Let the system work; good advice. The system would work and bring forth a result pleasing to the department and to the decent middle-class majority for whom it labored. That was mainly what the system was for, in Robb's opinion. And he would call former chief inspector Ray Cooley and tell him that his younger son had killed a perp, but that the preliminary investigation was finding the shooting clean. And he would discreetly check on Amalfi and Rivera, too, to make absolutely sure they were solid, that they would also let the system work.

The system now cranked into gear. The deceased was brought to the morgue at Bellevue, there to be probed by the medical examiner, whose duty it is to determine the manner and cause of death. The New York medical examiner is one of the best forensic medical shops in the nation, but even the best shops have difficulty attracting qualified personnel. Cutting up corpses is not what attracts most students to medicine, and most graduates of American med schools do not care to labor for civil service pay. The office was therefore populated largely by foreign born and trained, among whom, now wielding his knife through the chest of Cisco Lomax, was Osman Mochtar. Dr. Mochtar was from Afghanistan. He had escaped with his family during the Russian war and made his way to Libya, where he had obtained a scholarship to study at Garyounis University in Benghazi. He had been in the United States, in New York, for nearly five years. He thought cutting up corpses was a great job; you did not have to speak English to them, nor did they ever lay upon you unbearable insult, as was the case on the one occasion when he had sought work with patients at a public hospital. He was not a diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Medicine.

Dr. Mochtar extracted eight bullets from the body of Cisco Lomax and traced the course of two more. He determined that the cause of death was massive trauma to the brain from a bullet that had entered five centimeters posterior to the right zygomati arch, pierced the temporal bone, traversed an upward course, and exited through the anterior, left frontal bone.