handkerchief back to his face.
"What happened to him? " Whatever it was, it'd opened up his skull and left nothing much above the eyebrows. There was a heavy cooked smell, and the inside of the empty brainpan was boiled-looking.
"Some sort of exploding bullet?" Damn, the punks always got the latest.
"Whatever it was, it splattered his brain and bits of his skull for twenty feet around," she said.
"Charred or parboiled. In fact, it cauterized the veins. Notice how there's not much blood around him? But this is the easy one. He was definitely shot with something; there's an entry hole just over his eyebrows."
She walked to the next, her feet making little tack sounds as the congealing blood on the bottoms of her shoes stuck to the concrete. That reminded Carmaggio, and he pulled on a pair of thin-film gloves. No sense taking chances. Christ, he remembered when only the live ones could kill you.
"Plenty of blood with this, " he said.
"Tell me. Glad I didn't have breakfast."
It took something to make Chen admit that. Something had sliced neatly through this one's throat all the way to the spine, and halfway through that. The head lay at an acute angle to the body, and the body in an immense pool of brown-red, still liquid under the crust.
"Look. The edges are awfully neat."
"Machete," Henry said. "Good sharp machete, strong swing."
"Maybe. Look at this one."
Another body. This time one arm was off, sliced at the shoulder.
"Awfully sharp machete, wouldn't you say?" She led him to another. "There are four or five similar to this one."
The dead man's head looked distorted, as if the side of the skull above the ear had been dished in.
"Sledgehammer?" Henry said.
The examiner shook her head, touching the area with a metal probe. It gave with a mushy softness.
"Area of impact's too big," she said. "About palm-size. Whatever it was, it was traveling fast enough to turn the bone there to gravel, like slapping them up alongside the head with a board, really hard.
"And here's our prize," she went on.
"Marley Man," Carmaggio said. Well, there's one case we'll never have to close.
"Surprised you recognize him." The tall, thin black man's face was a pulped mass, like a redbrown flower surrounded by dreadlock petals.
"It's the gold beads on the ends of his dreads," he replied. "What got him?"
"A fist."
Henry snorted.
"All right, a fist-sized metal forging on the end of a pneumatic piston," she said. "Look at it." She indicated points with the stylus. "Knuckles. Same on a couple of the others."
He noticed one of the specialists examining the body's hand. "Got something?"
"Skin and hair under the nails," the man replied.
"Good." Very good, these days. As good as a fingerprint, sometimes.
He looked around at the carnage, outside at the blinking lights and uniforms putting up yellow tape.
"These folks definitely lost the War on Drugs. Okay, how many gunshot fatalities?" His voice sounded a little hollow in the huge dim echoing space of the warehouse.
"None."
"Say what? "
He nodded at the spent brass and the weapons being photoed and bagged up. The usual mix—cheap stuff, those cheesy Tech-9's, some Glocks, a MAC-10, two Calicos, one expensive H&K 9mm which had better stay in the evidence room.
"Some bullet wounds, but none of them fatal. Ricochets. These guys were shooting, but not at each other. And not for long."
"Well, I guess that proves the NRA's right; it really isn't guns that kill people," Henry said.
"Maniacs with machetes and baseball bats kill people. Even when the people are killer posse Jamaicans armed to their gold-capped teeth."
He turned to his assistant, Jesus Rodriguez, and indicated the guns and packaged drugs being dusted for prints and carefully packed away.
"What's wrong with this picture?"
" Si. No money. But I didn't think the perps would leave it."
"Yeah, but why leave the stuff, man? It's all here, samples, bags, vials, you name it. They had a goddamned supermarket going, even some