Thirty-Three Teeth Read Online Free PDF Page B

cheap ceremony at Ong Deu temple.”
    Siri’s mind suddenly jumped to his own death. Who’d take responsibility when he huffed his last breath? Who’d pay for his funeral at some nondescript temple? His friends were all broke. Would Judge Haeng discover some unmined vein of generosity and arrange for the Department of Justice to give him a state funeral? Some hope.
    “So…” Dtui was still answering “…it all fits. Mr. B is riding to his second job when Mr. A drops out of the sky and lands on top of him: chances—eleven million to one against. A breaks B’s neck, buckles the bike, and kills himself. Case closed.”
    “Except….”
    “Except for why. But that’s the police’s problem, not ours, right?”
    “Aren’t you just a little curious, Dtui?”
    “I’m peeing myself with anticipation.”
    “Well,” he blushed. “That’s good. I mean, curiosity’s good in this job. Keep it up.”
     
    The poor lady in the freezer had obviously been mauled. The wounds were over twenty-four hours old, and the insects and even her own cat had started on her before she went off from the heat. Her clothes were shredded and black with blood, while her skin was blanched white. There were bite marks on her body, the most traumatic of these being at her neck. Those areas of skin that hadn’t been bitten were raked with scratch marks.
    “They found her in the bushes beside her shanty.” Dtui was behind the doctor as he stood at the open freezer, looking at the mess that Auntie See had become.
    “Didn’t anyone report it when it happened? There must have been a hell of a lot of noise.”
    “Nope.”
    “What’s happening to people? Didn’t we used to care for our neighbors?”
    “Perhaps they thought it was just a dog fight.”
    But there was something wrong with that premise. Even before an autopsy, just looking into the dark freezer, he knew it wasn’t possible. From the size of the visible wounds, the separation between the individual claws, he had a strong feeling this was no dog attack.
     
    The autopsy was new to all of them. Siri was in no position to read up on the latest forensic pathology techniques from around the globe. For one thing, they didn’t get a lot of useful information from the outside world. For another, all the advances were being made in the United States, and Siri’s English stank. He was fluent in Thai, French, and Vietnamese, but these had apparently filled up his language tank, and all attempts at adding English overflowed hopelessly.
    But if the rest of the world ever learned Lao, he would certainly have become an authority on innovation in a morgue. Here he was with a body covered in bite marks, and he needed to confirm whether they were from dogs. So with a modicum of genius, he sent Geung off to the kitchen with a requisition form and started to create dams with adhesive bandages around the most profound marks. When Geung got back, Dtui mixed a thick solution of agar, and they poured it into pools on Auntie See.
    “Is this standard procedure?” Dtui wanted to know.
    “Well, I hear they use plaster of paris in the West, but we can’t afford that. They don’t even have any in the ‘breaks and fractures’ department of the hospital. So we’ll have to see how this works. Just don’t get peckish and raid the freezer before they set.”
    “I won’t.”
    After a few hours, the agar was solid and looking pretty as birthday-party treats with little turrets of teeth prints. Geung moved them to the refrigerator, and they took Auntie See out for an internal examination.
    As a New Year’s present, the Justice Department had furnished the morgue with a Soviet air conditioner so the men no longer had to work in shorts and undershirts. Dtui no longer had to stand in front of the open freezer door to cool off. But the stifling temperature outside that day had defeated USSR technology. There was probably a higher setting, but Siri couldn’t read Russian. So as they stooped over Auntie