Free Eye of Vengeance by Jonathon King Page A

call the medical examiner’s office until he was in the parking lot.
    “Would it help you to decide if I told you I was right outside?”
    He had called Nasir Petish’s cell phone. The doc’s midnight autopsy was only just beginning and though the physician had known Nick for several years—they shared an appreciation for Jameson’s whiskey and Cannonball Adderley’s saxophone—the physician still fell back on administration rules against press access. At least for the first twenty seconds of each conversation.
    “You are in my parking area?” Petish said, his East Indian accent flicking high at the end of every sentence.
    “Yeah. I figured you’d be up late with this one,” Nick said, leaving the assistant M.E.’s heads-up out of it.
    “And what you listening to out there, Mr. Mullins?”
    “The Adderleys and, uh, George Shearing at Newport,” Nick said, quickly rummaging through his collection to see if he actually had the CD in his car.
    “Is that the one during which Mr. Adderley comments on the influence of a young pianist named Ray Charles?” Petish said.
    “Yeah,” Nick said, coming up with the CD, “that’s the one.”
    “Bring it in, if you will, Mr. Mullins.”
    Nick went around to the loading dock area where the M.E.’s vans and black Ford Explorers were parked. A light mounted above the double-door entrance bathed the raised deck in an orange-tinted glow. One of the doors opened and a small man with tea-colored skin and wire-rimmed glasses ushered him in.
    “Thanks, Dr. Petish. I appreciate this,” Nick said, shaking the man’s offered hand.
    “Ahhh. No thanks are necessary, Mr. Mullins, for nothing that has been given, yes?”
    Nick grinned into the smiling face of the physician and nodded his understanding of the terms. He was never here. No comment. No attribution. He raised the CD and handed the plastic square to the M.E., who scanned the back intently. Petish carried a perpetually charmed look on his face despite his blunt speech and grim profession.
    “Ahhh, yes,” he said. “The one when Nathaniel still, as you say, had his lip. I like this recording very much.”
    The doctor read through the playlist as they passed through an area of wheeled gurneys and shelves of supplies and then down a wide corridor to his favorite examining room. Inside, the walls were concrete block and painted white with the kind of paint that was shiny and smooth and left an almost plastic texture, the better to wipe clean. The floor was done in gray with similar paint and Nick noted the drain located in the middle. There were two stainless steel tables in the room. Only one was occupied.
    Ferris had been heavily built, with powerful arms and thin hips in the way of a farmer or factory worker. Nick remembered the yokelike shoulders and the way they’d slumped during his trial. His freshly shaved skull was now gone from the ears up. Petish had already started with the bone saw.
    The M.E. slipped the CD into a portable player on a high shelf and set the music at a low volume and then snapped on a new pair of latex gloves. He almost always began his autopsies by sawing through the skull bone in a circular fashion and then lifting the top portion to reveal the brain inside. The sight did not bother Nick. He had attended autopsies before. The clinical atmosphere was actually a lot less disturbing than the open wounds and aftermaths he’d seen on the streets.
    “As you can see, Mr. Mullins, the deceased has considerable damage to the brain from a single wound.”
    Nick moved with the doctor as he positioned himself at the head of the table and turned the dead man’s face to the right. A small black hole appeared to be neatly bored into the exact line where his high-cut sideburn had once been.
    “It was a very high-velocity round and would most likely have snapped the head in this direction,” Petish said, mimicking the movement by grasping the dead man’s stiffened neck and jerking it toward one pale