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  Ezra stepped closer to the body of young Kevin Peters; close enough to feel the deep cold coming off of the dead skin in waves, a cold that only days before had been the warmth of a vital, living boy. He’d been a country boy, had Kevin Peters; from Barnhill, and that meant that the boy had probably spent some time baling hay when he wasn’t learning how to throw a sinker or seam up a double play. He almost seemed too big for a shortstop; the kid had some muscle. “Where was he found?” he asked. “Paint me a picture.”

  “Painting is a bit outside my realm,” Doctor Leonard said. He stood next to Ezra and joined him in looking down at the body: the long arms, the broad chest with just the hint of fuzzy hair across the pecs, the smooth, white stomach. Kevin Peters had big hands and long fingers; the dead boy’s hands had been as talented as Leonard’s, just in a different way- a way that would have brought the boy much more prestige than the doctor, had he lived and gone pro. “Why don’t you just look at the crime scene photos? I can bring them up right now.”

  “Because,” Ezra said, grabbing the young doctor by the shoulder as he went to turn away, “I’m not supposed to be looking at any of this at all, ya get? You bring up those pics on your vidscreen and it’s going to send a nice little ping across the network, let anyone who’s associated with this ‘closed’ case know that someone’s looking into it. We don’t want that. Now. Just take a moment, and then you tell me about it. Isn’t the human mind supposed to be the most powerful computer in the world?”

  “The power of the hardware varies,” Leonard said. “But I like to think mine’s bleeding edge. Okay.” The young doctor closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. “Mister Peters was found in his apartment on East Laird Avenue. There’s a whole complex of apartments there, attached to the university, and he’d been moving into one in advance of his upcoming collegiate career. His parents got nervous when he wouldn’t answer his phone- they’d already been scared about their darling boy all alone in the big city, wanted him to go to Wuster. Wuster is for actual scholarly pursuits though, not jocks on a sportsball scholarship.”

  “You’re wandering off the path,” Ezra said. “I get it- you’re a brain and the meatheads at school gave you a hard time. That’s not what we’re talking about.”

  “Right,” Doctor Leonard said. “So, his folks couldn’t get him on the phone and they called the school. The school sent a security guy over to the apartment, which was locked up and dark. No one responded when the security guy pounded on the door. The apartment looked empty. The kid’s car was parked in the slot corresponding to his apartment. The HCGD was brought in. A pair of Striders forced the door and there he was- Kevin Peters, dead in a folding chair among some half unpacked boxes in the living room of the apartment.”

  “And he was just sitting there?” Ezra said. “Upright? How come he didn’t fall out onto the floor?”

  Doctor Leonard nodded. “See, that’s where my powers of description fail us,” he said. “I said folding chair and you thought of one of those uncomfortable pieces of prefab plastic that get hauled out of the back room for a church social, all the young bucks trying to carry ten at a time to impress the young ladies of the congregation. Mister Peters was sitting in one of those unfolding fabric camp chairs, the ones old folks set out along the gutters to watch a parade. This particular folding chair had arms, complete with cup holders, and a high back, and a low seat. He was slumped over, but still in the chair. Even I have a hard time hauling myself up outta one of those things.”

  “And he was fully dressed?”

  “Pair of jeans and a white undershirt,” Leonard said. “No socks or shoes. He was a country boy- growing up, shoes would have come off in the mudroom. Can’t be tracking whatever you stepped in out there in the fields all through the kitchen and over the old hooked rug your grandmother made.”

  Ezra grunted. “Your powers of description seem all right to me,” he said. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

  “It’s an easy picture to paint,” Leonard said.

  “Cup in this camp chair’s cup holder?”

  “Nope.”

  Ezra let out a disgusted breath. “I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do with any of this, kid. This guy is just dead. I guess it happens sometimes. It has to, right? One of those things. ‘We see as through a glass darkly,’ and all that shit.”

  “Please don’t call me kid,” Leonard said.

  “What’s that?”

  The doctor looked up at Ezra. It seemed to cost him something on the inside, but he kept direct eye contact with the Guard as he spoke. “Please don’t call me kid,” he said again. “Look, I know I’m young. I know you probably don’t even mean anything by it, that’s just how you are. You’re the kind of guy who commands, you walk big and talk big, and you call people stuff like ‘kid’ and ‘red’ and ‘haystack.’ But I’ve worked damn hard to get where I am. I’m not a lab assistant or a messenger boy. I’m a doctor. So I would appreciate it if you called me Doctor Leonard. Or, if you prefer it, you can call me Forest.”

  Ezra studied the young doctor for a second. Leonard was a little guy, and wicked smart, and Ezra could see that he would have had a hard go of it all through school. He was the kind of kid who got his books shoved out of his hands in the hall between classes, all the girls he’d never have a chance with giggling while the big boys flexed; the kid who got shoved on the stairs, and maybe he’d right himself or maybe he’d fall and get some nasty scrapes and bruises- or a break.

  “Okay,” Ezra said. “Forest it is, then. And I’ll be Ezra. Okay?”

  “Okay. Now then, Ezra, let me show you the reason why I didn’t want to close up this investigation- despite some rather forceful opposition.” Doctor Leonard pulled a pair of blue gloves from a pocket of his lab coat and snapped them on his hands with a practiced ease (Ezra himself always struggled with the damnable things and tore at least one pair to shreds before successfully getting his hands into them). The young Chief ME took hold of the body at the wrist and elbow and carefully turned the left forearm, presenting the underside. The skin there was fishbelly white; even in the height of summer it would have been- the kid came from Barnhill, and he’d had a classic case of farmer’s tan that was still noticeable even now that his body was blue-tinged and days cold.

  Ezra looked at the proffered arm for a long time. All he saw was the strong limb of what had been a young man at the height of his physical prowess. This, the left arm, was just slightly thinner than the right, which would have been his dominant one- making him right-handed. Kevin Peters had very little body hair; the arm was bare and smooth. Ezra bent over the body, eyes only inches away from the upturned arm, focusing everything he had on it. Eventually he stood up straight again (telling himself that he was too young to have felt a twinge at the small of his back as he did so), and raised his eyebrows at the doctor. “I’m not seeing whatever it is you’re trying to show me, Forest,” he said. “Wanna help me out?”

  “I didn’t notice at first either,” the young doctor said. “It was later, when I was trying to stall for time because I hate a mystery and so decided to catalog birth marks, moles, and freckles, that I saw them. They’re very faint. Look here.” He raised the dead man’s arm, holding it awkwardly by the wrist with his left hand, and swung over a high intensity magnifying lamp that hung down from the ceiling on a white plastic arm. He pulled the light down close, almost touching the body, and focused it at a point just below the creases of the elbow.

  Ezra looked through the magnifying lens, frowning. After a moment he saw a few faint marks; barely discernable black smudges, almost like scuff marks on a white wall that had been scrubbed and rinsed over and over again by a careful hand- but never completely eliminated. There was no way he would have ever seen them on his own, but there they were.

  “And here,” Doctor Leonard said. He pulled the lamp down to the wrist, and there were more of the faint marks.

  “Okay,” Ezra said. “I see them now. But what do they m
ean? It almost looks like residue left over from dusting for prints- except we don’t even use that stuff anymore.”

  Doctor Leonard swung the lamp away again. He took hold of the arm with both hands, gripping it at the wrist and just below the elbow. His fingers went over the faint black marks on the skin. “You see?” he said. “The marks are barely there, but it’s like someone was holding his arm and left bruises on it.”

  Ezra shook his head. “Never seen bruises like that,” he said. “Even if they were, they’d have to be from days ago- weeks ago, to be so faint. They almost look like…”

  “What?” Doctor Leonard said. There was a gleam in his green eyes, beneath the round lenses of his old-fashioned spectacles. “They almost look like what, Ezra?”

  “Burns,” Ezra said. “Those marks almost look like electrical burns. But that makes even less sense.”

  “Yeah,” Doctor Leonard said. Ezra didn’t think the young doctor was conscious of it, but he was drumming his gloved fingers against the cadaver’s arm as he ruminated. “When I was a kid, my mom and dad took me to a magic show for my birthday one year. They were always taking me to stuff- the circus when it was somewhere close, basketball games, the zoo. They thought I would love it, but I didn’t. In fact, I hated that magic show. There were a pair of magicians. One was this really huge tall guy, and he looked and talked like one of those gold old bible-thumping televangelists, sweating and gesticulating in his three piece suit. His partner was a small man, and he never spoke. It was their act, you know.”

  Ezra nodded. He didn’t know where the young doctor was off to on this tangent, but one of Ezra Beckitt’s investigation tips was: let someone talk when they feel like talking. “Yeah, I remember them. Fun stuff.”

  “Not to me it wasn’t,” Doctor Leonard said. “They did all the usual magic stuff. You know, cut the buxom showgirl in half with a power saw, some card tricks, all of it with the big guy’s color commentary and the little guy’s facial takes. At the end of the show they did the bullet trick. They stood facing each other from opposite sides of the stage, each of them armed with a revolver into which a member of the audience had loaded one round that they, the two audience members, had marked with their initials and a little symbol- a smiley face on the one, that old hippie peace sign on the other. Then they shot each other in the face. The reports were like thunder. When the smoke cleared, the audience went wild. Both of the magicians had a bullet caught in his teeth and on inspection the bullets had, of course, those initials and doodles on them.”

  “Hell of a trick,” Ezra said.

  “I hated it,” Doctor Leonard said. “I absolutely hated the fact that it had to be a trick- had to be!- but I couldn’t figure out how it worked. I was being played for a sucker, but even at the age of eleven I was smart enough to know that I was being played for a sucker, and I couldn’t stand it. My parents just couldn’t understand what I was so upset about. That trick plagued my mind, High Guard Beckitt- Ezra. It tasked me. I don’t like to be fooled, and I don’t like tricks. That’s why science became my focus- it explains everything…and if it hasn’t explained it yet, it will in time. And this,” he went on, gesturing at the body on its cold metal slab, “this feels like a trick. There’s no reason for this kid to be dead, none at all that I can see. I keep expecting the damn kid to sit up, sneak up on me at my desk, and slap me upside the head before running out of here laughing like a damned jackass.”

  Ezra looked back down at the body of Kevin Peters, promising young student and possible pro baseball prospect, a country boy from the tiny burg of Barnhill. “Yeah, I get what you mean, Forest,” he said. “But what can ya do? I can’t go back upstairs and demand that a closed case be reopened on account of some…scuff marks on the arm of a body. We got no cause. Also, I don’t know what grounds I could possibly call on for it, ya get? You tell me. What would I say?”

  “I don’t know,” Doctor Leonard said.

  “And then there’s the other High Guards,” Ezra went on. He was talking fast, and he wondered why; who was he trying to convince so hard about letting this thing go? What thing, he thought. Nothin here but a dead kid. It’s terrible that someone so young, with everything going for him, should be dead- but so what? People die every day. “You’re young, you’re new- and you don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with these guys. Best to let this one go, Forest. Mister Peters is dead. His family is going to come and collect him soon, and start the long process of grieving for him and doing their best to get on with their lives. That’s it.”

  Doctor Leonard looked like he wanted to say something else. Then he only nodded his head. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I guess so. Sometimes, you don’t figure it out. Life goes on…until it doesn’t anymore.” With that, he tucked the body of Kevin Peters back into his shroud and then zipped up the heavy rubber body bag and rolled it back into the locker. When the stainless steel door shut, the sound seemed very loud to High Guard Ezra Beckitt. Very loud, and very final.

  “Hey, Forest,” Ezra said, turning the young doctor back around as he was heading for his desk. “That bullet catch trick- did ya figure it out?”

  Doctor Leonard smiled. “Nope,” he said. “I never did. Years later, those two magicians went on a crusade, debunking the sort of people who sell holistic medicine as legitimate science and railing against religion. Also, they pissed off the magic world by doing a series of specials where they revealed how their illusions were accomplished. One of the tricks they showed was that bullet catch, and I don’t know what infuriated me more- the fact that I couldn’t figure that trick out until they showed me, or the little guy opening up his mouth and talking.”

  Ezra nodded. “I’ll see you around, Leonard,” he said. “Maybe sometime I’ll take you up on that offer for a drink over at Wallace’s.”

  Doctor Leonard raised half a grin, and opened up on Ezra with a double dose of the old finger guns. “Later on, megalodon,” he said. Ezra shook his head and pushed his way out through the swinging steel doors of Purgatory.

  Three

  Ezra didn’t even have a chance to push the elevator’s call button before the doors whispered open in front of him, releasing the huge form of High Guard First Class Mitchell Bronson. Bronson was one of those guys who was always in a hurry for people to get out of his way, even if he himself broke out in a greasy sweat if he managed to get up to a brisk walk. He shoved his way through the doors before they were even open all the way, turning himself sideways to do it. Then he saw Ezra and just stood there, sweating and breathing hard through his nose.

  Mitchell Bronson was a big guy. He wasn’t as fat as Ezra’s old partner from his rookie days, who had left a broken bucket seat and a permanently bent steering wheel behind him in their old Crown Miranda, but big. There was some muscle still on his large frame, in the shoulders and arms, but most of him was just running to fat. He shaved his head because he was going bald; his head was lumpy and the waxy white color of a cheese that sat out all day on a picnic table, beaded with moisture; the back of his neck looked like a pack of hot dogs. He was forty-three. At the last Guards speed-pitch softball tournament he’d put away three cases of beer and needed someone to run the bases for him when he managed to get hold of a fat pitch and blast one into the outfield. With any luck he’d have himself a big old coronary event in the near future and roll off the skin of the world like a mortally harpooned walrus- or get himself shot in some lace-cunnie’s crib with his pants around his ankles and his gun in its holster, as Wendt had.

  “Well well,” Bronson said. “The hero of Dream Street. What brings ya down so low from yer high tower? Don’t tell me it’s some actual case work.”

  Ezra smiled. “Thought it was about time to meet the new sawbones,” he said.

  “Kid’s some kind of weird, no mistake,” Bronson said. “First Loveless turns up nuts, now we get this puny freakshow. You know, maybe it’s somethin about the work- cuttin up dead bodies all day, lookin into their works, all that. I was kinda hoping that th
is time around we’d get one of them hot girl doctors. You know- red hair up in a bun, thick black glasses, tits busting outta the top of that lab coat. But, no such luck.”

  “I’m pretty sure that kind of ME only exists in your skinvids,” Ezra said. “But keep lookin, chummy.” He clapped Bronson on the upper arm, hard, (son of a bitch still had some muscle to him, he was like a shaved bear in his billowing dress shirt and tent-sized slacks), and went to move past him and get on the elevator. The doors slid shut with him still on the wrong side though, because Bronson moved his bulk in front of them to block the way.

  “That’s real funny, Beckitt,” Bronson said. “But see, I’m not so much in a laughing mood. I got a pretty good idea what you’re doin down here, and I don’t like it.”

  “That right?”

  “That’s right,” Bronson said. “See, I heard you was havin a little chat with your old pal Gorton. Maybe you was just reminiscing about how ya used to hold hands at the academy, but I don’t know- maybe you was talking about some case, and how our boy wonder of an ME thought there was something a little hinky about it. Maybe you came down here for a little looksee. That right?”

  “Maybe,” Ezra said. “What’s it to ya?”

  Bronson glowered down at his fellow High Guard. He had the dead-eye stare down pat, Mitchell Bronson did; the thing about that stare, though, was that every Guard had it in his repertoire- it worked on shivering junkies in the interrogation room, but had little to no effect on a brother. “What it is to me,” Bronson said, “is my case. My cleared case. Kid’s dead, Beckitt. He was young, and he had a lot going for him, but sometimes folks just cash out and that’s how it plays. No greater mystery than that.”

  “That’s not what Doctor Leonard thinks,” Ezra said, staring blandly back into Bronson’s narrow brown eyes.