Avenging Angel Read Free Page B

complete and modern forensics laboratory outside the FBI lab back at Washington. What the brochure did not say was that the department budget had not yet authorized any more people; most of the new equipment and space was still unused. Call it planning ahead: in another twenty years, the Denver area was supposed to double in size because of Colorado’s energy boom. Then the lab would be too small.
    Baird was at his desk along one of the walls that caught light from the tinted and sealed windows high above the street. Somewhere behind the tangle of glass piping and chrome stands a Bunsen burner gave its soft hiss and an unseen hand clinked a stirring rod. Baird glanced up when he heard Wager’s shoes on the tile floor. “There’s the report on the clothing—I got that done last night. Working overtime. Your copy’s on top.”
    Wager glanced down the slip. “It doesn’t say much.
    “Don’t blame me.”
    The victim’s pockets had yielded lint and dust of a non-definitive nature. The cuffless trousers had a little bit more: a couple of seeds that had not been identified, and a film of dust trapped in the vacuum bag. Both were on their way by registered mail to the FBI for classification. The shoes, too, had been delicately cleaned and the scrapings of each packaged and forwarded. The label from inside the coat was from a men’s store in Salt Lake City, Utah; no other identifying labels or laundry marks had been found.
    “How long—”
    “Possibly twelve to twenty-four hours.” Baird, thinning hair showing his pink crown, did not look up as he finished the form with signature and date. “The coroner will pin it down better. Let’s go.”
    The basement of Denver General Hospital served as the morgue for DPD. Wager drove, then followed as Baird, lugging his metal case, stenciled DPD LAB—FINGERPRINT , walked through the tiled and echoing halls to the cool room with its bank of drawers like a gigantic filing cabinet. A young orderly who looked slightly hung over rolled out the drawer. A puff of cold, artificially scented air came with it. “Give me a call when you’re finished.”
    “Right.”
    Baird pulled off the coarse sheet. The body, its torn chest black from the blood dried beneath the bruised skin and mottled with lividity marks on buttocks and shoulders, stared with half-open eyes at the fluorescent panels of the ceiling. In the field, Wager seldom looked closely at a victim’s face—a glance, maybe, for identification, then he focused on the wound and the body in general and especially on the site. It made the corpse seem less human, less a perversion of the everyday world. But here in the antiseptic glare of the morgue, the humanness was washed away and he could study the face as if it were an object under glass. Now he saw the victim more clearly than he had when it lay in the field. In this flat light he could see that the gray-streaked hair had receded far up the man’s curving forehead; at the side of his neck, like hashmarks leading up to the hairy earlobes, sharp wrinkles creased the dry skin. The prominent nose and eyebrows marked a narrow face that was already losing its strong characteristics. The gaping lips, which had never been full, now looked like a razor slash through the gray flesh. Wager made a few notes in his little green book.
    “You find any needle tracks?”
    “No. But the doc’ll have to look at the organs to know for sure if he was a user.”
    “You figure he’s around fifty?”
    Baird looked up from rummaging in the shelves of his open kit and squinted at the face. “Yeah—he looks like it. We’ll try to pin it down a little closer for you.”
    He laid out his equipment on a wheeled table and began to fold a pair of disposable rubber gloves over his fingers. “I’m not sure how long this is going to take, Wager. There’s bound to be some decay already set in. A whole day lying in that sun…”
    The statement called for no reply. Wager watched as Baird cupped a