“But how can you know that when none of the victims has ever been identified? Couldn’t it just be someone who kills for sport? Like, say, your Son of Sam, for example?”

“What the Son of Sam did had a sexual element,” I said, looking around for my pathologist friend. “Do you know how much longer she might be? I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

Shaw glanced at his watch again. “You can check. Or I suppose she may have gone on to the morgue. We have a case coming in. A young male, suspected suicide.”

“I’ll see if I can find her.” I got up.

Off the hallway near the entrance was the coroner’s court, where inquests for unnatural deaths were held before a jury. This included industrial and traffic accidents, homicides and suicides, the proceedings in camera, for the press in Ireland was not allowed to print many details. I ducked inside a stark, chilly room of varnished benches and naked walls, and found several men inside, tucking paperwork into briefcases.

“I’m looking for the coroner,” I said.

“She slipped out about twenty minutes ago. Believe she had a viewing,” one of them said.

I left the building through the back door. Crossing a small parking lot, I headed to the morgue as an old man came out of it. He seemed disoriented, almost stumbling as he looked about, dazed. For an instant, he stared at me as if I held some answer, and my heart hurt for him. No business that had brought him here could possibly be kind. I watched him hurry toward the gate as Dr. Margaret Foley suddenly emerged after him, harried, her graying hair disarrayed.

“My God!” She almost ran into me. “I turn my back for a minute and he’s gone.”

The man let himself out, the gate flung open wide as he fled. Foley trotted across the parking lot to shut and latch it again. When she got back to me, she was out of breath and almost tripped over a bump in the pavement.

“Kay, you’re out and about early,” she said.

“A relative?” I asked.

“The father. Left without identifying him, before I could even pull back the sheet. That will foul me up the rest of the day.”

She led me inside the small brick morgue with its white porcelain autopsy tables that probably belonged in a medical museum and old iron stove that heated nothing anymore. The air was refrigerated-chilly, modern equipment nonexistent except for electric autopsy saws. Thin gray light seeped through opaque skylights, barely illuminating the white paper sheet covering a body that a father could not bear to see.

“It’s always the hardest part,” she was saying. “No one should ever have to look at anyone in here.”

I followed her into a small storeroom and helped carry out boxes of new syringes, masks and gloves.

“Strung himself up from the rafters in the barn,” she went on as we worked. “Was being treated for a drink problem and depression. More of the same. Unemployment, women, drugs. They hang themselves or jump off bridges.” She glanced at me as we restocked a surgical cart. “Thank God we don’t have guns. Especially since I don’t have an X-ray machine.”