He forgot his anger for a moment as he stared at me assessingly, focusing exclusively on my face. Comparing it, I was sure, with the faces of any strangers he’d met the night before. Most people remembered features that could be changed readily—height and weight, eye and hair color, the appearance of teeth, the shape of a nose. Only the visually astute or the very well trained noticed the shape and placement of ears, eyes and mouth.
Beauprix was talented or well-trained or both.
“Flowers. And strawberries,” he said slowly, searching. “A homely woman. Kinda backward. And shy.” Disjointed detail became coherent memory. “Olivia!”
He snapped his fingers, almost shouting the name as a look of triumph and, perhaps, the slightest flicker of admiration swept his face. But his expression hardened almost immediately as his voice turned accusing.
“You! You set that damned fire! Not to mention, you scared my daddy half to death. So maybe we’ll just add arson and property damage to the list of charges—”
I lost my patience. And my temper. It was too early for such nonsense. Besides, I hadn’t had nearly enough coffee that morning. I stuck my arms out toward Beauprix, thumbs touching, wrists limp and hands palms down.
“Go ahead, Officer. Cuff me. Read me my rights. See how far that will get you.”
At that point, the sheer absurdity of the situation must have struck Beauprix. He snorted, gave his head a quick shake and waved his hand in my direction. The gesture was, at best, dismissive.
“Oh, hell, little girl!” he said. “You proved your point. And your uncle won his bet. Just give me back my damned piece and let me get back to work.”
When Uncle Tinh had suggested I remove Beauprix’s gun from his safe, he hadn’t mentioned any bet.
“Bet?” I said as irritation gave way to curiosity. “What bet?”
Beauprix seemed surprised that I didn’t know.
“The bet he and I made,” he said. “When we were arguing about whether I needed your help or not. Which I don’t. And whether you were as good as he said. Which I said you weren’t. And, well, maybe I was wrong in that regard. But, in any event, he said you’d leave a personal message for me. At my home. During my daddy’s birthday party. He said that I was naturally inclined to be pigheaded and it was worth five thousand dollars to him to prove me wrong.”
The old scoundrel, I thought. He’d used me. And it took some effort to keep my expression serious.
“You took the bet,” I said.
He nodded.
“Yeah.”
“And lost. Not only five thousand dollars, but your damned gun.”
“Yeah.”
Then I took a guess.
“And now you’re pissed. Not over the money, which is probably going to some local charity, but because the foxy old bastard outsmarted you. Again.”
He began to nod, then looked at me and grinned instead.
“Yeah,” he said, and almost laughed. “Real pissed.”
He looked down at the pavement again and gave the mangled cigarette a poke with his shoe.
“I used to have a pack-a-day habit. Now I only smoke when I’m pissed.”
I smiled back and revised my opinion of him.
“With a temper like yours, might be better if you cut back to a pack a day again.”
He thought about it for a minute, found the joke and actually did laugh. Then he stepped away from his car and began walking toward the morgue. He didn’t slow his pace to accommodate my shorter stride, but turned his head to talk to me over his shoulder.
“Come on,” he said. “I might as well show you what I’m dealing with. Then you can return my gun, pack your bags and head back up north where you belong.”
The autopsy room was cold and smelled of decay and disinfectant. Pale green ceramic tiles covered the walls and a concrete floor slanted to a drain in the room’s center. Several stainless-steel gurneys—each holding a shrouded cadaver—created an island in the center of the large room. From the doorway where Beauprix and I paused, I could see the cadavers’ feet sticking out from beneath the white sheets. Manila tags dangled from every other big toe. The two walls that ran the length of the room were lined with double rows of shoulder-width, stainless-steel drawers. At the moment, all of the drawers were closed.
We’d come in through a foyer and walked down a short hallway to the autopsy room. Just steps inside the door where we’d entered, there was a battered gray desk where a very thin Caucasian male in a white lab coat was sitting. He was bent forward over the desktop, which gave visitors a top view of thinning, slicked-back hair that was Grecian-Formula-44 dark. At one corner of the desk, nearly at the man’s elbow, was a tower of wire baskets. A basket labeled In was half empty, as was the Out box. The contents of Pending were overflowing onto a folded, greasy paper sack that served as a plate for a half-eaten ham sandwich. A soda can anchored one corner of the sack; dozens of crushed, empty cans filled the wastebasket.
Mayonnaise and yellow mustard had stained several of the papers on the desk, including the one that the man was furiously writing on as he noisily chewed the food in his mouth. He started when Beauprix cleared his throat, looked up quickly to reveal a narrow face and a blob of mustard at one end of a dark, pencil-thin mustache. The movement must have included inhaling a piece of sandwich because he spent the next minute or two choking, sputtering and finally sneezing into a tissue. He looked at Beauprix with teary eyes and I noticed that the tissue had also taken care of the mustard.
“Damn you, Anthony,” he said. “You almost give a man a heart attack.”
He began struggling up from the chair, but Beauprix stopped him.
“Don’t let us interrupt you, Joe. I know the way. If I need you, I’ll just give a shout.”
Joe flashed Beauprix a smile as he settled in his chair and went back to his paperwork.
Beauprix picked up a small blue jar of Vicks from the corner of Joe’s desk. He twisted off the metal lid and put in on the desk before using his little finger to dip into the jar’s gooey contents. I watched as he put a smear on the inside edge of each nostril. Then he casually tossed the jar to me. I caught it, followed his example, then screwed the lid back on before returning the jar to its spot.
“You won’t need these,” Beauprix said, snatching a pair of disposable gloves from a box that was weighing down the contents of the In basket. He pulled on the gloves as he walked around the clutter of newly arrived corpses, moving along the left wall as his graceful strides carried him quickly through the room. He stopped in front of a drawer in the top row, second from the far wall.
I followed more slowly, taking in details. Each drawer had a preprinted number and was sequentially numbered, with 1 prefixing the upper row and 2 prefixing the lower. Most of the drawers also had a more temporary index card with the victim’s name scrawled on it in indelible black marker. The drawer that Beauprix stood beside was labeled 15/Nguyen Tri.
Beauprix looked at me and, when he spoke, his voice was in some middle ground between concern and challenge—a male cop struggling to figure out how to relate to a woman who is not his mother, sister, lover or a hooker or a perp.
“Sure you can you handle this?” he said.
“I’m not a rookie,” I said, implying that my experience with corpses was recent and professional. Certainly the memory of those who had died around me on a small boat in the South China Sea remained vivid.
“All right then,” Beauprix said.
He pulled the drawer and it slid noiselessly open, releasing a draft that briefly intensified the cold and the smell in the room. Inside the