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hadn’t been for those who had died in the crash, as he had originally thought. Perhaps they had been for herself. She might wish that she had died instead of being disfigured, even temporarily.
    Knowing Carole, he wouldn’t be surprised.
    * * *
    In the pecking order of assistants to the Bexar County coroner, Grayson was on the lowest rung. That’s why he checked and rechecked the information before approaching his immediate supervisor with his puzzling findings.
    “Got a minute?”
    An exhausted, querulous man wearing a rubber apron and gloves gave him a quelling glance over his shoulder. “What’d you have in mind—a round of golf?”
    “No, this.”
    “What?” The supervisor turned back to his work on the charred heap of matter that had once been a human body.
    “The dental records of Avery Daniels,” Grayson said. “Casualty number eighty-seven.”
    “She’s already been IDed and autopsied.” The supervisor consulted the chart on the wall, just to make certain. A red line had been drawn through her name. “Yep.”
    “I know, but—”
    “She had no living relatives. A close family friend IDed her this afternoon.”
    “But these records—”
    “Look, pal,” the supervisor said with asperity, “I got bodies with no heads, hands without arms, feet without legs. And they’re on my ass to finish this tonight. So if somebody’s been positively IDed, autopsied, and sealed shut, don’t bother me with records, okay?”
    Grayson stuffed the dental X-rays back into the manila envelope they had arrived in and sailed it toward a trash barrel. “Okay. Fine. And in the meantime, fuck you.”
    “Sure, sure—any time. As soon as we get all these stiffs IDed.”
    Grayson shrugged. They weren’t paying him to be Dick Tracy. If nobody else gave a damn about a mysterious inconsistency, why should he? He went back to matching up dental records with the corpses as yet to be identified.

Three
    The weather seemed to be in mourning, too.
    It rained the day of Avery Daniels’s funeral. The night before, thunderstorms had rumbled through the Texas hill country. This morning, all that was left of them was a miserable, cold, gray rain.
    Bareheaded, impervious to the inclement weather, Irish McCabe stood beside the casket. He had insisted on a spray of yellow roses, knowing they had been her favorite. Vivid and flamboyant, they seemed to be mocking death. He took comfort in that.
    Tears rolled down his ruddy checks. His fleshy, veined nose was redder than usual, although he hadn’t been drinking so much lately. Avery nagged him about it, saying an excessive amount of alcohol wasn’t good for his liver, his blood pressure, or his expanding midsection.
    She nagged Van Lovejoy about his chemical abuses, too, but he had showed up at her funeral high on cheap Scotch and the joint he had smoked on the drive to the chapel. The outmoded necktie around his ill-fitting collar was a concession to the solemnity of the occasion and attested to the fact that he held Avery in higher regard than he did most members of the human family.
    Other people regarded Van Lovejoy no more favorably than he did them. Avery had numbered among the very few who could tolerate him. When the reporter assigned to cover the story of her tragic death for KTEX’s news asked Van if he would shoot the video, the photographer had glared at him with contempt, shot him the finger, and slunk out of the newsroom without a word. This rude mode of self-expression was typical of Van, and just one of the reasons for his alienation from mankind.
    At the conclusion of the brief interment service, the mourners began making their way down the gravel path toward the row of cars parked in the lane, leaving only Irish and Van at the grave. At a discreet distance, cemetery employees were waiting to finish up so they could retreat indoors, where it was warm and dry.
    Van was fortyish and string-bean thin. His belly was concave and there was a pronounced stoop to his bony