Lucy Chen, the DNA tech, reminded Colin of a Chinese version of his wife. They were about the same age, and they both had the same air of unhurried competence. But Lucy was an expert on the double helix, not on the behavior and misbehavior of magma.
“Happy day,” Colin said. Lucy’s presence, and Jodie’s, kept him from adding some stronger opinions. As far as he was concerned, the one good thing about the eternal-seeming power and gas shortages was that the blow-dried dimbulbs with the expensive clothes took longer to get to a crime scene. If they wouldn’t have shown up at all, that would have pleased him even more. Some things, though, were too much to hope for.
“It’ll be back here, I bet. I’ll follow my nose,” Mike Pitcavage said. He found Mrs. Mandelbaum’s bedroom with no trouble at all. He was younger than Colin, but he’d been a cop even longer because he hadn’t gone into the service before putting on the blue uniform. How many tract homes had he walked through? Enough so, dozens of different floor plans seemed as familiar as the house he lived in, no doubt.
The coroner squatted by the corpse. His nose wrinkled; the smell in the bedroom was pretty bad, all right. “What do you think?” Colin asked, keeping his voice as neutral as he could. He knew what he thought, but that wasn’t what he was trying to find out.
“If the DNA does not show this to be a Strangler case, I will be very much surprised,” Ishikawa replied. Lucy Chen nodded. After a pause for breath (and after his face announced how much he wished he didn’t need to breathe in there), the coroner added, “Most of the victims are discovered in a less advanced state of putrefaction.”
“You got that right, Doc,” Pitcavage said. “I just hope the stink comes out of my suit.” Colin hadn’t worried about that. Like most people, he wore more wool than he had before the eruption. It was warmer than the synthetics. But the chief, also in wool, remembered that it also trapped odors better.
Albert stuck his head into the bedroom. “Sorry to bother you, sir,” he said, addressing his words to Chief Pitcavage, “but the first news truck just pulled up.”
Oh, well. The vultures hadn’t taken much longer than usual to start spiraling down to a story. Colin wasn’t sorry the chief had come. Otherwise, he would have had the dubious privilege of enlightening the men and women of the Fourth Estate.
Then Pitcavage said, “I think I’ll duck out the back door. Colin, you can handle the ghouls today.” Colin’s face might have been something—all the cops, Lucy, and even the staid Dr. Ishikawa started laughing. The chief thumped him on the shoulder. “I’m kidding. I really am.”
“You’d better be.” By the way Colin said it, everybody else thought the joke was a hell of a lot funnier than he did. He said it that way because that was how he felt.
“I am. I’m here. I’m stuck with it. I’ll deal with them.” Pitcavage walked out to face the reporters. Christians might have gone to face lions with that same exalted determination. But dealing with the media was more like getting trampled by a herd with mad cow disease. Colin thought so, anyhow. Suddenly, calling the next of kin didn’t seem half bad.
* * *
Oklahoma City reminded Vanessa Ferguson of Schrödinger’s cat. Even the locals seemed unsure about whether their town was dead or alive.
Denver, now, Denver was definitively deceased. Same with Salt Lake City. But both those places were only a few hundred miles from what had been Yellowstone National Park in happier times and was currently the world’s biggest red-hot hole in the ground.
There were something like 1,200 miles between the supervolcano caldera and Oklahoma City. That didn’t mean ashfall hadn’t reached the city. Oh, no. Oklahoma City, in fact, had taken a bigger hit than places like Los Angeles, if not so bad as the towns and farms up in Kansas where Vanessa had been excavating. As with the Kansas prairies, prevailing winds had dumped lots of ash and dust on Oklahoma City’s head.
The eruption had been a while ago. To Vanessa’s way of thinking, Oklahoma City should have picked itself up, dusted itself off—literally and metaphorically—and got on with its life. Maybe it should have, but it hadn’t. Little by little, she started to see why. The countryside was in worse shape than the town.
None of that was her worry, though. She’d made it to Oklahoma City. She’d escaped from the grave-robbing crew that was picking through the mortal remains of Kansas. She’s had as much of that as she could take, and more besides. She wasn’t supposed to be in Oklahoma City right now. She was supposed to be back with the crew. Had she been in the Army, they would have called it going AWOL. She wasn’t in the Army, no matter how hard they tried to make her feel as if she were. As far as she was concerned, she’d informally resigned.