Murphy's Law (20 page)

“Get real.” Nick rolled his eyes. “I’m a—” He stopped and swallowed. “I
was
a hockey player. We’re in and out of hospitals the way you’re in and out of restaurants. I’ve picked up a lot of medical knowledge over the years. Particularly anatomy. Hey,” he mused, “Maybe I could become a doctor.”

Dante’s laugh came out harsher than he’d intended. Pushing through the big glass swing doors, he was assailed by the smell of alcohol and sickness. His skin prickled with dread and his stomach took a little warning leap. He needed something to take his mind off where he was.

“You? A doctor?” He laughed. “Yeah, right.”

To Dante’s chagrin, Nick didn’t nudge him in the ribs and grin. Instead, Nick’s mouth tightened, his shoulders hunched and Dante felt like he’d kicked a puppy…a big one, a St. Bernard, but a puppy all the same.

Uneasy, Dante looked up at the big board showing which department was on what floor. He’d only been to see Guzzanti once before in his professional capacity, for the death of a child which had turned out to be SIDS and not abuse.

Thank God he didn’t have much call to visit the coroner.

“Third floor.” Nick nudged his elbow. “You can walk it. I’ll take the elevator.”

Dante fervently believed in conservation of energy. Particularly his own. “I’ll come with you.”

Guzzanti’s office was the third down on the right. Light from the floor-to-ceiling window at the end flooded the short corridor. Like every window in Siena, it framed a view worthy of a master painter. Gentle hills terraced with vines and olive trees, sun-baked red earth below, fiercely blue cloudless sky above. It was a beautiful day, much too gorgeous to be indoors…

With a sigh, Dante recognized his reluctance to talk with Guzzanti about dead bodies and reprimanded himself. He was here on business. He knocked and entered, knowing Guzzanti was expecting him.

“Dante.” Aldo Guzzanti stood, stooping. Dante always avoided thinking how he had achieved his stoop—bending over
what
? They shook hands. He turned to Nick. “Inspector?”

“No.”
Maybe someday,
Dante thought. “This is my cousin from America, Niccolò.”

“Ah, yes. The hockey player. I seem to remember one summer—” Guzzanti’s eyes slid slyly to Dante. “—the summer we won the Palio. 2000, it was. My daughter’s last summer before university. And I seem to remember her talking—a lot—about Dante’s American cousin. That would be you?”

Nick’s cheekbones were flushed. “Yes, sir, that would be me. How is—” His eyes drifted up and to the left.

“Anna.” Dealing with dead bodies had given Guzzanti a poker face. The amusement was all in his voice.

“Anna.” Nick sighed in relief. “Yes, how is she?”

“Oh, fine, fine.” Guzzanti smiled. “She’s in Rome now, moving up through the ranks. She’s a public prosecutor and her first big case will be next month. She’s married to a doctor and they have two kids. Hellions, both of them, but we love them anyway.”

“Well, give her my best.”

Guzzanti’s smile widened. “That I’ll certainly do. So, Dante, we’ve got a dead body on our hands. A murdered dead body.” He shook his head. “Haven’t seen one of those in years.”

“Foreigners.” Dante shrugged. “What do you want?”

“Barbarians,” Guzzanti agreed. He rubbed his hands together. “Well, I guess we can start,” he said brightly. “Your cousin can come, too, if he wants.” He turned and fixed Nick with a sharp gaze. “I must make a few things clear if you want to tag along, son. First of all—no fainting and above all no vomiting. Messes with the evidence. If you feel woozy you get out as fast as you can.”

“Sure,” Nick said easily. “I’ve mopped up liters of blood, my own and that of teammates. There’s not much that turns my stomach, believe me.”

Guzzanti nodded. “It’s hard enough to clean up after the dead, we don’t like to worry about cleaning up after the living. So, now we can—”

“Wait a minute.” Dante tried to quell the panic he’d felt at Guzzanti’s words. “I’m—we’re here to pick up the results of the autopsy.”

Guzzanti scratched his crown of gray hair. “Well,” he drawled, “that would be kind of hard to do. Seeing as how the body hasn’t been posted yet.”

Dante frowned. “Not posted? Why not? What is this? The man should’ve been posted yesterday. Who knows what clues we’re losing?”

Guzzanti sighed. “You’re not losing anything. The American has been kept in the morgue under stable, chilled conditions. No deterioration has taken place. Trust me.”

“Why wasn’t the autopsy done before?” Dante could feel his heart racing and a cold sweat filming his torso. His family knew about his weak stomach and gave him some mild grief, but nobody really realized how weak it was. At the thought of witnessing an autopsy his stomach seemed to float up his esophagus.

In all his years as a cop, he’d managed to adroitly avoid attending autopsies. Loiacono attended them religiously, but Dante couldn’t figure out what a non-doctor could possibly get out of watching the process. He figured the doctor’s report was more than good enough.

“The autopsy wasn’t done before because we are understaffed and because we had, not one, but two cases of suspected Creutzfeld-Jacob disease.”

Dante was horrified. “Mad cow disease?” he breathed. “Here? In Siena?” Just the other night he’d had a big, juicy
bistecca fiorentina.
Maybe encephalopathy prions were even now settling in his brain, eating big holes.

“That’s right.” Guzzanti nodded grimly. “And I had the Local Health District Administrator, the head of this hospital, the heads of three trade unions, the head of the local farmers’ co-operative, our senator and my wife breathing down my neck as we examined the brains centimeter by centimeter under a microscope. And I mean that literally.”

Oh, God,
Dante thought. “And?”

“Dementia praecox. Both of them.”

“Whew.” Dante didn’t even want to
think
about an outbreak of mad cow disease.

“And that, gentlemen,” Guzzanti declared, snapping his desk diary closed, “that is why we have one—” He glanced at the form he held in his hand. “—one American professor, presumably stabbed to death, though it is bad form to make pre-post guesses, still awaiting our scrutiny.” He walked over to his office door and opened it. “If you’ll come with me, we can start right away.”

“Hey.” Nick had perked up. “We’re going to watch an autopsy. Cool.”

Not cool. Hot. Dante pulled at his shirt collar. “Wait a minute. Won’t—won’t our presence, um, compromise the body? Contaminate the evidence?”

“Dante.” Nick shot him a look. “The guy’s dead. And we’re not going to spit or jerk off into his corpse—pardon me, doctor—and leave foreign DNA. Our presence can’t hurt anything.” Nick stood, and Dante saw the first signs of excitement Nick had shown all morning. “Right, doc?”

“Correct.” Guzzanti stood impatiently in the doorway. “So gentlemen, if you’ll follow me, we’ll see to your murdered corpse.” He opened his arms and ushered them out. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m looking forward to this. It’s been much too long since I’ve actually had a case of murder to deal with. Very exciting.”

Dante’s guts did a slow roll.

Chapter Twelve

Everything put together falls apart sooner or later.

The pathology lab was underground.

Figured. Fitting for a hellish experience.

Dante’s namesake had descended to hell, too, only with a different companion. Dante followed Guzzanti and an excited Nick. He battled reluctance and rising gorge.

Guzzanti and Dante automatically adjusted their pace to Nick’s limp. “So, Niccolò, what are you doing here with your cousin? It’s Dante’s job, but you don’t necessarily have to be here. Watching an autopsy isn’t exactly my idea of the perfect Sienese summer holiday. Particularly during Palio season when there’s so much going on in town.”

Amen
, Dante thought. Nick was silent, so he answered for him. “Nick’s…retired from ice hockey and trying to figure out what to do next. Since he’s here, I thought I’d let him tag along. See if he’d like to become a cop.”

“Retired, hmm?” Guzzanti cast shrewd eyes at Nick’s limping leg with the brace. “Anterior cruciate? I thought the Americans were so good at sports medicine, athletes just bought themselves new knees.”

“Not the knee,” Nick said softly. “Secondary concussion.”

Guzzanti’s lips pursed and his eyes opened wide as he emitted a soundless whistle. “Bad news. Sorry.”

Nick nodded stiffly and Dante’s heart went out to him.

They passed the canteen where the hospital staff and the patients were going to have
pasta al pesto
for lunch, to judge by the smell.

The
obitorio
, the morgue, was right next door. They walked past a wall of steel lockers with pullout handles. Dante couldn’t figure out what they were.

And then he could, and swallowed.

Through another door was a corridor, then a room with a big white sign above it.
Anatomia Patologica.

Guzzanti held the door open for them, and Dante walked into a scene as hellacious as anything the other Dante had ever seen in his descent to the Inferno.

The autopsy room was large with a heavy odor of dead meat and pesto overlaid by formalin and alcohol. Four large, rectangular stainless steel tables were in the four corners of the room. Three bodies in varying stages of butchery were lying on the slabs as gowned humans wearing face shields and wielding what looked like carpentry tools bent over them. It was impossible to detect the sex of anyone in the room, living or dead.

“Carlo!” Guzzanti called out. “What the hell is going on here?”

An amorphous body lifted its face shield. “A whole family found dead in San Rocco. Suspected asphyxiation.” The shield banged back down again like a space warrior’s.

“
Cristo.
The insurance company is going to be all over us,” Guzzanti grumbled.

The door swung open again and two people in white lab coats walked in—a tiny woman with plain, sharp, serious features and huge Coke-bottle glasses dwarfing her face, and a large, broad-shouldered, thick-necked man almost as large as Nick.

“Right then,” Guzzanti said briskly. “Let’s get started. Sergio?”

A glum, middle-aged man detached himself from the shadows at the far end of the big room. He slouched, his hands deep in the pockets of his stained lab coat. Dante didn’t even want to think about what had caused the stains.

“Yeah?” The man’s voice was sullen, body language depressed.

“You can bring him in now, Sergio.”

The man grunted and turned. Guzzanti smiled apologetically. “Our
diener
, Sergio.”

“Your
diener
seems to have an attitude problem,” Nick said, after the man had left the room.

Guzzanti sighed. “He’s from
the Wave.”

“Ah,” Nick and Dante said together. The
Onda,
the Wave contrada, wasn’t running this year. Not running in the Palio, coupled with working with dead people for a living, would make anyone depressed.

Dante shuddered. He couldn’t imagine a worse job than dealing with dead people.

The door banged open, pulling Dante out of his thoughts. A stretcher with a dead body—presumably
his
dead victim, so he tried to straighten up and look interested instead of nauseated—rolled in, pushed by the
diener
, whose trip to the morgue had made him surlier than ever.

The back wheels caught in the jamb and Sergio rattled the stretcher angrily. One of the wheels had locked in a sideways position and he couldn’t straighten it. The
diener
pushed and pulled, cursing a blue streak.

Finally, with a rusty creak, the wheel turned around and the stretcher jumped into the room with a bang. The body shifted and the head hung limply over the edge. Sergio reached out to deposit the head back on the stretcher with about as much emotion as a housewife putting a cantaloupe back on the greengrocer’s shelf after having sniffed it.

“Ah, Sergio,” Guzzanti said genially. “Over here, please.”

The
diener
wheeled the stretcher sharply right. It turned with a creak, pushed by Sergio’s large, broad hands until he had it parked next to the steel table by the window.

He walked around the stretcher and the table, then reached across with his simian-long arms and tugged the body across. Two sharp yanks and the body had been pulled over to the steel table with as much emotion as a butcher shifting a side of beef.

Sergio efficiently stripped the body until it lay naked and defenseless on the metal slab, the puncture wound small but clearly visible.

Ashes to ashes
, Dante thought with a shudder. Roland Kane might not have been much of a human being, but he’d still been human and, as such, deserving of pity for the state he was in now. Pity and horror vied in his chest.

“The block, Sergio,” Guzzanti said.

The
diener
placed an arm under the body’s neck and lifted. When the upper body was where sit-ups hurt, he slipped a block of plastic under the back and let the body fall back over the block.

Sergio looked over with a truculent scowl.

“That will be all, Sergio,” Guzzanti said and the
diener
gave a grunt and walked out. The door didn’t slam behind him because it was pneumatically driven, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

“Not a great job,” Dante observed.

“What, Sergio’s?” Guzzanti asked. “It’s not bad. At least he doesn’t get any backtalk from his clients.”

Guzzanti beckoned to the two young people. They arranged themselves solemnly at either side of the body’s head, hands clasped behind their backs, necks craned, waiting. They gave Dante the creeps, like vultures around a corpse.

“You don’t mind if I allow these two students of mine to attend the autopsy, do you, Dante?” Guzzanti asked. “It’s their first post, and a murder at that. Who knows when they’ll get a chance to see another one? Of course—” He frowned, looking at Nick, then Dante. “—it’s getting a little crowded around here, so maybe Nick could—”

“That’s okay. I’ll step back,” Dante said swiftly. He moved back a step, then two. “Nick wants to see what being a cop is all about, after all. I’ll yield my place to him.”