“Maybe I should take back the switchboard now,” I suggested. “The Doctors from Hell team are probably waiting for you.”
“They just want to talk about FVs and blood gases,” Dad said as he got up from the switchboard. “Don’t you want to hear the details of the autopsy?”
“Do I have a choice?”
He chuckled as if he thought I was kidding. “Of course, it was all very ordinary and straightforward,” he said, frowning. “No really interesting features at all.”
“I will make a point of conveying your disappointment to the killer, should the occasion arise.”
Dad seemed to interpret that as an invitation to fill me in on the details of the autopsy. For an autopsy with no interesting features at all, there were a lot of details, at least the way Dad told it, in between the phone calls I was answering.
“So what do I know now that I didn’t before you told me all this?” I asked when Dad had finished. At least I assumed he was finished when he began to reminisce about similar but more interesting past autopsies.
I must have sounded a little testy. Dad thought about it for a second and then summed up the previous half hour of conversation with unusual brevity.
“The blow to the throat required quite a bit of strength - not everyone could have done it. If it was deliberate, it could indicate some special knowledge of anatomy or fighting tactics, but the killer could have just hit the right spot by accident. And once he was temporarily stunned by that, strangling him with the mouse cord didn’t require greater than average strength. Or special knowledge.”
“So the chief’s going to be looking a little harder at anyone who’s large, strong, or has special training, but really the autopsy neither conclusively points the finger at anyone nor eliminates anyone,” I said. “Keisha and Luis may be long shots, but they’re still in the running.”
Dad’s face lit up. “Is that who you suspect?” he asked in a stage whisper. “And they were in on it together?”
“No,” I said, “I named them only because they’re about the smallest people on staff.”
“Ah,” he said, looking glum again.
“The autopsy’s not a lot of help,” I complained.
“Sometimes science doesn’t hold the answers,” he proclaimed. “Sometimes only the power of the human mind can ensure that justice is done.”
“You’ve been watching those crime-solving shows again,” I said with a sigh. “Why don’t you go tell the Doctors from Hell designers about blood gases now?”
He patted me on the shoulder and trotted off.
I was alone in the waiting room, except for one patient waiting’ meekly in the corner for an appointment with his therapist. At least I assumed he was a patient, since he kept glancing at George out of the corner of his eye and looking anxious if I caught him at it. People who came to see Mutant Wizards for the first time would invariably walk in and exclaim, “Why the hell do you have a buzzard in your waiting room?” And if we kept them waiting, they’d spend the time staring unabashedly at George. Patients, on the other hand, always tried to act as if George didn’t exist, or as if there were nothing out of the ordinary about sharing a waiting room with a live buzzard. Perhaps they thought it was some kind of Rorschach test, and if they mentioned it, someone would immediately say, “That’s a good question. Why do you think we have a buzzard in our waiting room?”
I suppose I should have drafted Dad to keep minding the switchboard for me as soon as I realized that he wasn’t working with the Doctors from Hell team. Shortly after I took the switchboard back, the mail cart cruised through with Dad sitting on top of it. He’d acquired a notebook remarkably similar to die one Chief Burke carried, and was scribbling diligently in it.
The second time he rode by, he’d apparently run out of interesting things to note. He was sitting cross-legged and appeared to be lost in thought.
On his third circuit, he’d begun looking distinctly bored.
The fourth time through, he was lying down on his stomach, gripping the front of the mail cart, looking for all the world like a slow-motion toboggan rider. After that, he lay down on his back.
“What are you doing, anyway?” Jack asked when he happened to be in the reception area as the cart rolled through.
“Detecting,” Dad said. “I’m studying the victim’s point of view.”