“You want to redo the autopsy.”

“Who the hell is Tilberg?” Wingate said.

“Coroner.”

Deacon spoke over them both. “He’s going to want a reason, Hazel.”

“According to the reservation canvass, nobody saw Henry in the smoke shop. It wasn’t a service call, and he parked far away from the doors. He’s not even an occasional smoker; he’s got no business at all on the reserve. And he had a gambling problem once.”

“What?” Wingate yelped.

“A long time ago. But he stole money at that point. And, well, yesterday, Cathy showed me an envelope of cash. It wasn’t a sickening amount, but it was still fifty-five hundred.”

Wingate closed his right eye. The force of her will and her peculiar way of building evidence for a case was something to see. He understood why she’d driven Ray Greene crazy. And in the end you had to agree with her! There was no way you were going to make your own logic as internally consistent as hers. Supposedly this was “instinct.” He’d never really seen it. Too bad she wielded it like a mallet.

“So you think this is foul play?” came Jack’s voice, finally.

“Committed by whom?” said Wingate.

“A jealous husband. An angry creditor. Someone who felt they were getting the short end of a stick.”

“Armed with what? An angry bee? What’s the weapon?”

“That’s our job, Jack.”

Wingate was facing partially away from her as she continued to negotiate the reinvestigation of Henry Wiest’s body. After a few more exchanges, Deacon acquiesced to whatever Tilberg deemed necessary. It was never good karma to have to redo another doctor’s postmortem, but he would serve as requested. She pressed the button on the star-shaped console, and the doctor was cut off. She felt Wingate’s eyes on her.

“Something is wrong,” she said.

“Are you sure you’re not looking for a last hurrah or something?”

“I never had a first hurrah, James. Are you totally satisfied?”

“Well, what we know is that the band police, a respected institution, with well-trained officers, wrote a thorough report that covered all the bases. We know a wasp sting is not only possible but likely; we know there are no witnesses, there were no signs of a struggle, no contraband in Wiest’s car, no drugs or alcohol in his system, forty-five dollars in his wallet …”

She was smiling, listening to him. “I know.”

“But? Would you be doing this if you hadn’t known him?”

“I would have wondered about it, sure. But I might not have felt so strongly about ruling out foul play as I do in this case. I know there’s a chink in your armour, James. You can live with this.”

“I’m going to be on vacation, so it won’t matter.”

“That’s right. So go. Don’t let me make you any crazier.”

“Unless you’re right.”

“No, you go. I have all the resources I need. You need to recharge, James! Let yourself go for a week. You look a little drawn these days.”

“I am going, don’t worry. Just don’t cut me out of the loop if one starts forming.”

“You think this is the right thing to do, don’t you?”

“I’m on vacation.”

“You are the loop, James,” she called to him as he exited her office.

] 5 [

Wednesday, August 10, late morning

The following morning, Howard Spere showed up with a boyishly excited look on his face. He’d been dispatched as the intermediary between her office and the coroner’s, and now he was here with the papers. The label from a packet of grape jelly was stuck to the side of his suit jacket – Welch’s. She imagined him furtively trying to flick it from his fingertips to the floor in whatever diner he’d had breakfast in this morning, eyes out for the waitress. He was hanging on her doorknob, dangling a sheet of paper pinched between thumb and forefinger. “Did someone order a body?”

“You find this a cheerful business, Howard? I thought you knew Henry Wiest.”

“I did. In fact, I knew him well. He would have been pleased to know we were being thorough.”

“That’s what I thought. But would he have been pleased to know we now doubt the cause of his death?”

“Do we?” he asked.

“That’s why you’re bringing me those papers this morning.” She held her hand out for them. He passed them to her and she found the line her name had to go on and signed it there.

“What I meant –”

“I know what you mean, Howard. He deserves the truth.”

Spere left with the papers and she settled down to go through Tuesday’s reports. Maybe something unrelated would catch her eye and lead to a brilliant deduction, like it did in the movies. Kojak chomping on almonds and realizing the murderer had used cyanide. There were only three reports and there wasn’t a single interesting thing in any of them. A keyed car in Port Dundas, a stolen bike in Kehoe Glenn, a fight over a girl in a bar in Hoxley. Maybe Henry was murdered by a jealous husband who happened to have a thing for bikes. And hated Buicks.

She signed off on the files and closed them up. She’d seen a lot of dead people in her years. She’d seen things she would never be able to forget, including things she never wanted to talk about again. You had to have the talent to depersonalize when dealing with all the awful things that could happen or be done to a human body. But you could never separate yourself enough. Your body still responded, still felt a refractory pain. You could not witness the kind of dead she saw in her work and not want to help them if you could.

She went down to the funeral home in Kehoe Glenn with Spere and stood away from the drawers as they got Henry off of his metal bed and onto a gurney. She stared at a calendar on the wall of the cold room while she listened to the sound of plastic and zippers. There were three boys jumping off a dock in the picture. An innocent summer scene.

The body went to Mayfair. She got the call to come down in the early evening. Spere met her by the staff door beside Emergency, where they waited for ten minutes, watching a man sleeping on a gurney. He wore an oxygen mask. It looked soothing to have oxygen pumped into you, but that man did not look like he was having a pleasant experience. At least Henry was already dead. A secretary they’d never seen before led them down into the autopsy room. “What happened to Marianne?” Hazel asked.

“She went back to school.”

The new girl didn’t look like she could be older than twenty. She sashayed down the hall in front of them, and Hazel traded a look with Spere. “We didn’t come here to end up in the cardiac wing, Howard.”

The girl left them at the door to Autopsy and the two of them went in. Deacon was still in his scrubs. They could see Henry Wiest lying on his back on the metal table. Deacon pulled his mask down. “I think you’ll find this interesting,” he said, offering a hand that neither of them shook. He led them back to the table.

Hazel tried not to look at Henry’s face, but she couldn’t ignore the Y-shaped incision in his chest, which Deacon had reopened. The top of the man’s head was missing.

“So,” said Deacon, “they left everything in the cavity –”

“Like when you buy a chicken,” Spere said, and they both spared him a momentary glance.

“And?” said Hazel.

“And it was a heart attack. For sure.”

She exhaled, and it was relief, but Deacon wasn’t done.

“But it wasn’t a wasp sting that did it to him.”

He beckoned them to lean down to look close up at Henry’s face. He’d been stung once high on the cheek and once under the hairline. Deacon lay a gloved fingertip just below where they could see the sting mark on his cheek. It was a black dot, as black as if it had been made with a lead pencil.

Hazel leaned down closer and Spere nestled in beside her. “What kind of wasp leaves a black mark?” he said.

“Watch this,” said Deacon. He had a one-centimetre pin in his hand. “I got this off of the bulletin board in the staff room.” He leaned down, and with a gloved thumb and forefinger at the edges of the mark, he gently stretched the skin. The black dot expanded and they could see a thin, bloodless tunnel about half a millimetre wide descending into the dead man’s cheek. Deacon held the pin above the hole, his pinky against the top of Wiest’s eye socket to steady himself, and then he let it go. It dropped with no resistance into the wound almost all the way to its head, like a blade into a sheath. Then he withdrew the pin and held it under the light. It was completely clean.