Susan walked into my office as Grueman abruptly ended the encounter with “Good day” and hung up..

“Eddie Heath’s body is here.”

Her surgical gown was untied in back and clean, the expression on her face distracted. “Can he wait until the morning?”

“No,” I said. “He can’t.”

The boy looked smaller on the cold steel table than he had seemed in the bright sheets of his hospital bed. There were no rainbows in this room, no walls or windows decorated with dinosaurs or color to cheer the heart of a child. Eddie Heath had come in naked with IV needles, catheter, and dressings still in place. They seemed sad remnants of what had held him to this world and then disconnected him from it, like string tailing a balloon blowing forlornly through empty air. For the better part of an hour I documented injuries and marks of therapy while Susan took photographs and answered the phone.

We had locked the doors leading into the autopsy suite, and beyond I could hear people getting off the elevator and heading home in the rapidly descending dark. Twice the buzzer sounded in the bay as funeral home attendants arrived to bring a body or take one away. The wounds to Eddies shoulder and thigh were dry and a dark shiny red.

“God,” Susan said, staring. “God, who would do something like that? Look at all the little cuts to the edges, too. It’s like somebody cut crisscrosses and then removed the whole area of skin.”

“That’s precisely what I think was done.”

“You think someone carved some sort of pattern?”

“I think someone attempted to eradicate something. And when that didn’t work, he removed the skin.”

“Eradicate what?”

“Nothing that was already there,” I said. “He had no tattoos, birthmarks, or scars in those areas. If something wasn’t already there, then perhaps something was added and had to be removed because of the potential evidentiary value.”

“Something like bite marks.”

“Yes,” I said.

The body was not yet fully rigorous and was still slightly warm as I began swabbing any area that a washcloth might have missed. I checked axillas, gluteal folds, behind ears and inside them, and inside the navel. I clipped fingernails into clean white envelopes and looked for fibers and other debris in hair.

Susan continued to glance at me, and I sensed her tension. Finally she asked, “Anything special you’re liking for?”

“Dried seminal fluid, for one thing,” I said.

“1n his axilla?”

“There, in any crease in skin, any orifice, anywhere.”

“You don’t usually look in all those places.”

“I don’t usually look for zebras.”

“For what?”

“We used to have a saying in medical school. If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses. But in a case like this I know we’re looking for zebras,” I said. I began going over every inch of the body with a lens.

When I got to his wrists, I slowly turned his hands the way and that, studying them for such a long time that Susan stopped what she was doing. I referred to the diagrams on my clipboard, correlating each mark of therapy with the ones I had drawn “Where are his charts?” I glanced around.