Free Michael Connelly by the Concrete Blonde the Black Ice The Harry Bosch Novels: The Black Echo Page A

was finished with the story about the bracelet, it seemed to have mollified Sally’s worries about the death of
     Billy Meadows not being a mystery. He seemed energized. He turned to a cart on which his cutting tools were piled and rolled
     it next to the autopsy table. He switched on a sound-activated tape recorder and picked up a scalpel and a pair of regular
     gardening shears. He said, “Well, let’s get to work.”
    Bosch moved back a few steps to avoid any spatter and leaned against a counter on which there was a tray full of knives and
     saws and scalpels. He noticed that a sign taped to the side of the tray said: To Be Sharpened.
    • • •
    Salazar looked down at the body of Billy Meadows and began: “The body is that of a well-developed Caucasian male measuring
     sixty-nine inches in length, weighing one hundred sixty-five pounds and appearing generally consistent with the stated age
     of forty years. The body is cold and unembalmed with full rigor and posterior dependent fixed lividity.”
    Bosch watched him start but then noticed the plastic bag containing Mead-ows’s clothes on the counter next to the tool pan.
     He pulled it over and opened it up. The smell of urine immediately assaulted his nostrils, and he thought for a moment of
     the living room at Meadows’s apartment. He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves as Salazar continued to describe the body.
    “The left index finger shows a palpable fracture without laceration or petechial contusion or hemorrhage.”
    Bosch glanced over his shoulder and saw that Salazar was wiggling the broken digit with the blunt end of the scalpel as he
     spoke to the tape recorder. He concluded his external description of the body by mentioning the skin punctures.
    “There are hemorrhagic puncture wounds, hypodermic type, on the upper inside thighs and interior side of the left arm. The
     arm puncture exudes a bloody fluid and appears to be most recent. No scabbing. There is another puncture, in the upper left
     chest, which exudes a small amount of bloody fluid and appears to be slightly larger than that caused by hypodermic puncture.”
    Salazar put his hand over the tape recorder’s mike and said to Bosch, “I’m having Sakai get slides of this chest puncture.
     It looks very interesting.”
    Bosch nodded and turned back to the counter and began spreading out Meadows’s clothes. Behind him he heard Salazar using the
     shears to open up the dead man’s chest.
    The detective pulled each pocket out and looked at the lint. He turned the socks inside out and checked the inside lining
     of the pants and shirt. Nothing. He took a scalpel out of the To Be Sharpened pan and cut the stitches out of Meadows’s leather
     belt and pulled it apart. Again nothing. Over his shoulder he heard Salazar saying, “The spleen weighs one hundred ninety
     grams. The capsule is intact and slightly wrinkled, and the parenchyma is pale purple and trabecular.”
    Bosch had heard it all hundreds of times before. Most of what a patholo-gist said into his tape recorder meant nothing to
     the detective who stood by. It was the bottom line the detective waited for. What killed the person on the cold steel table?
     How? Who?
    “The gallbladder is thin walled,” Salazar was saying. “It contains a few cc’s of greenish bile with no stones.”
    Bosch shoved the clothes back into the plastic bag and sealed it. Then he dumped the leather work shoes Meadows had been wearing
     out of a second plastic bag. He noticed reddish-orange dust fall from inside the shoes. Another indication the body had been
     dragged into the pipe. The heels had scraped on the dried mud at the bottom of the pipe, drawing the dust inside the shoes.
    Salazar said, “The bladder mucosa is intact, and there are only two ounces of pale yellow urine. The external genitalia and
     vagina are unremarkable.”
    Bosch turned around. Salazar had his hand on the tape recorder speaker. He said, “Coroner’s humor. Just wanted to see