When we arrived at the department, Tom Mason whistled me to his office. “You can come along, too, Harry,” Tom added.

I sat, Harry stood. “Got us a li’l problem here,” Tom said, looking at me.

“Which is?”

Tom picked up a sheet from his desk, put on reading glasses. “A woman name of Vernia Teasdale and a Mr Jameson Daniels signed a complaint avowing that, lacking proper cause, you entered their domicile yesterday and broke camera equipment, a table, and caused them to be in fear of their lives. They say you scared them so much they locked themselves in the bathroom until you left.”

I shook my head. “Teasdale is the mama of Terry Lee Bailes, the guy who tried to abduct the baby at the hospital,” I explained. “I was there to inform Mrs Teasdale of the death of her son. She became emotional. The man with her didn’t like me causing her distress. They were shooting a porn movie or performing for an internet audience when I arrived. A marijuana roach was found on the premises – seen when the door was open, proper cause. The aforementioned man took offense at my ability to arrest him. There was a small scuffle. Objects fell.”

“No one was arrested because of…?” Tom asked.

“I didn’t want to place the woman under any more emotional duress, Tom. She was having a tough day, her son dead and all.”

Tom studied a pair of rap sheets. “Both of ’em got records, low-life stuff: misdemeanor dope busts and three DUIs on Teasdale, Daniels has grand theft auto, second-degree assault. It’ll turn into your word against theirs, and the judge’ll throw their charges out like a week-old biscuit. I don’t see a problem here, do I?”

“Nope,” I said. “Because there is none.” I laced my fingers behind my head and smiled at Harry. He frowned back at me.

What? I mouthed.

He looked away. I stood and headed out the door, went to my desk. When I turned back, Harry was still in Tom’s office, only this time the door was closed.

Chapter 24

Harry was scheduled for another meeting at the District Attorney’s office, which left me to attend the autopsy on Bailes. Leaving Harry still in with Tom, I went to the morgue. The pathologist handling Bailes was Ernie Hemmings, a rotund black man with huge sleepy eyes, octagonal glasses, and a constant smile as bright as his hairless pate. I always saw Ernie as a character in Alice Through the Looking Glass, the Cheshire Pathologist, maybe.

Ernie was studying a report as I entered.

“The blood screen on Bailes,” he said, frowning at various numbers on the pages. “We got some interesting hits including a Prozac-type substance. Plus the stuff you’d expect, like THC and meth. And one big surprise, Stenebrexia.”

“What the hell’s Stene-whatever.”

“I suppose you could call it a psychotropic dis-inhibitor. It was developed to help people with inhibitions and anxiety disorders, like stage fright and agoraphobia. But the stuff interacts poorly with other drugs, common ones like Prozac and the ilk. It can actually promote anxiety, plus odd behavior and acting out.”

“But if the stuff dissipates fear, it could have helped Bailes step into the hospital.”

“You’re right. It could have made it easier. Thing is, Stenebrexia is only legally available in a half-dozen countries, the US not one of them.”

“Pharmaceuticals seem able to float over borders, right?”

Ernie nodded, turned to study Bailes’s misshapen face. “Maybe the guy was afraid of his mirror. Anyway, time for the show.”

When Hemmings pushed the scalpel into the swastika tat on Bailes’s sternum and pulled it south, I started from the room.

“You’re leaving?” Hemmings said.

“I’m not paid enough to watch you root through garbage. I’ll be back.”

I jammed my hands in my pockets, went out a side door, and cut to the parking lot. I found a coffee shop with a television and watched CNN – abducted woman of the week, children starved in a basement, a man poisoned to death by his wife – until I duked the clerk five bucks to switch to the Weather Channel. When I returned to the morgue, Hemmings was lacing Bailes’s abdomen shut with stitching like shoelaces. The Frankenstein stitches fit the lopsided face.

“He was pretty eaten up inside, right?” I asked.

“Pardon?”

“Pancreatic cancer? Terminal?”

Hemmings frowned and tapped Bailes’s gut. “Our boy here might have died of hepatic failure in twenty or so years if he kept drinking and drugging. Outside of incipient hardening of the liver, the guy was basically healthy, Carson. Who told you he had cancer?”

I re-ran Kirkson’s words in my head…

“Terry Lee visited here a week back and told me. He was crying like a fucking baby. I told him to man up, live the rest of his life like there was nothing to lose.”

I was sure Kirkson hadn’t been lying. The details were too real, plus Kirkson had the image of being bunked with an aroused Thunderhead Wallace to keep him truthful.

“That’s not the question,” I said. “The question is, who told Bailes he was sick?”

Hemmings shrugged, snipped off a stitch. “You gotta figure it was a doctor, right?”

“Dr Bascomb? Are you there?”

Dr Bernard Bascomb, senior biomedical researcher at New Zealand’s University of Auckland School of Medicine, was reluctant to turn his eyes from the slender ankles of his new research assistant. She was currently hunched over a microscope in the bright lab outside his office, her ankles trim and elegant and, given the ample revelation of calf beneath the back of her lab jacket and the floor, very European, though his researcher was obviously part Maori.

“Dr Bascomb? I say, are you there?”

The latter heritage was reflected in a darker skin tone, high-cheekboned facial structure, and her musical, integrated name, Alicia Apatari. She was a lovely creature who, at twenty-two, would consider him a doddering old clutcher, though he was barely sixty and could play badminton like a forty-year-old.

“Hello-oo…Dr Bascomb?”

He would have loved to have considered Alicia Apatari’s Euro-Maori ankles all afternoon, but Bascomb’s intercom was buzzing and the evil crone who intercepted visitors was yowling his name like a dyspeptic cat.

“Dr Bascomb…are you there? Doctor?”

Bascomb’s finger jabbed the response button. “What is it this time, Miss Trendle?”

“You’re there, then.”

“No, I’m not here. I departed a half-hour ago.”

A pause as she digested the information. Then, irritation. “You have a visitor. A Dr Matthias from the US. He said he had an appointment.”

Bascomb shot a glance at his calendar and winced. He was a day off.

“Yes, yes…send him in.”

The receptionist’s voice dropped to a whisper. “This Matthias, Doctor. Is he the one that had all the, uh, publicity a few years back? When he said American black people were…”

Bascomb rapped the case of the intercom with a chubby knuckle. “Is the machine not functioning, Miss Trendle? Or did I not make myself clear? Send Dr Matthias in.”

“To be sure.” The receptionist’s voice had gone sub-zero.

Bascomb’s hands swept over his desk, arranging and tidying. A messy desk suggested an untidy mind. And the mind about to enter his office had been – no, was – one of the most distinctive in genetics, no matter what so many others thought.

Idiots. Retrogrades.

“Hello, Bernard,” a voice said as a face appeared at Bascomb’s door, small and tan. The tanned flesh fit, Bascomb noted; Matthias’s retirement had taken him to one of the US states on the Gulf of Mexico.

“Kurt!” Bernard said. “Make yourself at home in my small dominion.”

Matthias entered. He wore a black suit sculpted to a hard, diminutive body, a jockey’s body, Bascomb thought. Would I be surprised if he rode into my office on a black horse? Probably not. Matthias’s pinpoint eyes were like green lasers behind gleaming wire bifocals.