I WAS WEARING my new blue uniform, and I’d washed my hair thirteen times and once more for good luck when I walked into the autopsy suite the next day. Claire was standing at the top of a six-foot ladder, her Minolta focused down on Mieke Vetter’s decapitated and naked body. Claire looked huge and wobbly up there.
Can’t someone else do that?” I asked her.
I’m done,” she said. She climbed down the ladder, one ponderous step at a time.
I gestured to the woman on the table. “I can save you some time,” I said to Claire. “I happen to know this victim’s cause and manner of death.
You know, Lindsay, I still have to do this for evidentiary purposes.
Okay, but just so you know. Yesterday, your patient sprayed me with blood, bone fragments, hair, not to mention brains. You have any idea what dripping brains feel like
Warm gummy bears? Am I right?” Claire said, grinning at me.
Uh. Yeah. Exactly.
One of my first cases was a suicide,” Claire said, getting on with her work, drawing a Y incision with her scalpel from each of Ms. Vetter’s clavicles to her pubis.
This old soldier ends it all with a twelve-gauge shotgun under his chin. So I come into his RV, fresh out of training, ya know? And I’m leaning over his body in the La-Z-Boy, taking photos, and the cops are yukking it up.
Because
I had no idea. You see, that’s the point, girlfriend.
I started laughing for the first time in a long while.
So as I’m leaning over the body, about a quarter of the guy’s brain has been slowly peeling off the ceiling - it falls and smacks me right behind my ear.
She slapped her neck to show me, and I rewarded her story with a good guffaw.
Like I said, warm gummy bears. So, how’d it go?” she asked me.
How did which go? The interview with your patient’s devil spawn? Or the meeting with the mayor
Both of ’em, baby girl. I’m going to be here all night, thanks to your bird friends filling up my vault all over again.
Well, Vetter first, short and to the point,” I told Claire. “He lawyered up, pronto. Got nothing to say. But when he does get around to saying something, I’ll bet you a hundred bucks he says his buddy tortured and killed all those people and he just watched.
Won’t really matter, will it? Killer or accessory, he still gets the needle. Plus, you witnessed him killing this poor woman.
Me and thirty other cops. But for the sake of the victims’ families, I still want him convicted for killing them all.
And your meeting with the mayor
Hah! First Conklin and I get the high fives and Jacobi almost cries, he’s so proud of us, and I think, ‘Whoa, we’re gonna pull our horrible crime-solution rate out of the basement up to maybe the ground floor’ - when the whole conversation devolves into which jurisdiction has the first bite at Vetter since the killings took place in Monterey and Santa Clara Counties as well as - Claire? Honey? What is it? What’s wrong
Claire’s face had twisted in pain. She dropped her scalpel, and it rang out against the stainless steel table. She grabbed her belly, looked at me with shock in her eyes.
My water just broke, Lindsay. I’m not due for three weeks.
I called for an ambulance, helped my friend into a chair. A minute later the doors to the ambulance bay banged open and two brawny guys strode into the autopsy suite carrying a stretcher.
What’s up, doc?” said the biggest one.
I said, “Guess who’s having a baby
