“Not very social of you.” He massaged the pitcher, erased the face. “Wanna glass?”

I said, “No, thanks,” but he went and got one anyway, left the file on his chair.

At the front were routine forms signed by Deputy Coroner A.C. Yee, M.D. In the photos what had once been Michaela Brand was a department-store manikin taken apart in stages. See enough autopsy shots and you learn to reduce the human body to its components, try to forget it’s ever been divine. Think too much and you never sleep.

Milo returned and poured me a beer. “She died of strangulation and all the cuts were postmortem. What’s interesting are Numbers Six and Twelve.”

Six was a close-up of the right side of the neck. The wound was an inch or so long, slightly puffed at the center, as if something had been inserted in the slot and left there long enough to create a small pouch. The coroner had circled the lesion and written a reference number above the ruler segment used for scale. I paged to the summary, found the notation.

Postmortem incision, superior border of the sternoclavicular notch, evidence of tissue-spreading and surface exploration of the right jugular vein.

Twelve was a front view of a smooth, full-breasted female chest. Michaela’s implants spread as if deflated.

Dr. Yee had pointed to the spots where they’d been stitched up and noted, “Good healing.” In the smooth plain between the mounds were five small wounds. No pouching. Yee’s measurements made them shallow, a couple were barely beneath the skin.

I returned to the description of the neck lesion. “ ‘Surface exploration.’ Playing around with the vein?”

“Maybe a special type of play,” said Milo. “Yee wouldn’t put it in writing but he said the cut reminded him of what an embalmer might do at the start of a body prep. The location was exactly what you’d choose if you wanted to expose the jugular and the carotid artery for drainage. After that, you spread the wound to expose the vessels and insert cannulas in both of ’em. Blood drains out of the vein while preservative’s pumped into the artery.”

“But that didn’t happen here,” I said.

“No, only a scratch on the vein.”

“A would-be embalmer who lost his nerve?”

“Or changed his mind. Or lacked the equipment and knowledge to follow through. Yee said there was an ‘immature’ quality to the murder. The neck stuff and the chest lacerations he called dinky and ambivalent. He wouldn’t put that in writing, either. Said it was for a shrink to decide.”

He extended a palm.

I said, “Better find yourself a decisive shrink.”

“Fear of commitment?”

“So I’ve been told.”