An older man with glasses, dressed in a vest and a white shirt, came in and said, “Damn rude to be interrupting a man’s breakfast to talk about the dead.”

“That’s what the taxpayers are paying you for, right? You’re the corpse whisperer.” I turned to his degree and pointed. “Tell me you spilled prune juice on your medical degree, and it’s just drying off somewhere.”

He took out a soda from a small fridge behind his desk and said, “I ain’t no doctor.”

I rubbed my head. Russell Pritcher was going to eat this guy for a snack. Our only hope was the medical examiner.

“Where’s the ME?”

“Your fancy doctor is downstairs. Feel free to find your own way.”

Lawrence Bryce, from the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner, was a tall guy with sandy-blond hair and glasses. I’d met him once before, on a case that involved a banker accused of killing his business partner. Lawrence had flown out to Miami to testify in the case, and, well, I hadn’t exactly been kind to him on the stand.

Lawrence stood beside a metal gurney containing a tarp over what was clearly a body. The room seemed sterile and smelled of antiseptic.

“Larry, how are ya?”

He looked at me and shook his head. “I was told you were the prosecutor on this. I was hoping it was just someone with the same name.”

“Hey, we both had jobs to do and I did mine.”

“You called me the Curly of medical examiners in a courtroom full of people.”

“Hey, Curly’s everyone’s favorite Stooge. It was a compliment.” I folded my arms and looked down at the body. “Let’s set that aside and try to put away the boys that did this, shall we?”

He had been filling out a form on a clipboard, which he set down on the counter. He pulled back the tarp.

Patty’s body had severely decomposed. Will groaned and looked away. Jia didn’t flinch. The Y-shaped incision was fresh, sewn over for the second time. I looked at her nails. They were still painted a fading pink.

“Tell me you got something.”

“Some. Why they let people without medical degrees become coroners in these rural counties I’ll never understand.”

“Yeah, it’s a real mystery. What’dya got?”

“Well, there’s not going to be much forensic evidence after an autopsy and burial, so you can forget about that. But there were a few interesting things. For one, she’s got cigarette burns over her body. That wasn’t in the initial reports.”

“Yeah, goof up by the boys in blue.”

“They’re fairly egregious injuries. I counted twenty-one cigarette burns over her body from head to toe. There was one on her right cornea.”

Will said, “Bastards.”