“White. But I’l have to verify that.”

“How confident do you feel?”

“Pretty confident. The nasal opening is narrow, the bridge steepled, the cheekbones tight to the face. The skul looks classical y European.”

“Age?”

“Skeletal maturation is complete in the fingers, the teeth show little wear, the cranial sutures minimal closure.” Rinaldi pul ed a leather-bound notepad from his shirt pocket.

“Meaning?”

“Adult.”

Rinaldi jotted it down.

“There is one other little thing.”

Both men looked at me.

“There are two bul et holes in the back of the head. Smal caliber. Probably a twenty-two.”

“Cute, saving that for last,” said Slidel . “Don’t suppose you found a smoking gun?”

“Nope. No gun. No bul ets. Nothing for bal istics.”

“Why’s Larabee cutting free?” Slidel tipped his head toward the parked cars.

“He’s giving a talk tonight.”

Rinaldi underlined something in his notes and slid the pen into its slot.

“Shal we go inside?” he asked.

“I’l be there in a minute.”

I stood, listening to rain tick the magnolia leaves overhead, unconsciously putting off the inevitable. Though the scientist in me wanted to know whom we’d pul ed from the privy, another part of me wanted to turn away, to take no part in the dissection of another murder.

Friends often ask, “How can you constantly deal with the remains of death? Doesn’t that debase life? Make brutal death commonplace?” I shrug off the queries with a stock response about media. Everyone knows about violent death, I say. The public reads about the stabbings, the shootings, the airline disasters. People hear the statistics, watch the footage, fol ow the trials on Court TV. The only difference? I see the carnage closer up.

That’s what I say. But the truth is, I think a lot about death. I can be fairly philosophical about the hard cases who do each other in as part of doing business. But I can never avoid the sense of pity for the young and the weak who simply happened to get in the way of some psychopath listening to voices from another planet, or some druggie in need of fifty dol ars for a fix, or for the genuinely innocent who through no fault of their own happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were subsumed by events of which they had no understanding.

My friends interpret my reluctance to discuss my work as stoicism, or professional ethics, or even as a desire to spare their sensitivities. That’s not it. It’s more a concern for me than them. At the end of the day, I need to leave those cadavers cold and silent on their stainless steel. I need to not think about them. I need to read a book, or see a movie, or discuss politics or art. I need to reestablish perspective and remind myself that life offers much more than violence and mayhem.