Free Eye of Vengeance by Jonathon King Page B

shoulder. When he turned Ferris’s head back the other way, an exit wound four times the size of the hole on the other side yawned ragged and blackened with dried blood in the area of the jaw.
    “Any way to guess the caliber?” Nick said, letting the doctor make an assumption instead of making it himself.
    “Yes. A .308, if I am not mistaken,” Petish said while sneaking a peek at Nick and smiling at his raised eyebrows. “Oh, they recovered the round, Mr. Mullins. I am good, but certainly not that good.”
    Nick instinctively reached for a notebook from his back pocket, but then simply scratched a spot on his thigh, recalling Petish’s rules.
    “If the marksman was only just lucky, he could not have been more accurate,” Petish said. “To enter the skull from this point and the expansion of bore diameter damage as it enters the brain would have the effect of instant cessation of all motor and neurologic response.”
    “Dead before he hit the ground,” Nick said.
    “Precisely,” the doctor said as he pointed out other discolored spots on the body.
    “My external examination of the deceased shows a number of bruises both anterior and posterior. Some very old, some more recent, but none that would have been administered in the last few days,” Perish began as if he were reading into a report recorder.
    “Jailhouse jostle,” Nick said, thinking of the status Ferris would have had at MDCC as a child molester.
    “Possibly,” the M.E. said as he positioned a scalpel over the body’s chest and began making his incisions.
    Nick concentrated on the tattoos that Ferris had obviously gotten while he was inside. Serpents in dark ink that now stood out on the pale insides of both forearms. Somewhat crude but detailed enough to see the fierceness of eyes and sharpness of claw. Nick wondered if Ferris had paid a prison artist to do them so he could project his toughness or whether it was an expression of what was inside his head.
    Petish worked quickly and meticulously, cutting away inside the chest cavity, with deft strokes slicing the connective tissue of major organs and carefully weighing each before unceremoniously dropping them into a five-gallon bucket on the floor nearby. In the air, the Adderley brothers played a buoyant riff of 1930s blues in stark juxtaposition to what was going on at the table. Nick asked an occasional anatomy question and watched as the doctor took tiny samples of the organs and slipped them into test tubes for later microscopic examinations.
    “Don’t you think that hole in his head makes a pretty good case for cause of death?” Nick said, only half joking as the physician pointed out a darkened portion of lung tissue, snipped and bottled it.
    Petish looked up for the first time. “Really, Mr. Mullins. Have you known me to be anything other than completely thorough?”
    Nick kept quiet but had to turn his head away when the doctor removed the lower intestines from the corpse. After the weighing, the M.E. misjudged the bucket below and one end of the colon caught an edge, flipping a stream of liquid through the air and against one wall. Those who thought they’d witnessed autopsies by watching CSI: Miami were missing this part unless they had scratch-and-sniff TV. The odor was nearly intolerable. But Nick was bothered more by the growing disdain he was building in his head by going back to the serpents and then recalling Ferris’s crime scene: the little house, the small body bags. Instead of the scientific atmosphere he usually held to at these proceedings, he could feel a hate building. Fucking deserved it was on his lips when Petish said, “There it is.”
    Nick stepped closer to look at the cutting board that Petish had lain on top of the chest and realized the M.E. had Ferris’s heart out and was snipping an artery with a pair of scissors.
    “What? He had a heart attack,” Nick said and then realized his voice was much too anxious.
    Petish shook his head with a look of smiling