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table loaded with photography equipment and various tubes, valves, trinkets and mason jars filled with various powders, liquids and unidentifiable bits of things that looked like pickled flesh.
    As they entered, the doctor was in the act of plopping a heavy cardboard file folder onto his desktop.  He moved a chair over to be next to the other chair at his desk, then offered the empty seat to Sterno.  Doctor Rosenzweig had thin, wispy whiskers the color of dirty snow covering his tapered chin, with tobacco smoke stains under the nostrils and crumbs of bread under his mouth.  His wide-set eyes blinked non-stop, and were magnified hugely through his small silver spectacles.
    "Meet our Pinkerton man, Doc," the mayor said. "Charlie Sterno's his name.  Mr. Sterno, meet Dr. Eugene Rosen-zeeg, Hope County's own full-time doctor."
    "Und mortician, und coroner," he said.  "I help with suspicious deaths und murders, not that we get suspicious deaths.  Well, in any case, let us see, we have this one, do we not?  Please sit, Mr. Sterno."  He suddenly froze in the act of adjusting his chair under his behind.  "I assume it is Tommy Donnan you are here to look into." 
    "Thank you," Sterno said.  He sat down.  The file on the desk had been well-used already.  Across the top corner of the front cover were the words "Donnan, Thomas Andrew:  died 1 May '22" written in a script that approached calligraphy in its flourish.  Dr. Rosenzweig thrummed the cardboard with his fingertips as he took in Sterno.  Actually, it was only one part of Sterno's face that held the doctor's attention.
    "Ja, that is…" he breathed as he studied Sterno’s jawline.  "Hyper-pronounced masseter, extended maxillary body..." He reached out a hand to tilt Sterno's chin back, but caught himself.  Instead, he tilted his own head back, he tilted it left, he tilted it right.  From Sterno's angle, his eyes became bug-like behind his wire frames. 
    "It is almost like it is from our human ancestors.  Goodness, would I like to get a picture," he said.
    Sterno cleared his throat.  The doctor snapped to attention, straightened in his chair.
    "Now, let us see.  Mr. Sterno, where would you like to begin?"
    Sterno used his eyes to indicate the cameras and slides and flash pots behind the doctor.   "I was told you might have some photographs from that day."
    Dr. Rosenzweig peered at Sterno over his frames, one eyebrow arched up onto his forehead.  “They are not pleasant. But I assume you have seen many like them before,” he said.  He opened the file, thumbed aside some typewritten notes before finding the pictures, then pushed all else aside to lay them flat on the table.  "Oh, here, let us see. I suppose you should first take a look at this.  Have you seen any photos of Tommy Donnan yet?"
    “A few old ones,” Sterno said.  He had spent the night in Tommy’s room, in his bed, listening to the house around him—the snoring sounds of Tommy’s over-worked father, the bed chamber dribbling of Tommy’s grief-drained mother, the tossing of Tommy’s shell-shocked brother (as far as he knew, the girl had never returned to the house) and the random baying of the hound.  A handful of younger Tommy Donnans had stared out at him from the dresser, the walls, the bureau—a happy enough looking fellow.  Sterno had been kept awake by the nagging of an old dream come back to him—more a dreamt feeling than a real dream.  He spent much of the night yawning but not sleeping, blinking without thought at the unblinking buggy racer.  The rooster’s crow had been welcomed this morning.
    The old doctor said, “Here is the most recent one of him I could find—of him alive, I should say.”  He handed a print to Sterno.  "This is from the summer of 1921, so let us see, almost a year before he died.  Nine or ten months, perhaps.  His mother gave it to me.  Das is a blue ribbon he is holding."
    He looked more like a man in this photo than in the photos Sterno