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wrong with the software they already had and that the state of New Hampshire never got anything right.
    The doctor seemed beyond grateful when someone from the conference staff pulled him out of the hotel ballroom. He approached Cyrus and Avakian like a puppy then happily led them over to a table near the afternoon coffee setup. “First dibs on the baked goods,” he exulted. “Load up. On me.”
    Himmel was one of those older men who never seemed to grow out of adolescence, and even though he was a portlysixty-five decked out like a period piece in a red bow tie and suspenders and short-sleeved white shirt, he had juvenile mannerisms, dunking his chocolate chip cookies into his coffee and wiping the crumbs off his puffy lips with the back of liver-spotted hands.
    He slurped his coffee and apologized again for the venue before launching into a tirade on the inefficiencies of state government. Cyrus grounded him at the first polite moment. “The cause of death was strangulation, right?”
    “Yeah. Her larynx was crushed. It was manual, from the front. The bruises were consistent with a pair of thumbs. It’s not so easy to kill someone like that unless they were drugged or passed-out drunk.”
    “You don’t have the tox back yet, right?” Avakian asked.
    “Hello? This is New Hampshire. Have you seen our budget? The idiot bureaucrats are spending money on software we don’t need instead of nuts and bolts.”
    Cyrus jumped in, heading off a tangent. “Which came first, the strangulation or the head wound?”
    “Look, if she was conscious at the time of the assault, I’d say a hundred percent she was strangled then drilled.” He turned his hand into a power drill, pointed a finger against his skull and made a long drawn-out
brrrrrrrr
sound with his throat, causing the two agents to blink in disbelief at his antics. “You can’t sink a drill bit into someone’s skull without them putting up a little bitty fight and there aren’t any signs of bondage. If she was drugged first, then all bets are off on the sequence. If she still had a beating heart the drilling would have produced a real gusher. There wasn’t any blood at the crime scene but she was certainly killed somewhere else. There also wasn’t a lot of blood on her hair and scalp so she was probably dead or fibrillating when she got trephined. We’ll know more when the labs come back, but like I said, it’ll take a while.”
    Avakian squinted at him. “Trephined?”
    “Hole made in head,” Himmel said slowly, as if Avakian were a child. Cyrus could tell his partner wanted to sock the guy in the nose.
    “Talk to us about the head drilling,” Cyrus said quickly.
    “I’ve been at this for a long time and this is unique. It’s more than a trephination, you know. I’m sure you saw it on my report, there was a tract I probed, maybe two to three millimeters in diameter, extending from the hole in the parietal bone through the entire left parietal lobeinto the left lateral ventricle.” Himmel sat back and waited for their murmurs of interest.
    “Help me out, Doc,” Cyrus begged.
    “The ventricles. The chambers at the middle of the brain where the cerebrospinal fluid is formed then circulates around the outside of the brain and spinal cord. The fluid cushions the brain, like shock absorbers.”
    “Is the killer making a deposit or a withdrawal?” Avakian asked.
    “Good question.” He seemed surprised. “We’ll need to get our tox samples back and all the fixed tissue sections, but grossly, I didn’t see any dramatic evidence of injection of a foreign substance, like a caustic agent.” “Just like the other cases,” Avakian said.
    “What other cases?”
    Cyrus thought he’d mentioned the others on the phone but maybe he hadn’t. He got irritated at himself for not remembering; it wasn’t like him.
    His mobile rang. He pulled it from his inside pocket and saw it was from Marian. He put it on vibrate, stuffed it back in his pocket and let it