“Are you ready to release the Cowboy?”

“I’m on my way up.”

“Bon. Sister’s busting her bloomers for a burial.”

When I disconnected and turned, the hall was empty. Fine. I’d give the photo to Ryan. He’d have a copy of the list of observers. If he wanted to follow up, he could get contact information for Kessler.

I pressed for the elevator.

By noon I’d completed my report on Charles Bellemare, concluding that, however strange the circumstances, the Cowboy’s last ride had been the result of his own folly. Turn on. Tune in. Drop out. Or down, in Bellemare’s case. What had he been doing up there?

At lunch, LaManche informed me there’d be difficulty viewing Ferris’s head wounds in situ. X-rays showed only one bullet fragment, and indicated the back of the skull and the left half of the face were shattered. He also informed me that my analysis would be critical since mutilation by the cats had distorted the patterning of metallic trace observable on X-ray.

In addition, Ferris had fallen with his hands beneath him. Decomposition had rendered gunshot-residue testing inconclusive.

At one-thirty I descended again to the morgue.

Ferris’s torso was now open from throat to pubis, and his organs floated in covered containers. The stench in the room had kicked into the red zone.

Ryan and the photographer were there, along with two of the morning’s four observers. LaManche waited five minutes, then nodded a go-ahead to his autopsy tech.

Lisa made incisions behind Ferris’s ears and across his crown. Using scalpel and fingers, she then teased off the scalp, working from the top toward the back of the skull, stopping periodically to position the case label for photographs. As fragments were freed, LaManche and I observed, diagrammed, then gathered them into containers.

When we’d finished with the top and back of Ferris’s head, Lisa retracted the skin from his face, and LaManche and I repeated the procedure, examining, sketching, stepping back for pics. Slowly, we extracted the wreckage that had been Ferris’s maxillary, zygomatic, nasal, and temporal bones.