Mercy 6

Claiborne went to Dozier, who was first in line. That was strange, too, the way the beds were ordered: Dozier, Fleming, Verdasco, then the empty steel for Peterson, the four aligned in a neat slant rather than squared.

“Him again,” said Claiborne, nodding toward Mullich. “They’re arranged according to the floors they were found on.”

The others followed him to Dozier.

“Look at him first,” he told Mendenhall. “Head and neck. Then go to the scans.”

“Scans? You took scans?”

“You’ll see.”

She crouched to get a level profile of Dozier. The skull was balanced on the occipital, cleanly presenting throat and nape. His beard had been combed into a point. His lips were in repose, not yet slipping into grimace. With two fingers, she palpitated what could have been slight swelling beneath his Adam’s apple. “Maybe something there.” She shrugged. “Not worth a scan. I thought you would just run an X-ray.”

Claiborne led her to the side table, a stand-up metal desk, out of place because of the lamp and pens and books and paperweights, little gifts. He flicked on one display above the desk, showing the X-ray. He left the one with the CT dark.

“I did what you just did,” Claiborne told her. “I looked at him, pressed his throat, then walked to the X-ray.” He nodded to the X-ray. “So I wasn’t expecting that.”

The display showed diagonal occlusion from occipital to throat, the point of minor swelling. Mendenhall squinted. There was a path of displacement and internal bleeding through the neck.

“So we ran this.”

The scan clearly showed that the spinal cord and vertebrae were clean. The trauma was all capillary bleeding, all in the tissue, the major vessels and bone clean and undamaged. The skin appeared intact, certainly no wounds.

“Does that mean no infection?” asked Mullich.

“Nuh-uh.” Claiborne kept looking at the scan. “It just seems a little too clearly defined for infection.”

“You’d expect it to wander more,” Mendenhall explained.

“Infection.”

“But I have seen linear infection paths.” Claiborne drew the diagonal across the scan.

“Yeah,” said Mendenhall. “Following a stab line. A long puncture.”

“I’ve seen fungals a little like this.” He looked at the tech. “I showed you that one. Absolutely geometric. Crystalline.”

Mendenhall grabbed a horn-rimmed magnifying glass from the desk and went back to Dozier’s body. Only after she began the move did she sense transgression on her part, a passing of Claiborne. The tech and Mullich turned with her but did not step, just broke formation, torn and hesitant.

She bent close to Dozier’s throat, lens held above the tiny swelling.

Claiborne led the others to Dozier, bringing a wireless otoscope.

With precision, he took the magnifying glass from Mendenhall’s fingers and gave her the scope. It was laser-aimed. The halogen light was intense enough to turn Dozier’s dark skin translucent.

Mendenhall’s pan was transmitted to a large overhead screen. They saw what she saw. The view was near-microscopic: dead skin cells sloughing, pores gaping, curled whiskers rooted.

“I see a line.” Mendenhall drew the laser along a straight path of sloughed skin cells. She lifted her eyes to Claiborne.

“From shaving,” he said. “A week ago, I’d guess. You can find a dozen of them on his throat. You’ll find some more on the nape, especially around the occipital. When we turn him over.” He nodded to the tech. “Tilt him.”

With a delicate lift of Dozier’s shoulder, the tech presented the nape and the base of the skull for Mendenhall.

“I need to get me one of these,” said Mendenhall. She raised the scope a little to clarify that she was speaking about it, not the tech, though she might have meant both. She sought refuge in the close view of Dozier’s skin, the epidural landscape. She did see more of those lines, not cuts, not scarring, just cells scraped evenly by a razor, days ago, weeks ago. She saw the salt crystals of Dozier’s dried sweat.

Claiborne cleared his throat. The tech shuffled her feet. Mullich remained quiet. She could sense him waiting, not just watching.

She found a cluster of blood cells clinging to the corner of a salt crystal. Moving diagonally just below the occipital, she found another. Following the same line, she slid her view up the periphery and found a third cluster, dried purple, trapped in a sheer on the base of a salt crystal.

“I see a blood line.”

She knew Claiborne was wagging his head.

“She found three dried blood-cell clusters on a hospital janitor.

On a guy who’d been doing repairs all day. And the day before. And the day before that. In fact, you’re just finding a case for Thorpe.

Blood contact.”

“The three form a line,” replied Mendenhall. She traced the laser along the line. It wasn’t quite perfect, with one cluster just on the other side of the line. Then she straightened to address Mullich.

“Any two points form a line. But a third point determines, no?”

Mullich shrugged.

Claiborne stepped closer to her.