“Swell,” Willy interpreted. “Undetermined?”

This was the least favorite of the five MODs, or classifiable manners of death. Among “natural,” “suicide,” “homicide,” and “accident,” the last, which Willy had aired, was at once the rarest and the most unsatisfying.

Beverly chose not to go there quite yet. “Until the tox results return, it’s pending. But I won’t argue against your pessimism.”

“What did you actually find?” Joe asked.

“Nothing terrifically healthy,” she replied. “She had multiple degenerative diseases, most if not all related to lifestyle choices. But none stood out as a primary cause of death. As you know, that doesn’t necessarily exclude some other mechanism coming into play. Also, the human system is complex enough to collapse if too many oppositional forces conspire to overwhelm it. In geriatric cases, some pathologists will revert to ‘failure to thrive’ as a cause, although I prefer not to. It’s imprecise and, I think, a little lazy. But I sympathize with the frustration it connotes. It’s also academic here. Mrs. Shaw would have had to have been fifty percent older to qualify.”

Both men were inured to her high-flying syntax, barely noticing it anymore.

“What about time of death?” Willy risked asking, knowing pathologists dislike the question and blame television for its nonsensical ubiquity.

But Beverly surprised them by answering, “Not terrifically long ago, given lividity, rigor, and algor. All indicate death a few hours ago, versus, let’s say, sometime early last night. But as you know, I won’t be held to that as an absolute.”

“You mentioned some other mechanism coming into play,” Joe repeated. “What were you thinking of?”

She resumed removing some of the outer layers of her operating costume, returning to the scrubs in which she’d greeted them. “There are ways to get away with murder. Injections, mechanisms, environmental factors that don’t leave a trace or disappear by the time an autopsy is conducted. Joe, you had a case decades ago, I recall, where curare was administered. It wasn’t the terminal COD. The person was killed some other way, after being immobilized with the curare, but we didn’t find it in the tox screen because we didn’t know what to look for.”

She gestured vaguely at the body. “She might have something on board we’ll never find, because it falls outside the scope of the standard panel of tests.”

But Joe knew this woman well and recognized when she was edging toward a finding where her footing was less than absolute.

“Speak to me,” he therefore prodded. “What’s running around in that analytical brain? You found something that’s bugging you.”

“I did,” she admitted, her cheeks coloring slightly like a schoolgirl’s, which flooded his heart with affection. “In and of itself, it establishes nothing, but in the context of this woman’s attention to makeup and personal care, it’s an anomaly. She ate too much and exercised too little. But her nails, lips, and eye shadow tell me she was self-conscious about appearance—at least to that extent.”

Willy finally broke. “Come on, Doc.”