Free Beach Road by James Patterson

find particularly endearing in a friend or coworker—a deep and dependable level of misery, male-pattern baldness, and a sexually stingy wife. Again, maybe all these traits work together, but that doesn’t make them any less likable, and my favorite medical examiner, Clifford Krauss, bless his heart, has all three.
    Because of all his winning qualities, it doesn’t bother me in the least that Krauss, who took over the morgue nine years ago, one year after I made chief of Homicide, is two or three times better at his job than anyone else in the Seventeenth. And he definitely knows it.
    By now we all know that the kid stretched out on his back on the metal gurney in the morgue is Michael Walker, seventeen, from Bridgehampton, Long Island, and one of the kids wanted in connection with three East Hampton homicides. Till this morning I didn’t even know there were black people in the Hamptons, let alone triple homicides. But hey, I’m just a street cop from Bed-Stuy.
    When I walk in, Krauss is at his desk in front of his laptop. He cups one hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and says, “Suffolk County coroner.”
    “They just went through my report,” he says after hanging up, “and are pretty sure that the same gun that killed Walker was also used in the three Hampton homicides on Labor Day weekend.”
    Then Krauss grabs his long yellow pad, comes over to where I’m standing next to Walker, and, wielding a stained Hunan Village chopstick for a pointer, takes me on a dead man’s tour.
    The crispness and intensity of Krauss’s delivery hasn’t softened in nine years, and if anything, his enthusiasm for gleaning secrets from a corpse has only increased. He starts with the exact size and location of the entrance and exit wounds, and the angle at which the bullet traveled. Reading from his notes, he describes the caliber, make, and casing of the bullet picked out of the plaster from behind the bed, and says all three are consistent with the weapon and silencer recovered by police in Long Island.
    “I put the time of death at early in the morning of September eleventh,” he says, “very early in the morning, approximately four a.m.”
    “Approximately?”
    “Yeah,” says Krauss, with a twinkle in his eyes. “Could have been four thirty. All his blood work and the amount of dilation of his pupils indicate someone who’d been in a deep sleep right up to the moment he was shot.”
    “Hell of a way to wake up,” I say.
    “I’d prefer a kiss from J-Lo,” says Krauss.
    “So Walker wasn’t the one watching the tube?”
    “Not unless he left it on.”
    “Also, we found a basketball cap on the floor of the closet, where it looked like someone was searching for something. The hat’s barely been worn and is about three sizes too big for this guy here.”
    “Isn’t that how they wear everything now?”
    “Jeans, coats, sweatshirts, but not hats. And none of Mr. Walker’s prints are on it. Maybe if we’re really lucky, it was left by the shooter.
    “That’s all you got for me, Cliffy?”
    “One last thing. The rat who snacked on Walker’s big toe—a black Norwegian, four to six pounds, female, pregnant.”
    “Why’s it always got to be a black rat, Krauss? Why never a white one?”
    One thing, just for the record. That description of Cliffy’s wife—pure bullshit. Her name is Emily, and she’s a sweetheart.

Chapter 38
    Marie Scott
    LAST WEEK THIS very same Riverhead courtroom was filled with a sickening indifference. It is even worse now. It turns my stomach inside out.
    Today the room’s
bursting
with reporters, family and friends of the victims, and, more than anything else, a lust for blood. The parents of the three dead boys stare at me with powerful hatred, and Lucinda Walker, Michael’s mom, who I’ve known since she was a grade-school student at Saint Vincent’s, looks at me as if she doesn’t know what to think. I feel so bad for Lucinda. I cried for her last night. Deep down she must