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heirlooms. I wouldn’t eat. I cussed.
    Doc Evans simply waited. A few weeks later, he went up to my room and said:
    â€œYou’ve behaved as badly as can be and we haven’t thrown you out. We’ll never do that. Now, don’t you think you’ve tried us enough?”
    His voice carried that selfsame tone of wisdom and boundless patience when he asked me:
    â€œDid you kill it?”
    I shook my head and stood up.
    â€œIt was that way already when I got here.”
    â€œAnd what are you doing with that stick?”
    â€œI wanted to see its insides. I want to see how they work.”
    He stared at me for a while, his arms folded. Nowadays that answer would have earned me a couple of years’ counseling and stacks of little pink pills. Things were different in those days, but he was a smart guy, anyway. He knew no good would come of kids who tore the wings off flies or stove cats’ heads in with rocks. I think he was searching for something perverse or unhinged in my interest in the cat, but he didn’t find it. The more I think of it, the more convinced I am that that stare was a pivotal moment in my life. The way I turned out had a lot to do with that gaze.
    He finally made his mind up to believe me. He lowered himself next to the animal, examined it and looked around. Our backyard had a wire fence around it with more holes than the Clippers’ defense. And behind our house was a wood. Not big, but a thick one.
    â€œThat will have been a fox or a coyote. Give me the stick.”
    I did so, but what came next surprised me. Instead of burying the poor thing, as I thought he would, he put it on the garage table. He spread out some garbage bags and old newspapers and then had me fetch his doctor’s bag. It was big and made of worn leather, had his initials engraved on it and weighed a ton. I had a hard time lifting it up to the table. From it he extracted a scalpel and forceps.
    â€œTo harm a living thing is wrong, but this was an accident. It’s sad, but we can learn from it.” He hesitated, then went on. “You still want to see an animal from the inside?”
    I nodded.
    â€œThen we have to do this properly,” he said as he rolled up his sleeves. His arms were dark, tanned and hairy, while his hands were large and skillful.
    I sat next to him while he dissected the animal. He did so in the way he did everything in life: slowly, gently and respectfully. He briefly explained what the internal organs were, what they were for and what happened if any of them went wrong.
    Today they don’t do dissections in high school, not even on frogs, as they did in my day. In less capable hands than the ones I was in, it can be a traumatic experience. Even many years later, kids shudder to recall the smells and sounds of dissection.
    I simply remember the smell of Old Spice and Doc Evans’s deep, dry voice. That afternoon he won me over. I began to call him Daddy and he set me on my way to becoming a doctor.
    Twenty-six years later, as I beheld Svetlana Nikolić’s body, I remembered the day my father had taught me to fear neither blood nor death. I took a deep breath and tried to take in what I saw.
    The nanny was bundled up in a thick, see-through plastic sheet. Only her bare feet stuck out from under it. She was clad in a blue sweat suit such as she often wore around the house, although it looked much darker, almost black, through the gruesome wrapping. Her head jutted from the top end, at an unnatural angle. You didn’t need to be a brain surgeon to tell her neck had been broken. It was an instant and almost painless execution, but one that required brute strength, a lot more than it seems in the movies. Even for a skinny Serbian college girl.
    The worst thing was her eyes.
    Whoever had done it hadn’t troubled to close her eyelids. On the contrary, her eyes stared straight ahead and accusingly reflected the flashlight. They were at precisely the right