"What's the matter?"

"I just want to look at something."

Slaughter stepped from the cruiser, walking toward a metal barrel near the gravel lane. What made him stop was the blood along the rim and down the barrel. He studied the blood on the ground as well, noticing the large drops leading toward the house. He peered inside the barrel, saw the rusty cans, the broken glass, the blood across it, and the woman had been right. So why then had the kid behaved the way he did?

He glanced around for places where the boy could hide, stooped to check underneath some bushes by the shed, then straightened, walking to the cruiser. Dunlap asked him, "Anything?" But Slaughter only shook his head and worked the gearshift, driving slowly down the lane.

The radio crackled. "Chief, it's Marge. I haven't found the medical examiner."

Slaughter grabbed the microphone. "Well, keep trying. Stay there until you get him. I need lots of help on this. I've got plenty of questions."

They were at a side street now. Slaughter saw a German shepherd on a chain in one backyard. The dog was lunging, held back by the chain as it glared at them. Slaughter studied it a moment. Then he looked across the street toward where the lane continued. Far along it, at the end, he saw the large trees of the city park and all the places where a boy could hide, not to mention all the places in the backyards of the lane. He was looking both ways on the side street. A cruiser went by, and Slaughter nodded grimly to the driver. Then staying to the search plan, he moved across the side street and down the lane. The thing is, he was thinking, we don't have much time until it's dark, and what the hell is that kid doing now? He maybe just was angry at his mother. What, though, if he's crazy? How do we behave if someone traps him and the kid attacks again?

The medical examiner scowled. He had been a star in his profession once, back in Philadelphia, but that had been ten years ago. Born and raised in Potter's Field, he had left the town to go to school. A doctor's son, he'd wanted to be like his father. He had guessed that he would be a surgeon, but when he had finished pre-med, staying on at Boston for his training, he had found that diagnostics more than surgery attracted him. His father had approved. After all, those specialties were quite compatible. A lot of men could cut, but not as many could detect a cause, and a combination of both could earn considerable fees.

But the son had soon determined he would specialize much more than that. Searching out diseases not just in the living but the dead as well. Pathology, and in particular those duties strictly relegated to a medical examiner. The father had been livid, but for reasons that the son had not expected. Granted that a medical examiner had little chance to make the money that a surgeon could. "But autopsies!" the father had shouted. "You should want to cure the living, not dissect the dead!" The son had not been able to explain himself. The best that he could manage was the notion that determining the cause of death could help prevent another death just like it. But the argument was not convincing, even to himself. He sensed that there was another reason, although that reason wasn't clear to him, but he had made his choice, and despite his father's angry objections, he had continued with his studies.

Even when his father threatened not to pay his tuition, he'd persisted, working part-time, getting money any way he could. As well as with his father, he had trouble with some teachers. They felt that working with the dead was self-defeating for a doctor, and they had tried to change his mind, but he was adamant. Everyone agreed, though: he was good at what he did. He finished in the upper tenth of all his classes, and when he completed all his training, he had little trouble finding work. By then, he and his father no longer spoke to one another. He was certain he would not go back to Potter's Field. The place he chose was Philadelphia, and in five years, he rose from simply being on the staff to acting as assistant medical examiner. The hard jobs he was always given. More than that, he sought them out: the murders that were mystifying, and those deaths that no one understood, those suicides that maybe had been awkward accidents. He solved them all. It got so other members of the staff would come to watch him do his work. There were betting pools to see how long he might be stymied by a body's puzzle. Homicide detectives hoped that he would be assigned to their investigations. Reporters interviewed him. Magazines did stories on him. Once he even had an article devoted to him in Time.

And so his star had risen, with it self-understanding. He grew to comprehend that what attracted him were riddles from mute witnesses, the pleasures of the chase. Oh, sure, if he had stayed in diagnostics, he'd have had his share of puzzles, but the kind he worked with now were so much different, so more final and detached. He didn't have to bother with compassion, even fear, both in himself and in his patient. He could be objective, logical, and most important, uninvolved. A body there before him, he had this and this to learn about it; he would learn these things, and then this problem would be finished. Except for his excitement as he sensed that he was getting closer to the clue that he was looking for, he never felt emotion. No, that wasn't true. He often felt frustration, but excitement and frustration were related, one the polar feeling of the other, and the satisfaction of his work was in his scientific method, in his order, in the truths that he uncovered.

"After all, it doesn't matter. Nothing does," he often told himself. What profit if you diagnose a living person and that patient dies because there isn't a way to cure him? Granted, there were times when you could find out what was wrong with someone and stop the illness. But the end was still the same. If not on this occasion, maybe the next time, and finally the end was certain. Every person died. There wasn't any way to stop that. People just marked time. He couldn't bear the thought of caring for a patient and then failing.

"Self-defeat," his father had said when he first suggested that he'd like to be a medical examiner. His father had been wrong, though, for the self-defeat was not his study of the dead but how his father had prolonged the agony of someone's living. Tomorrow and tomorrow. Life is just a sequence of small losses. All those phrases now occurred to him, but back then he had not been wise enough to understand them, to call them up against his father. It was just a matter of one's viewpoint. Life was either good, or else it wasn't. In the long run, did it matter if you saved a man from this disease and spared him for another? The final truth was what he studied on the table.

Something else. A corollary. He would never have the strength to watch a patient die. He didn't have the courage. He was fearful of mistakes, and even if he made none, he was fearful of the look in someone's eyes should he be forced to pronounce a death sentence. He could never tolerate responsibilities of ultimate consequence. Certainly he had responsibilities in this profession, but if he failed, what difference did it make? A murderer would walk the streets. A suicide would never be detected. But he couldn't change what they had done; he couldn't replay time and alter things. The pain of what they did was past. He hadn't been connected with it.

The medical examiner was not so unaware that he didn't realize the causes for his attitude. His mother, for example, who had died when he was very young but not so young that he didn't remember how her body tortured her. Lung cancer. And he'd seen his father helpless to preserve her. Yes, his father the physician who was powerless when it most counted. Each day watching as she wasted. No, although he himself had long since learned to mute the power of that memory, he had not forgotten. She had been the only person close to him who'd ever died and filled him with grief. He didn't know why that should be, how his mother had made so strong a mark on him. Perhaps because he loved her, and that startled him. Because he knew a child's love had little substance. So he told himself. But if he'd really loved her, she had been the only one he ever loved. For sure, he didn't love his father. New thought: could it be that he had set out, insecure, to imitate his father, and then facing up to how he felt about the man, he had determined to annoy him? Self-defeat? His father maybe had been right. It could be that he himself had ruined his own chance to have a lucrative career just to get back at his father.