‘Not at all. It was like pulling hens’ teeth. I wouldn’t call him friendly. But he was polite.’

‘Do you remember how he was dressed?’

‘A long black leather coat. It was belted, so I don’t know what he had on under it. But I thought he looked sharp.’

‘Shoes?’

‘It seems he had on boots.’

‘Did you notice anything else about him?’

He thought for a while, looking past me at the door. He said, ‘Now that you mention it, he had what looked like burns on his fingers. I thought that was a little scary.’

‘What about his hygiene?’ I then asked, for the more addicted a crack user got, the less he cared about clothing or cleanliness.

‘He seemed clean to me. But I really didn’t get close to him.’

‘And he bought nothing else while he was here?’

‘Unfortunately not.’

Elmer James propped an elbow on the showcase and rested his cheek on his fist. He sighed. ‘I wonder how he found me.’

I walked back, avoiding slushy puddles on streets and the cars that drove through them heedlessly. I got splashed once. I returned to my office, where Janet was in the library watching a teaching videotape of an autopsy while Lucy worked in the computer room. I left them alone and went down to the morgue to check on my staff.

Fielding was at the first table, working on a young woman found dead in the snow below her bedroom window. I noted the pinkness of the body and could smell alcohol in the blood. On her right arm was a cast scribbled with messages and autographs.

‘How are we doing?’ I asked.

‘She’s got a STAT alcohol of .23,’ he replied, examining a section of aorta. ‘So that didn’t get her. I think she’s going to be an exposure death.’

‘What are the circumstances?’ I could not help but think of Jane.

‘Apparently, she was out drinking with friends and by the time they took her home around eleven p.m. it was snowing pretty hard. They let her out and didn’t wait to see her in. The police think her keys fell in the snow and she was too drunk to find them.’

He dropped the section of aorta into a jar of formalin. ‘So she tried to get in a window by breaking it with her cast.’

He lifted the brain out of the scale. ‘But that didn’t work. The window was too high up, and with one arm she couldn’t have climbed in it anyway. Eventually she passed out.’

‘Nice friends,’ I said, walking off.

Dr. Anderson, who was new, was photographing a ninety-one- year-old woman with a hip fracture. I collected paperwork from a nearby desk and quickly reviewed the case.

‘Is this an autopsy?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Dr. Anderson said.

‘Why?’