Blue Labyrinth Read Online Free PDF Page B

the subway tracks. Not to mention his own injuries. And he was no shrinking violet: he’d drawn his gun in the line of duty a dozen times and used it twice. He could deal with violent death. What made him uneasy was the cold, clinical way in which a corpse was systematically taken apart, organ by organ, handled, photographed, commented on, even joked about. That and, of course, the smell. But over the years he’d learned to live with the task, and he approached it with stoic resignation.
    There was something about this autopsy, however, that gave it a particularly macabre cast. Angler had seen a lot of autopsies—but he’d never seen one that was being keenly observed by the victim’s own father.
    There were five people in the room—living people, anyway: Angler; one of his detectives, Millikin; the forensic pathologist in charge of the autopsy; the assisting diener, short and shriveled and hunched like Quasimodo—and Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast.
    Of course, Pendergast had no official status here. When Pendergast made his bizarre request, Angler had considered denying himaccess. After all, the agent had been uncooperative in the investigation to date. But Angler had done some checking up on Pendergast and learned that—while he was known in the Bureau for his unorthodox methods—he was also held in awe for his remarkable success rate. Angler had never seen a dossier so full of both commendations and censures. So in the end he decided it simply wasn’t worth trying to bar the man from the autopsy. After all, it
was
his son. And besides, he had a pretty good sense that Pendergast would have found a way to be present, no matter what he said.
    The pathologist, Dr. Constantinescu, also seemed to know of Pendergast. Constantinescu looked more like a kindly old country doctor than a medical examiner, and the presence of the special agent had thrown him for a loop. He was as tense and nervous as a cat in a new house. Time and again, as he’d murmured his medical observations into the hanging mike, he’d paused, glanced over his shoulder at Pendergast, then cleared his throat and begun again. It had taken him almost an hour to complete the external examination alone—which was remarkable, given the almost total absence of evidence to discover, collect, and label. The removal of the clothing, photography, X-rays, weighing, toxicity tests, noting of distinguishing marks, and the rest of it had gone on forever. It was as if the pathologist was afraid of making the slightest mistake, or had a strange reluctance to get on with the work. The diener, who didn’t seem to be in on the story, was impatient, rocking from one foot to the other, arranging and rearranging instruments. Throughout it all Pendergast stood motionless, somewhat back from the others, the gown like a shroud around him, eyes moving from Constantinescu to the body of his son and back again, saying nothing, expressing nothing.
    “No obvious external bruises, hematomas, puncture wounds, or other injuries,” the pathologist was saying into the microphone. “Initial external examination, along with X-ray evidence, indicates that death resulted from a crushing injury to the cervical vertebrae C3 and C4, along with possible lateral rotation of the skull, transecting the spinal column and inducing spinal shock.”
    Dr. Constantinescu stepped back from the mike, cleared histhroat yet again. “We, ah, we’re about to commence with the internal examination, Agent Pendergast.”
    Still Pendergast remained motionless, save perhaps for the slightest inclination of his head. He was very pale; his features were as set as any Angler had seen on a man. The more he got to know this Pendergast, the less he liked him. The man was a kind of freak.
    Angler turned his attention back to the body lying on the gurney. The young man had been in excellent physical condition. Staring at the corpse’s sleek musculature and lines graceful even in death, he was reminded of certain