“Not a tattoo,” I said. “A burn mark. It looks a little like the tip of a flatiron, don’t you think?”

Bömer nodded. “Tortured?”

“Are there any similar marks on his back?”

“I don’t know.”

I took hold of a big shoulder. “Then let’s turn him over. You take the hip and the legs. I’ll turn the body. We’ll pull him toward us, and I’ll lean over and take a look.”

It was like moving a wet sandbag. There was nothing on his back except some lank hair and a birthmark, but as the body rested against our abdomens, Bömer swore uncomfortably.

“Too much for you, Richard?”

“Something just leaked out of his prick and onto my shirt,” he said, quickly stepping away from the slab and then staring in horror at a large brown-yellow wound in the center of his belly. “Shit.”

“Close. But not quite.”

“That was a new shirt. Now what am I going to do?” He pulled the material away from the skin of his belly and sighed.

“Haven’t you got a brown one in that trailer of yours?” I joked.

Bömer looked relieved. “Yes, I have.”

“Then shut up and pay attention. Our friend here wasn’t tortured, that much I’m sure of. Anyone using a hot iron on him would have used it more often than once if he’d meant to hurt him.”

“So why do it?”

I lifted one of the hands and bent the fingers into a fist as big as the fuel tank on a small motorcycle.

“Look at the size of these mitts. The scar tissue on the knuckles. Especially here, at the base of each small finger. And do you see this bump?” I let Bömer take a look at a bump that curled all the way around the back of the palm to a point just below the knuckle of the little finger. Then, lowering the left, I lifted the man’s right. “This one’s even more pronounced. This is a common fracture in boxers. I’d say this guy was a southpaw, too, which should help narrow it down a bit. Except that he hadn’t boxed in a while. See the dirt under these fingernails? No boxer would tolerate that. Only the pathologist here didn’t scrape them out, and no detective ought to tolerate that. If the medicine man doesn’t do his job, it’s up to you to put him straight.”

I took out my pocketknife and an Adlon envelope containing Muller’s resignation letter and scraped out what was underneath the dead man’s nails.

“I don’t see what a few crumbs of dirt are going to tell us,” said Bömer.

“Probably nothing. But evidence rarely comes in a large size. And it’s nearly always dirty. Remember that. Now all I need is to see the dead man’s clothes. And I need the use of a microscope for a few minutes.” I glanced around. “As I recall, there’s a laboratory somewhere on this floor.”

He pointed. “In there.”

While Bömer went to fetch the dead man’s clothes, I put the contents of his fingernails into a Petri dish and stared at them for a while underneath a microscope. I was no scientist and no geologist, either, but I knew gold when I saw it. There was just a tiny crumb, but it was enough to catch the light and my attention. And when Bömer came into the lab carrying a cardboard box, I went ahead and told him what I’d found, even though I knew what he was going to say.