I was waiting for you.”
She looked into Miranda’s eyes, her own eyes pleading for release from the emotional confusion. Miranda recognized the familiar fear of a brutalized child. She had been the same age when her father died.
Almost immediately Jill rallied and spoke in an even tone. “You know it when someone says goodbye to you and what they mean is forever. I knew this morning that I’d never see her again. But it was like being inside a movie. The more scary it was the more unreal it all seemed. Now it seems real. That’s my mom in there on the table. Isn’t she beautiful?”
“Yes,” said Miranda, “she’s very beautiful. Why the note, Jill?”
“I’m a kid. Kids can’t hang around places like this without permission.”
“Permission?”
“Like school, a note from my mom.” Miranda winced, and Jill smiled at her sweetly. “That’s irony, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Jill, that’s irony. Come on now. Let’s get you home. Is anyone there?”
“Victoria.”
“Your father?”
“My father is deceased,” the girl said with incongruous formality.
“I’m sorry, Jill.”
“It’s okay.” She gazed plaintively at Miranda and then away. “I don’t want my mom to be dead.”
“I know. Come on. Let’s go home.”
“Call me first thing in the morning, Miranda,” said Morgan. “Good night, Jill.” He remained seated while Miranda and Jill walked out through the front entrance, Miranda’s arm draped lightly across the girl’s shoulder, the girl leaning slightly into Miranda’s body, almost as if they were comforting each other.
When they were gone, Morgan picked up a chrome-plated Zippo lighter from the bench and fiddled with the unfamiliar mechanism until it flared into an orange-blue flame that burnt his finger. With a rapid flick of his hand he let the lighter drop to the floor. Then he leaned over, retrieved it, and slipped it into his pocket, where he could feel its residual warmth.
After the time it would have taken him to have a cigarette, Morgan went back into the autopsy room. “The big question is why?” he mumbled as he moved close to Ellen to follow her progress. He was thinking about smokers, not the corpse on the table.
“I can’t tell you that, Morgan. I never know why. No matter how much I cut and probe, I can’t get there. I can slice and dice the brain, but the mind is something else. I know that’s trite, but it’s true. I’ve never seen a soul, either.”
“Maybe you’ll surprise yourself someday and find a cavity the size of a walnut near the hypothalamus, but it’s empty and the occupant has fled. There’s a whole galaxy of souls out there, billions of walnuts rattling along the corridors of heaven. And I don’t even know what you mean by the mind.”
“The potential inherent in the functioning brain for awareness…” She paused and leaned low with a bright light to peer into the depths of the body. “I don’t know, Morgan. You tell me. What is the mind?”
“Maybe it’s like a grasp, something shaped in the air with your hands, the way your fingers move to catch water. It’s not the hand or the water but what they can do. More like the content in a computer, not the hard drive or a memory stick, but the content itself. And it can be erased. Look at her, just like that, and all you’re left with is machinery.”
“Late night at the morgue — the chatter never stops! Can you pour us some coffee? I don’t know how much more I’m going to get out of her tonight.”
Morgan got two cups of coffee and came back. “What about him?” He nodded in the direction of the stainless-steel drawers. “Robert Griffin. What’s the last word?”
“Died from asphyxiation. No trauma to speak of apart from death. His lungs were rosy and plump. Seems to have died without protesting.” She walked to a drawer, pulled it open, and peeled back a white cloth so that Griffin’s face gleamed in the phosphorescent light. “There was a fair dose of Valium in his system. Maybe that explains it. Apart from a little water damage he looks quite passable. Death becomes him, I think.”
“More so than life. He seems to have had an impoverished existence despite his wealth. No family, no friends, an indifferent lover, an obsession with fish. There was no water in his lungs, right?”
“Right.”
“No sign of a struggle?”
“Right. A small cut on his left temple, nothing much.”
“Would there have been blood?”
“I doubt it. It happened, as far as I can tell, virtually at the point of death. There would hardly be any to speak of.”
“Unless someone cleaned it up.”
“Who? He was busy expiring.”
“The killer.”
“I don’t think there was anything much, not if his heart had stopped pumping.”
“But it must have bled a little. I can see veins.”
“His face was underwater.”
“He didn’t drown?”
“Right.”
“But he was asphyxiated?”
“Right.”
“So it was almost as if he co-operated in his own murder, let someone smother him.”
“Possibly.”
“Then maybe he had a burst of air pumped into him, say, from an aerator used for an aquarium. Just to make sure he would float.”
“He was gassy. It must have gone into his gut. Why bother?”
“The killer wanted it to look like suicide but didn’t want him to sink, to remain undiscovered. Or didn’t want us draining the pools.”
“Surely a killer would know we’d find his lungs dry.”
“The killer didn’t expect an autopsy. The killer thought we’d find him, write him off as an accidental drowning or suicide, and that would be that. She could bury him and get on with her life.”
“You think Eleanor Drummond did it?”
“Yeah, that’s what I think. And then killed herself in a sort of Grand Guignol fit of housekeeping.”
“So it’s all wrapped up then?”
“I think the fun has just begun,” said Morgan. “How do we tell victim from villain? What about the daughter? Why the double life of Eleanor Drummond? There’ll be a registered birth for Molly Bray. And what about the fortune in fish? There’s Miranda’s connection —”
“Miranda’s
