Will call when I get a breath, I text him. Dinner? If really late, take-out here while we meet?

My phone immediately chimes and he replies, Will pick up Armando’s.

I answer, Combos with xtra cheese, fresh tomato, peppers, onions. On 1 of them add spinach & artichoke hearts. Say they R for me. I tell him I look forward to seeing him.

It will feel reassuring when Benton appears, when the rest of this afternoon is behind me, and I glance at my watch. It’s twenty-eight minutes past one, and I text Luke about the Howard Roth case, letting him know we need to discuss it and not to release the body yet. I should be back in a few hours, I type, as I move on past the soiled room, the anteroom, the changing rooms and locker rooms, no sign of Luke or anyone, which is typical at this hour, unless we have an unusually heavy caseload.

Beyond anthropology the corridor bends around to the Bio4 containment lab, or what we informally refer to as decomp, reserved for suspected infectious or contaminated or badly decomposed bodies. Pushing a hands-free button that automatically opens a metal door, I walk into an air-locked vestibule and hang up my coat. Grabbing protective clothing off shelves, I push a second button that opens a second door and find Marino covered from the neck down in white Tyvek, checking his camera equipment.

The stretcher bearing the black pouch is parked next to one of three stainless-steel tables attached to wall sinks, and above them observation windows are dark. A clock mounted next to the walk-in cooler reminds me unpleasantly that it’s now one-thirty. I’m supposed to be in court in exactly half an hour, and I continue to hope, at this point rather ridiculously, that I’ll be canceled at the last minute. Or perhaps the trial is running behind schedule and the judge will understand that I am, too.

“Was afraid you got lost,” Marino says, as he covers his bald head with a designer surgical cap, this one a medicine skull that he ties in back like a biker’s do-rag.

“We’ve got a problem case maybe.”

“Not another one.”

“The man who supposedly fell down the stairs,” I explain. “It doesn’t look like a fall to me, unless he went off a ten-story building and hit a few things on the way down. Toby took that call, I believe?”

“He went to the scene and said there was nothing to it.”

I lean against a counter and pull shoe covers over my wet boots.

“Do you know the details?” I ask.

“It’s Machado’s case.”

“Did he attend the autopsy this morning?” I inquire.

“The Portuguese Man of War is always there for gore. Said he was going to. I’ll check with him when I get a minute or drop by his house later and bang on the door.”