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pathologists use them to snap ribs, two of which, Dr Banachek pointed out, had been cracked during the struggle. Theresa kept her kidnapping/ransom theory to herself as he freed up the thoracic cavity a little more with each sickening crunch and the smell of offal and clotting blood filled the room.
    Instead, she took a closer look at Darryl’s mashed face, now that the blood had been hosed away. The nose looked broken, left cheek flattened where it had been pressed to the floor as he died. He had nearly matching cuts over both eyebrows and another on the right temple. These had coated his face in blood, but from the sheer volume of it on the office floor she felt sure he had more gashes on the back of his skull, under the hair. Theresa thought she’d been getting used to the idea, but it still felt strange to realize this had been a person she’d interacted with regularly for more than a dozen years. She expected his clouding eyes to pop fully open as he shouted, ‘Gotcha!’ with that rumbling, Barry White laugh.
    Dr Banachek had peeled back the skin from the Y-incision, clearing the way to examine the organs. Lemon-yellow, bubbling fat bulged outward.
    ‘He should have left off some of those cheeseburgers,’ Harris said.
    ‘Definitely a lot of bruising here,’ Banachek said, peering at the spider-like red tendrils of blood vessels broken by a blow to the area.
    Harris excavated the skin on his side, finding more of the same kind of damage, prodding at the subcutaneous fat with an expression of distaste. ‘And here I am, reduced to a friggin’ diener. How could Reese not be home at four in the morning?’

    ‘His wife’s out of town,’ Banachek said absently.
    ‘So what, he’s at his mistress’s? Hah. No, he had the sense to look at his caller ID before picking up. Not like me.’
    ‘It’s not like this happens often,’ Theresa said in an attempt to shut him up, though she’d never been able to get him to see the bright side of anything.
    Banachek removed the lungs, slapping them on to the polypropylene cutting board next to the sink. As usual, they just looked like raw meat to Theresa. ‘Not since Diana, and that was, what – ten years ago?’
    ‘At least,’ Theresa said, feeling a residual pang much more deeply than she would ever be able to for Darryl Johnson. She and Diana had been friends of sorts, sharing plenty of lunch hours together. Until her husband had strangled her with a jump rope and left her body on their kitchen floor.
    ‘I remember that,’ Harris said. ‘The pretty one from Records. They emptied the building for the whole day for her, no talk of a half-day. And they called in Reese – why? Because I have more seniority!’
    He and Dr Reese had had a friendly rivalry for as long as Theresa could remember. Friendly on Reese’s part, anyway – Harris, she couldn’t be sure about.
    Banachek sectioned the lungs with a large bread knife, slicing off tiny bits he found interesting and dropping them into the plastic quart container filled with formalin, murmuring the occasional comment, such as: ‘Too many cigarettes. They would have begun to haunt him in another decade.’
    The stomach was largely empty, unsurprising if death occurred five or six hours after dinner time. From Darryl’s gut she would have pegged him for a snacker, though, and indeed, some tough yellowish flecks bobbed here and there in the red-brown purée that emptied out of his digestive sac. Banachek helpfully retained most of it in a fifty ml plastic tube and labeled it to be sent to Theresa’s department, where she would have to rinse off the acids and bile and put the remaining solids under the stereomicroscope. Oh joy. Theresa would rather run her hands through a bucket of blood than deal with two tablespoons of gastric contents.
    Harris photographed the hands, after taking four minutes to figure out how to turn the camera on. Another advantage of the digital era, making photography fairly simple even for