“The burning satisfied a psychological need. There was also damage to the skull and the face. The postmortem will tell the full story.”

“When’s that?”

I looked at my watch. “Forty-seven minutes. We’ve got a ringside seat.”

She froze, eyes wide. “I’ve never, uh … do I have to be present?”

“I can go it alone, but one of us should be there.” I stood and shuffled the photos into my briefcase, clicked it shut. “I’ll get in contact later in the day and let you know what we found.”

Belafonte and I walked back through to the atrium where she went her way, me mine. I had no ill feelings toward Belafonte for leaving me alone with the post. Harry hadn’t cared much for the procedure himself, part of our division of labors: I took the bulk of the autopsies, and Harry handled the majority of courtroom work, testifying in cases we’d worked. It was a perfect division since he resembled a mustached James Earl Jones down to a bass rumble of a voice and, when it came to resembling actors, I’d been more often aligned with Jason Bateman. My courtroom testimony tended to meander into concept and supposition, while Harry’s sounded like a pronouncement from Zeus.

And, truth be told, I liked to look into the machinery that was us, the bags and tubes and glistening orbs of multicolored meats that formed our engineering. I was fascinated by the intricacy of the systems and at the same time awed that this assemblage of material – not much different from the systems that powered pigs and cattle – had managed to create glorious paintings, send men to the moon, discover subtle mathematics, build towering structures, create majestic symphonies … There was something different in the us. I had no idea what it was, but suspected we contained more than complex chemical engineering in bipedal configuration.

Those weren’t, however, my thoughts as I pulled into the morgue lot, the sun high in a sky of scudding cumulus, the advance ranks of a nearing shower; I was thinking only of a dark cocoon found on a lonely strand of beach, stinking of scorched meat and chemical accelerant and sending some poor beachcomber screaming back to his hotel, pausing only to vomit in the sand.

Dr Ava Davanelle was on duty and I found her preparing in an autopsy suite, pulling the blue gown into place. The body was on the table, a mosaic of red flesh mingled with char, the burning uneven. Ava looked up, saw me, registered surprise.

“I thought I’d see someone from Miami-Dade.”

“They’re busy.”

It took two beats to register. “Menendez,” she said.

“The cops are running full-tilt boogie.”

“I met Ms Menendez a couple months ago at a city-county function. She seemed both smart and sweet, a lovely person.”

“She had a lot of friends,” I said, looking down at the corpse. “But this girl had very few, I think.”

“But she now has you,” Dr Davanelle said quietly, picking up a wicked-looking scalpel. I walked to a chair against the white wall and sat. My history with Ava Davanelle had started a dozen years ago in Mobile, where she had been my girlfriend, a newbie pathologist with lyrical hands and a fierce addiction to alcohol. She was drawn into a case I was working and almost killed. Ava had also met my brother Jeremy back then, when he was incarcerated at the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior and being studied by Dr Evangeline Prowse, who was fascinated by my brother’s brilliance.

Time and events travel roads we can never suppose. Jeremy had escaped from the Institute years ago, placed on every Wanted listing between Mexico City and Nome, Alaska. Last year a man of Jeremy’s height and weight had been pulled from a river in Chicago, the corpse’s DNA matching my brother’s. He was now dead and long gone from the listings.

Or maybe not.

In reality, my brother – after a lengthy hiding-out period in an isolated cabin in the Kentucky mountains – was now living in a huge house in Key West and picking stocks based on a simple but bizarre equation developed during his years in hiding: The financial market had but two true states, scared child or blustering drunkard, all else just states of transition.

He’d made millions from his insight.

And the DNA sample taken from the corpse in Chicago? It had been supplied by the pathologist performing the autopsy, one Dr Ava Davanelle, who had been my brother’s secret girlfriend for years, though both Jeremy and Ava disdained the characterization, saying their relationship was far more complex.

“Interesting,” I heard Ava say, looking up as she leaned over a resected section of upper arm, the bicep splayed open as she studied through a magnifying lens. She cued a communications link to the room where the techs worked. Seconds later a ponytailed young woman in a lab jacket whisked through the door and nearly ran to Ava, who handed over bags of labeled tissue.

“Stain and check these for hemorrhage, Branson. I’m also looking for differentiation between intravital and postmortem trauma. Look close.”

“You found something?” I said.

“Just a supposition,” she said, turning back to her work.

After an hour – Ava slicing, weighing organs and calling for more tests – I went outside to breathe an atmosphere not thick with the smell of death and antiseptic. The rain had passed though, leaving only small patches of cloud in the eastern sky, clear blue above. In the distance the jagged Miami skyline seemed to glisten in the renewed air and I walked the grounds and the nearby streets for an hour, grabbing a coffee from a street vendor and sipping it beneath a tall King palm in a tiny streetside park, the fronds swaying and rattling against one another.

When I returned, Ava was closing the body, the heavy stitches straight from Frankenstein. The top of Kylie Sandoval’s head lay beside her on the table.

“Well?” I said.

Ava replaced the bowl of skull as she spoke. “I’ve identified four sites struck by a blunt instrument, two on the head, two on the body. I suspect it was one of these blows that broke her nose, another that shattered the left temple, creating intercranial hemorrhaging. I think I’ll find more.”

Ava shed the gown and mask and I followed her to her office, utilitarian, shelves of medical and forensics texts and a simple desk and chair. There was a single large painting on one wall behind her desk, a streetscape of Key West in thick swaths of impasto oil, the houses dark and hunkered shapes, the twilight sky dappled with fierce strokes of orange and red, one slender palm bridging earth and sky, as still as a patch of paint can be, yet somehow moving within the frame of the picture.

It was a stunning work and my brother had painted it, claiming his move to Key West had brought out his artistic side. I had never been able to fathom the inside of his head, and his sudden ability to paint further scrambled my understanding.

Ava studied her notes. “I need analysis from other tissue samples before I confirm my suspicions of multiple trauma sites. Should take a few hours, same with the tox screens, and I’ll call you with the results. They might be quite interesting.”

9

I was crossing the parking lot when my phone rang: Belafonte.

“Can we speak?” she said.

“We are.”

“I mean … meet somewhere? I really need to talk to you, hopefully today.”

“Where are you?”

“Flagami, tracking down information on Kylie.”

“Gimme an address. Preferably a bar where I can get a decent beer.”

“I’m, uh, in uniform.”

“Go home,” I told her. “And await further instructions.”

I hung up and pressed the fifth number down on my speed dial. Three rings.

“Carson, what’s up?” Vince Delmara. He sounded beat.

“What did you do to me, Vince?”

“Belafonte? She’s all I could find, Carson. Really. Every detective or soon-to-be detective is beating the streets on Menendez. Did you see any news show last night? All they talked about was lack of progress. We’re in crash-and-burn mode here.”