“For nothing I’ll tell you what I told Mallory: there weren’t any external blows or wounds. Whitby wasn’t shot or knifed or bludgeoned before he went into the pond. He drowned.”

“And his blood alcohol?”

“The tox screen will come in tonight or tomorrow. That you can get from Mallory. I won’t charge you for my work, since the county ordered the same job, but you also don’t get a free look at the screen.”

He severed the connection. Whick, like slicing off the top of a corpse’s head. I looked at my hands with a sense of deflation. I had expected so much more from Vishnikov. I’d been so sure there’d be some kind of in jury … and then, the golf cart that had gone through the culvert-or maybe those wheel tracks hadn’t belonged to a golf cart. Sherlock Holmes would have measured a cart, taken a plaster cast of the wheels, checked them against the tracks in the culvert. Maybe I’d made up a whole lot of connections that didn’t exist, wanting to create a murder where there’d only been an inexplicable accident.

My father used to lecture me about being too impulsive. “Don’t ride your emotions so much, Pepper Pot. Take the time to think it through first. You can save yourself a lot of grief, and me as well.”

He’d said that more than once, but I vividly remembered his voice from a day he’d been called to meet me in the principal’s office. I’d tried to stage a sit-in to protest a schoolmate’s expulsion. I thought they’d done it because Joey lived in a shanty and stank; it turned out to be because Joey was setting fires in the lockers. I wondered now if riding my emotions was leading me to shelter another Joey, whether Benjamin Sadawi would prove to be a fire starter as well. I didn’t seem to have learned much in twentyfive years.

I took the dogs for a short run, then went to the safe in my bedroom closet for my Smith & Wesson. I drove out to the range and fired a hundred rounds, venting my frustration with myself more than anything else. I was off the target more than I was on it, which didn’t improve my mood; I went to my office feeling that I’d better be able to use finesse to solve my problems.

I didn’t remember any finesse when Bobby called me a little after ten. It was his turn to chew me out, for not letting him know that Vishnikov was already working on Whitby. “You heard that whole discussion about where the body was and who would do the second autopsy, and you didn’t let out one peep that you already had Vish working on it.”

“I’d been the subject of a hostile interrogation for over two hours. If I said anything to that crew, I’d have been there another two hours.”

“But later, when you were alone with me?”

“Bobby, you were focusing on the Egyptian kid, and I was tired-I forgot. Have you found him yet?”