6

Not every room in the morgue echoed, Garreth reflected. The autopsy room with its row of troughlike steel tables did not. It always sounded horribly quiet . . . no footsteps or casual chatter, only the droning voices of the pathologists dictating their findings into the microphones dangling from the ceiling and the whisper of running water washing down the tables, carrying away the blood.

The Oriental doctor had already opened the abdominal cavity and removed the viscera when Garreth came in and stood at the head of the table, hands buried in his suit coat pockets. She nodded a greeting at him, never breaking her monologue.

The water ran clear this time, Garreth noticed. Even that in the sink at the foot of the table, usually rosy from the organs floating in it awaiting sectioning, sat colorless. The doctor examined the organs one at a time, slicing them like loaves of bread with quick, sure strokes of her knife and peering at each section . . . and tossing some slices into specimen containers. She opened the trachea its full length and snipped apart the heart to check each of its chambers and valves. As Garreth watched, a crease appeared between her eyes. She moved back to the empty gray shell that had been a man and went over the skin surface carefully, even rolling the body on its side to peer at the back. She explored the edges of the neck wound.

The neck had another mark, too, Garreth noticed, one that had been hidden before by the dead man's shirt. A thin red line ran around, biting deep on the sides. A mark from a chain ripped off?

"Trouble?" he asked.

She looked up. "Exsanguination—blood loss—is indeed the cause of death. However . . ."

Garreth waited expectantly.

"It did not result from the throat wound. That was inflicted after death. So was the broken neck. The cord is completely severed but there's no hemorrhage into it."

Déjà vu struck again. Death by bleeding, wounds and a broken neck inflicted after death. Now he knew he had knowledge of a previous crime with similar circumstances. Garreth bit his lip, straining to remember the previous case.

"He didn't bleed to death internally and I can't find any exterior wound to account for—"

There had been something else strange about that bruise on the other man. Now, what had it been? "What about the bruise?" he interrupted.

". . . for a blood loss of that magnitude," the doctor went on with a frown at Garreth, "unless we assume that the punctures in the jugular vein were made by needles and the blood drained that way."

That was the other thing about the bruise!

"Two punctures, right? An inch or so apart, in the middle of the bruise?"

She regarded him gravely. "I could have used your crystal ball before I began, Inspector. It would have saved me a great deal of work."

Garreth smiled. Inside, however, he swore. He remembered that much, those facts, but still nothing that could help him locate the case in the files, not a victim or detective's name.

The remainder of the autopsy proceeded uneventfully. Lack of water in the lungs established that the victim had been dead before entering the water. The skull and brain showed no signs of bruises or hemorrhage to indicate that he might have been struck and knocked unconscious. The stomach contained no food, only liquid.

"Looks like he died some time after his last meal. We'll analyze the liquid," the doctor said.

Garreth bet it would prove alcoholic.

When the body was on its way back to its locker, Garreth prepared to leave. He had missed lunch but had no appetite. Perhaps he should just go on to the hotel. At least the fog had burned off, leaving a bright, clear day.

Before leaving the morgue, he called up to the office. Kolb answered. "Is there a message from the Denver P.D. with descriptions of some men's jewelry?" he asked her.

She went to look and came back on the line in a minute. "No, but there's a message to call—damn, I wish Faye would learn to write legibly. I think the name is Ellen or Elvis Hague or Hugie. I can't read the number at all."

"Never mind. I think I know." Mrs. Elvira Hogue was one of the witnesses to the Mission Street liquor store shooting. He looked up the number in his notebook and dialed it. "Mrs. Hogue? This is Inspector Mikaelian. You wanted to talk to me?"

"Yes." Her thin, old-woman's voice came back over the wire. "I saw the boy who did it, and I learned his name."

Garreth whooped silently. Once in a while the breaks came their way! "What is it?"

"You remember I told you I've seen him in the neighborhood before? Well, he was here this morning again, bold as brass, talking to that Hambright girl up the street. I walked very close to them and I heard her call him Wink."

"Mrs. Hogue, you're a wonderful lady. Thank you very much."

"You just catch that shtunk. Mr. Chmelka was a nice gentleman."

Garreth headed for R and I—records and identification—to check the name Wink through the moniker file. They came up with a make, one Leroy Martin Luther O'Hare, called Wink, as in "quick as a," for the way he snatched purses in his juvenile delinquency days by sweeping past victims on a skateboard. Purse snatching had been only one of his offenses. Wink added burglary and auto theft to his yellow sheet as he approached legal adulthood, though he had not been convicted of either charge.

With Wink's photograph tucked among half a dozen others of young black males, he drove to Mrs. Hogue's house.

She quickly picked out Wink. "That's him; that's the one I saw this morning and the one I saw coming out of the liquor store after I heard the shooting."

Garreth called Serruto.

"We'll get a warrant for him," the lieutenant said.

Garreth visited Wink's mother and the Hambright girl, first name Rosella. He also talked to the neighbors of both. No one, of course, offered any help. Garreth gained the impression that even Wink's mother hardly knew the person Garreth asked about. The neighbors denied any knowledge of comings and goings from Mrs. O'Hare's or Miss Hambright's apartment.

"Hey, man, I gots enough to do chasin' rats over here without wachin' someone else over there," they said, or else: "You wrong about Wink. He no good, but he no holdup man. He never owned no gun."

Garreth dropped word of wanting Wink into a few receptive ears whose owners knew he could promise some reward for turning the fugitive, then he headed for the Jack Tar. He would see Serruto about staking out the mother's and girlfriend's apartments. For now, he had better check in with Harry before his partner put out an APB on him.