Free We Are Death by Douglas Lindsay Page B

her hands, the delicate insertions of the scalpel, the occasional heavy lifting of viscera.
    Badstuber did not seem quite as enthusiastic. Her face was tight, tense, as though she was having to stop herself vomiting. She hadn’t spoken beyond a quick hello on being introduced to the doctor.
    ‘You dug out the bullet?’ asked Jericho, as Trueblood seemed to have come to the end of a verse.
    ‘Yep. It’s off to Bristol, you’ll need to speak to them to get specifics.’
    ‘OK, thanks. Anything further on the point of entry? Can we rule out the midget?’
    Trueblood looked at Jericho and smiled.
    ‘I’m afraid not, your midget is still in the frame. The gunshot was fired, as we thought, from very close range. Definitely no more than three feet. And it entered the forehead travelling up at an angle of around sixty degrees. So, as we talked about, either someone was sitting in a car, or the killer was a lot shorter than the victim.’
    ‘Or maybe they’d bent down, say to tie their shoelace, caught Carter unaware, he looked down at him and caught a bullet in the face.’
    Trueblood considered this and then nodded.
    ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Definite possibility.’
    Without a word, Badstuber backed away from the table, then walked quickly from the room, her hand to her mouth. They watched her until the door closed, then turned back to the cadaver.
    ‘It’s not for everyone,’ said Trueblood. ‘She seems nice.’
    ‘How would you know, she hasn’t said anything?’
    ‘I mean, nice-looking. Attractive.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Jericho.
    Trueblood smiled. ‘You’re probably off co-workers.’
    ‘I’ve already been warned off.’
    ‘By whom?’
    ‘Her.’
    ‘God, what did you do, Robert?’
    ‘I didn’t do anything. She knew me by reputation, so felt the need to let me know she’s happily married with three kids.’
    ‘No way!’
    ‘Yes. That happened.’
    ‘Well, good for her. She saw you coming.’
    ‘I wasn’t going to do anything.’
    Trueblood gave him an eyebrow, then looked back down at the corpse.
    ‘Anyway, I completely approve. I should have warned you off too. Bit disappointed that I never actually had to.’
    ‘I already knew you had three kids and were happily married before we met.’
    ‘Well, maybe I’ll let you off.’
    She let out a sigh, then looked up from what was left of Evan Carter’s face.
    ‘What else can I tell you? He hadn’t had sex recently, he’d been drinking but not to excess, not even remotely. I mean, I doubt he would even have been drunk at all. No drugs in his system. Pretty clean all round. Very fit.’
    ‘So I’ve been hearing.’
    ‘Shame.’
    ‘Loss to the gene pool?’
    ‘Exactly... Any idea who killed him?’
    He shook his head, nodded as a way of indicating that he was done standing over the corpse.
    ‘We’ve only just started,’ he said.
    *
    S itting in the car on the way back to Wells. Briefly on the M5, before they would turn off and head for Street and Glastonbury. Badstuber staring straight ahead. No conversation since they’d left Taunton. Jericho wondered if she’d been sick.
    ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
    ‘I don’t like cadavers,’ she said. ‘I can look at pictures, but the real thing is upsetting for me.’
    ‘That’s reasonable,’ said Jericho.
    ‘I didn’t realise we were looking for a dwarf. You suspect a dwarf?’
    ‘No, we don’t suspect a dwarf. We were joking.’
    ‘You think dwarves are funny?’
    ‘Not that we should rule out a dwarf. It’s just, someone sitting in a car seems more likely.’
    He glanced at her. She was staring straight ahead.
    ‘What are we going to do now?’ she asked. ‘I have my own ideas, but you should also have input.’
    That’s big of you, he thought. Up until this point Jericho had just been going along with having the Swiss inspector in tow, without really considering the implications. Suddenly he was looking at having a partner, and someone who considered herself an equal