AFTER I LEAVE ERNIE, I return to the CT-scan room but it’s empty now. I head back to the receiving area, where two FBI agents are drinking coffee near the door that leads out to the bay.

“I tried to call you,” I say to Georgia as I pause by her desk.

“I bet you did right about the time I was out in the bay telling them they can’t park in there. You see how much good it did. That big-ass SUV’s still sitting in there, isn’t it?”

“If it gets scraped by a stretcher they have no one to blame but themselves.” I’m always warning Lucy about that.

She doesn’t listen and nobody dings or sideswipes her cars. It hasn’t happened once. But there’s always a first time for everything, and I head in the direction of the autopsy room, which is dark and silent as I walk past its shut door. Beyond it is another autopsy room, what’s really an isolation area for badly decomposed or possibly infected cases, and the two agents on either side of the steel door leading inside don’t look happy to be here.

Using my elbow, I press a hands-free steel button on the wall and the door automatically swings open on a cloud of stench that sends both agents scurrying out of the way.

“How are we doing in here?” I ask cheerfully as I take my time holding the door open wide, and the foulness is thick and bristles like something alive.

Mahant, Anne, Harold and Luke are swathed in protective clothing and clustered around the only table in a room with a thirty-foot ceiling and banks of high-intensity lights, and I note that the observation window in the upper wall is empty and dark. Anne didn’t think to tell our FBI visitors that they could sit behind glass in a teaching lab and avoid unnecessary unpleasantness if they preferred. They could drink coffee up there and monitor everything we’re doing on a live audio-video feed. But Anne accidentally on purpose forgot to mention it, I guess.

Luke snaps a new blade into a scalpel. The paper bags have been removed from Elisa Vandersteel’s hands, feet and head, and her sports bra, blue shorts, and socks are off and spread out on a white-paper-covered countertop. He begins to run the blade through her flesh, from clavicle to clavicle, then down her torso.

“It’s looking like she has cardiac damage, possibly a torn posterior pericardium, and hemorrhage in the area of the left myocardium,” he tells me what he observed on the CT scan. “Plus what looks like suffusion of blood in the interventricular septum.”

“What about her head injury?” I reach for rib cutters on the nearby surgical cart, and situate myself across the table from Luke.

I’m shoulder to shoulder with Mahant.