“What about the owner of the Mercedes? I guess he still hasn’t turned up?”

“Wilmington P.D.’s got his house under surveillance,” Marino answered. “They’ve looked through windows, sniffed through the mail slot to see if anyone’s decomposing in there. But so far, nothing. It’s like he disappeared in thin air, and we don’t have probable cause to bust in his door.”

“He’s how old?”

“Forty-two. Brown hair and eyes, five-foot-eleven and weighs one-sixty.”

“Well, someone must know where he is or at least when he was seen last. You don’t just walk away from a practice and not have anyone notice.”

“So far it’s looking like he has. People have been driving up to his house for appointments. They haven’t been called or nothing. He’s a no-show. Neighbors haven’t seen him or his car in at least a week. Nobody noticed him driving off, either with somebody or alone. Now apparently some old lady who lives next door spoke to him the morning of June fifth—the Thursday before the fire. They was both picking up their newspapers at the same time, and waved and said good morning. According to her, he was in a hurry and not as friendly as usual. At the moment, that’s all we got.”

“I wonder if Claire Rawley might have been his patient.”

“I just hope he’s still alive,” Marino said.

“Yes,” I said with feeling. “Me, too.”

A medical examiner is not an enforcement officer of the law, but an objective presenter of evidence, an intellectual detective whose witnesses are dead. But there were times when I did not care as much about statutes or definitions.

Justice was bigger than codes, especially when I believed that no one was listening to the facts. It was little more than intuition when I decided Sunday morning at breakfast to visit Hughey Dorr, the farrier who had shoed Sparkes’s horses two days before the fire.

The bells of Grace Baptist and First Presbyterian churches tolled as I rinsed my coffee cup in the sink. I dug through my notes for the telephone number one of the ATF fire investigators had given to me. The farrier, which was a modern name for an old-world blacksmith, was not home when I called, but his wife was, and I introduced myself.

“He’s in Crozier,” she said. “Will be there all day at Red Feather Point. It’s just off Lee Road, on the north side of the river. You can’t miss it.”

I knew I could miss it easily. She was talking about an area of Virginia that was virtually nothing but horse farms, and quite frankly, most of them looked alike to me. I asked her to give me a few landmarks.