“Hey, sport, how’s it going?” Chet said.

“Not so good,” Jack said. He sat down and turned on his microscope light.

“Problems with the Franconi case?” Chet asked.

Jack nodded. He began to hunt through the slides for liver sections. He only found one. “Everything about it is like squeezing water from a rock.”

“Listen, I’m glad you came back,” Chet said. “I’m expecting a call from a doctor in North Carolina. I just want to find out if a patient had heart trouble. I have to duck out to get passport photos taken for my upcoming trip to India. Would you take the call for me?”

“Sure,” Jack said. “What’s the patient’s name?”

“Clarence Potemkin,” Chet said. “The folder is right here on my desk.”

“Fine,” Jack said, while slipping the sole liver section onto his microscope’s stage. He ignored Chet as Chet got his coat from behind the door and left. Jack ran the microscopic objective down to the slide and was about to peer into the eyepieces, when he paused. Chet’s errand had started him thinking about international travel. If Franconi had gotten his transplant out of the country, which seemed increasingly probable, there might be a way to find out where he’d been.

Jack picked up his phone and called police headquarters. He asked for Lieutenant Detective Lou Soldano. He expected to have to leave a message and was pleasantly surprised to get the man himself.

“Hey, I’m glad you called,” Lou said. “Remember what I told you this morning about the tip it was the Lucia people who stole Franconi’s remains from the morgue? We just got confirmation from another source. I thought you might like to know.”

“Interesting,” Jack said. “Now I have a question for you.”

“Shoot,” Lou said.

Jack outlined the reasons for his belief that Carlo Franconi might have traveled abroad for his liver transplant. He added that according to the man’s mother, he’d taken a trip to a supposed spa four to six weeks previously.

“What I want to know is, is there a way to find out by talking to Customs if Franconi left the country recently, and if so, where did he go?”

“Either Customs or the Immigration and Naturalization,” Lou said. “Your best bet would be Immigration unless, of course, he brought back so much stuff he had to pay duty. Besides, I have a friend in Immigration. That way I can get the information much faster than going through the usual bureaucratic channels. Want me to check?”

“I’d love it,” Jack said. “This case is bugging the hell out of me.”

“My pleasure,” Lou said. “As I said this morning, I owe you.”

Jack hung up the phone with a tiny glimmer of hope that he’d thought of a new angle. Feeling a bit more optimistic, he leaned forward, looked into his microscope, and began to focus.

Laurie’s day had not gone anything like she’d anticipated. She’d planned on doing only one autopsy but ended up doing two. And then George Fontworth ran into trouble with his multiple gunshot wound case, and Laurie volunteered to help him. Even with no lunch, Laurie didn’t get out of the pit until three.