked the nurse.

“When I did a rectal temperature I didn't notice any tears, and no one noticed anything unusual about his mouth or throat when he was intubated. I also checked for old fractures and bruises.”

“What about tattoos?”

“Tattoos?” she asked as if she'd never seen a tattoo.

“Tattoos, birthmarks, scars. Anything that someone may have removed for some reason,” I said.

“I have no idea,” the nurse said dubiously.

“I'll go ask his parents.”

Trent wiped sweat from his forehead.

“They may have gone to the cafeteria.”

“I'll find them,” he said as he passed through the doorway.

“What are his doctors saying?” I asked the nurse.

“He's very critical and unresponsive.”

She stated the obvious without emotion.

“May I see where the bullet went in?” I asked.

She loosened the edges of the bandage around his head and pushed the gauze up until I could see the tiny black hole, charred around the edges. The wound was through his right temple and slightly forward.

“Through the frontal lobe?”

I asked.

“Yes.”

“They've done an angio?”

“There's no circulation to the brain, due to the swelling. There's no electroencephalic activity, and when we put cold water in his ears there was no caloric activity. It evoked no brain potentials.”

She stood on the other side of the bed, gloved hands by her sides and expression dispassionate as she continued to relate the various tests conducted and maneuvers instigated to decrease intracranial pressure. I had paid my dues in ERs and ICUs and knew very well that it is easier to be clinical with a patient who has never been awake. And Eddie Heath would never be awake. His cortex was gone. That which made him human, made him think and feel, was gone and was never coming back. He had been left with vital functions, left with a brain stem. He was a breathing body with a beating heart maintained at the moment by machines.

I began looking for defense injuries. Concentrating on getting out of the way of his lines, I was unaware I was holding his hand until he startled me by squeezing mine. Such reflex movements are not uncommon in people who are cortically dead. It is the equivalent of a baby grabbing your finger, a reflex involving no thought process at all. I gently released his hand and took a deep breath, waiting for the ache in my heart to subside.

“Did you find anything?” the nurse asked.

“It's hard to look with all these lines,” I said.

She replaced his dressings and pulled the sheet up to his chin. I took off my gloves and dropped them in the trash as Detective Trent returned, his eyes a little wild.

“No tattoos,” he said breathlessly, as if he had sprinted to the cafeteria and back. “No birthmarks or scars, either.”

Moments later we were walking to the parking deck. The sun slipped in and out, and tiny snowflakes were blowing. I squinted as I stared into the wind at heavy traffic on Forest Avenue. A number of cars had Christmas wreaths affixed to their grilles.

“I think you'd better prepare for the eventuality of his death,” I said.

“If I'd known that, I wouldn't have bothered you to come out. Damn, it's cold.”

“You did exactly the right thing. In several days his wounds would have changed.”

“They say all of December's going to be like this. Cold as hell and a lot of snow.”

He stared down at the pavement. “You have kids?”

“I have a niece,” I said.

“I've got two boys. One of 'em's thirteen.”

I got out my keys. “I'm over here,” I said.

Trent nodded, following me. He watched in silence as I unlocked my gray Mercedes. His eyes took in the details of the leather interior as I got in and fastened my seat belt. He looked the car up and down as if appraising a gorgeous woman.

“What about the missing skin?” he asked. “You ever seen anything like that?”

“It's possible we're dealing with someone predisposed to cannibalism,” I said.

I returned to the office and checked my mailbox, initialed a stack of lab reports, filled a mug with the liquid tar left in the bottom of the coffeepot, and spoke to no one. Rose appeared so quietly as I seated myself behind my desk that I would not have noticed her immediately had she not placed a newspaper clipping on top of several others centering the blotter.

“You look tired,” she said. “What time did you come in this morning? I got here and found coffee made and you had already gone out somewhere.”

“Henrico's got a tough one,” I said. “A boy who probably will be coming in.”

'Eddie Heath.”

“Yes,” I said, perplexed. “How did you know?”

“He's in the paper, too,” Rose replied, and I noticed that she had gotten new glasses that made her patrician face less haughty.

“I like your glasses,” I said. “A big improvement over the Ben Franklin frames perched on the end of your nose. What did it say about him?”

“Not much. The article just said that he was found off Patterson and that he had been shot. If my son were still young, no way I'd let him have a paper route.”

“Eddie Heath was not delivering papers when he was assaulted.”

“Doesn't matter. I wouldn't permit it, not these days. Let's see.”

She touched a finger to the side of her nose. “Fielding's downstairs doing an autopsy and Susan's off delivering several brains to MCV for consultation. Other than that, nothing happened while you were out except the computer went down.”

“Is it still down?”

“I think Margaret's working on it and is almost done,” Rose said.

“Good. When it's up again, I need her to do a search for me. Codes to look for would be cutting, mutilation, cannibalism, bite marks. Maybe a free-format search for the words excised, skin, fresh - a variety of combination of them. You might try dismemberment, too, but I don't think that's what we're really after.”

“For what part of the state and what time period?” Rose took notes.

“All of the state for the past five years. I'm particularly interested in cases involving children, but let's not restrict ourselves to that. And ask her to see what the Trauma Registry's got. I spoke with the director at a meeting last month and he seemed more than willing for us to share data.”

“You mean you also want to check victims who have survived?”

“If we can, Rose. Let's check everything to see if we find any cases similar to Eddie Heath's.”

“I'll tell Margaret now and see if she can get started,” my secretary said on her way out.

I began going through the articles she had clipped from a number of morning newspapers. Unsurprisingly, much was being made of Ronnie Waddell's allegedly bleeding from “his eyes, nose, and mouth.”

The local chapter of Amnesty International was claiming that his execution was no less inhumane than any homicide. A spokesman for the ACLU stated that the electric chair “may have malfunctioned, causing Waddell to suffer terribly,” and went on to compare the incident to the execution in Florida in which synthetic sponges used for the first time had resulted in the condemned man's hair catching fire.

Tucking the news stories inside Waddell's file, I tried to anticipate what pugilistic rabbits his attorney, Nicholas Grueman, would pull out of his hat this time. Our confrontations, though infrequent, had become predictable. His true agenda, I was about to believe, was to impeach my professional competence and in general make me feel stupid. But what bothered me most was that Grueman gave no indication that he remembered I had once been his student at Georgetown. To his credit, I had despised my first year of law school, had made my only B, and missed out on Law Review. l would never forget Nicholas Grueman as long as I lived, and it did not seem right that he should have forgotten me.

I heard from him on Thursday, not long after I had been informed that Eddie Heath was dead.