'Good for Molly,' I said of the woman Marino began dating at Thanksgiving. 'How are the two of you doing?'

'Real good.'

'Are you spending Christmas together?'

'Oh yeah. We'll be with her family in Urbana. They do a big turkey, the whole nine yards.' He tapped an ash to the floor and fell silent.

'This is going to take a while,' I said. 'The bullets have fragmented as you can see from his films.'

Marino glanced around at the morbid chiaroscuro displayed on light boxes around the room.

'What was he using? Hydra-Shok?' I asked.

'All the cops around here are using Hydra-Shok these days. I guess you can see why. It does the trick.'

'His kidneys have a finely granular surface. He's very young for that.'

'What does that mean?' Marino looked on curiously.

'Probably an indication of hypertension.'

He was quiet, probably wondering if his kidneys looked the same, and I suspected they did.

'It really would help if you'd scribe,' I said.

'No problem, as long as you spell everything.'

He went to a counter and picked up clipboard and pen. He pulled on gloves. I had just begun dictating weights and measurements when his pager sounded.

Detaching it from his belt, he held it up to read the display. His face darkened.

Marino went to the phone at the other end of the autopsy suite and dialed. He talked with his back to me and I caught only words now and then. They drifted through the noise at my table, and I knew whatever he was being told was bad.

When he hung up, I was removing lead fragments from the brain and scribbling notes with a pencil on an empty, bloody glove packet. I stopped what I was doing and looked at him.

'What's going on?' I said, assuming the call was related to this case, for certainly what had happened tonight was bad enough.

Marino was perspiring, his face dark red. 'Benton sent me a 911 on my pager.'