“Sam Schuster,” said Jinnah, taking the offered seat. “Did you work on him?’
Aikens looked at Jinnah, curious.
“More a labour of love, really,” he smiled. “What did you want to know?”
“Whether he committed suicide or was murdered, Doc. Mind if I smoke?”
“I don’t,” shrugged Aikens. “But the bureaucrats who run this place will have a hairy if they smell the demon nicotine sneaking through the air conditioning.”
Jinnah contented himself with a stick of gum. The forensic pathologist sat quietly in his chair, brow furrowed, long, bony index fingers gently rubbing the sides of his lengthy nose. Jinnah waited patiently. Aikens was like this. He never gave a glib answer to important questions. Finally, with a frown, he brought his hands together and flexed his fingertips back and forth slowly.
“Difficult to say,” he pronounced. “A peculiar death either way, no doubt of it.”
“You may have read that certain reporters at my newspaper have no doubts whatever,” said Jinnah, grimacing. “The cops say it’s suicide too.”
“Ah,” said Aikens. “The insurance policy. That, I fear, is leaping to conclusions.”
Jinnah leaned forward very slightly, not wanting to appear too excited.
“You mean he could have been murdered?” he asked.
Aikens stopped massaging his fingertips and placed his hands delicately on the desktop. Jinnah was always struck by how large they were: slender, but long and well-muscled. Then he imagined them with latex gloves on, thought of where those fingers had probed and shuddered. He knew what was coming. Aikens always made him pay for his information: not in money, but emotional currency.
“I think it’s best I show what troubles me,” Aikens said standing.
Jinnah stood and reluctantly followed the pathologist over to the small light table piled with X-ray and photograph files. Aikens found the folder he was looking for near the top and carefully placed it on the glass surface. Jinnah could not help but close his eyes as Aikens opened the brown manila folder.
“Come, come, Mister Jinnah!” Aikens softly chided him. “I’ve shown you worse than this. Remember: in the midst of life we are in death.”
Jinnah opened his eyes and forced himself to look at the two glossy, eight-by-ten photos on either side of the folder. They showed two angles of Sam Schuster, neither of them pleasant. The photo on the right had been taken looking straight down on the upper portion of Schuster’s body. The businessman had his hands up, arms bent at the elbow, fingers forming little black claws. His chest area was a charred, black mess. His face was largely unmarked as far as Jinnah could see. And Robert Chan had been right: Schuster appeared to be wearing sunglasses. Jinnah realized it was the light of the camera flash reflected off the soot covering the lenses of normal reading glasses.
“As you can see, there is considerable damage to the thorax,” said Aikens, using a pen as a pointer and circling the image of Schuster’s chest. “From this and the position in which the body was found, lying beside the vehicle, we can deduce that Mister Schuster was hit with a sudden burst of intense flame emanating from the interior of the Cadillac.”
“What do you mean, considerable?” asked Jinnah, wincing.
“Came out like a blow-torch, my dear man,” said Aikens, suppressing a small smile. “There must have been rather a lot of gasoline inside that car.”
“Bloody awful way to go — having your chest burned out like that,” said Jinnah with feeling.
“Spoken like a true smoker. But no, that is not the direction in which death approached. The autopsy showed that Mister Schuster’s lungs were seared on the inside, as were his throat and nasal passages.”
“He breathed in fire?”
“Super-heated gases, actually,” corrected Aikens. “Rather like taking a good lungful of the heady atmosphere of the outer layers of the sun’s heliosphere.”
“Jesus Christ!” muttered Jinnah. “Was it quick?”
“Never knew what hit him — presuming he didn’t set the fire himself.”
“Were his hands free?” asked Jinnah, looking closely at Schuster’s claws.
“No,” said Aikens. “At least, I don’t think so. You see how the victim’s hands and arms are positioned, so. Typical death response.”
“That suggests his hands were loose.”
“Ah, but a minute inspection of his wrists and cuffs showed fibres from the same kind of bindings that secured his feet, so.”
Aikens moved his pen over to the right-hand photograph, which captured Schuster’s lower body. Despite the smoke and soot obscuring much of the detail on his pelvis and legs, Jinnah could tell Schuster’s ankles were bound.
“Could he have tied the knots himself?” he asked.
Aikens frowned again, the deep lines forming triangular ridges that marched back from his eyebrows and up his forehead almost as far as his hairline. His mouth made noiseless little “pum-pum” motions as he considered what they both knew was a crucial point. Jinnah took the opportunity to stuff another stick of gum into his mouth. He was over his initial squeamishness. Sam Schuster had ceased to be another human being who had met an horrific end. He had become a puzzle — an important intellectual distinction that helped ease Jinnah’s delicate stomach.
“I am not an expert at ligatures,” Aikens said finally. “But my anecdotal experience suggests that it is unlikely he could have done so.”
Jinnah’s heart skipped a beat at the word “unlikely.” Aikens was, of course, being modest. His anecdotal experience was more extensive than most so-called expert’s specialized knowledge.
“So could it have been murder?” he prompted.
“Mister Jinnah, I am increasingly of the opinion that it will take a panel of good citizens and a coroner to make that determination.”
“Damned peculiar way to commit suicide.”
“Oh, I’ve seen some very odd suicides indeed, Mister Jinnah,” said Aikens, smiling. “This is no more unusual than the chap in East Vancouver who had an elaborate gallows tripped by a bag of potatoes he’d attached to an automatic peeling machine —”
“Please!” said Jinnah, holding up a hand. “Don’t remind me!”
“— and I imagine someone could go to extraordinary lengths to make suicide look like murder for the sake of ten million dollars.”
“So you think Grant and the cops are right? Suicide?”
“Jinnah, what I am saying is, there is a giant element of doubt. We might be able to say something more definitive if we had ligatures around the wrists to look at, but we don’t. But consider this, if you will: If a man wants to make it look like his life is in danger and has an accident — drops a match when he shouldn’t, for instance — is it suicide, or death by misadventure?”
This caught Jinnah by surprise. He looked at Aikens in what he hoped was a penetrating manner, but the white, oval face gave nothing away.
“You are talking in riddles, Doc,” he said carefully. “You have information which is not strictly forensic, I presume.”
Aikens smiled and flipped through the photographs. This too was a ritual. Aikens was bound by his own strict code of ethics. He did not speak out of turn, did not pass on gossip. But he did know that a well-placed news story turned up facts in areas where he could not explore. And Rex Aikens cared about his corpses. They were his charges who deserved the truth about their ends, even if, in some cases, they did not want the truth to come out. But the pathologist also believed in letting reporters