“I’ll have them back for you in five minutes,” Jack said.

Daryl didn’t respond.

“I think the poor guy was intimidated,” Lou commented as the three rose up to the first floor in the elevator.

“Once Jack is on a mission, look out!” Laurie said.

“Bureaucracy irks me,” Jack said. “There’s no excuse for the X ray to be squirreled away in the chief’s office in the first place.”

Jack opened the front office’s outer door and then Dr. Bingham’s inner door. He turned on the lights.

The office was large, with a big desk beneath high windows to the left and a large library table to the right. Teaching paraphernalia, including a blackboard and an X-ray view box, were at the head of the table.

“Where should we look?” Laurie asked.

“I was hoping they’d just be on that view box,” Jack said. “But I don’t see them. I tell you what, I’ll take the desk and the file cabinet, you look around the view box.”

“Fine,” Laurie said.

“What do you want me to do?” Lou asked.

“You just stand there and make sure we don’t steal anything,” Jack scoffed.

Jack pulled out several of the file drawers, but closed them quickly. The full-body X rays that were taken by the morgue came in large folders. It wasn’t something easily hidden.

“This looks promising,” Laurie called out. She’d found a stash of X rays in the cabinet directly under the view box. Lifting the folders out onto the library table, she scanned the names. She found Franconi’s and pulled them free of the others.

Returning to the basement level, Jack got the X rays of the floater and took both folders back to the autopsy room. He gave Bingham’s office keys to Daryl and thanked him. Daryl merely nodded.

“Okay, everybody!” Jack said, walking over to the view box. “The critical moment has arrived.” First he slipped up Franconi’s X rays and then the headless floater’s.

“What do you know,” Jack said after only a second’s inspection. “I owe Laurie five dollars!”

Laurie gave a cry of triumph, as Jack gave her the money. Lou scratched his head and leaned closer to the light box to stare at the films. “How can you guys tell so quickly?” he asked.

Jack pointed out the lumpy shadows of the bullets almost obscured by the mass of shotgun pellets in the floater’s X rays and showed how they corresponded to the bullets on the Franconi films. Then he pointed to identical healed clavicular fractures that appeared on the X rays of the two bodies.

“This is great,” Lou said, rubbing his hands together with enthusiasm that almost matched Laurie’s. “Now that we have a corpus delicti, we might be able to make some headway in this case.”

“And I’ll be able to figure out what the hell’s going on concerning this guy’s liver,” Jack said.

“And maybe I’ll go on a shopping spree with my money,” Laurie said, giving the five-dollar bill a kiss. “But not until I figure out the how and the why this body left here in the first place.”