"Night Warriors - 01 - Night Warriors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

'You take a look at that washed-up weed and that other debris,' the medical examiner told him. 'See where it lies. Most of it's lighter than a body, and far less bulky; yet it's way down the beach by comparison.'

Lieutenant Ortega came forward and looked down at the body uneasily. 'So what do you infer from that?' he asked the medical examiner.

'I don't know, I'm just making an observation,' the medical examiner replied.

'You .observe that the body is lying further up the beach than the seaweed and the logs and the other trash?'

'That's correct.'

Lieutenant Ortega sucked at his teeth again. His earlier efforts obviously hadn't succeeded in dislodging the fragment of food that was worrying him. 'You observe that the body is lying further up the beach than the seaweed and the other trash, and from this observation you conclude that the girl was not drowned at all, but that she died in some other way and was left on the beach, either by accident, or with the deliberate intention of making it appear as if she had drowned?'

'You said it, not me,' replied the medical examiner, palpating the dead girl's right leg, and watching to see what finger-marks he made. He snapped his fingers and one of the gum-chewing medics brought him his alloy medical-case, and opened it up for him. He rummaged around inside it until he found his thermometer, which he lubricated, and then unceremoniously inserted into the body's anus. 'If she's been floating around in the ocean all night, the probability is that her body temperature will be far lower than if she's been lying on the beach. That will depend when she died, of course; but this beach is pretty well crowded right up until sundown, isn't that true?'

'Yes, sir,' Detective Morris agreed. 'Sometimes well after sundown, too, when the kids have cookouts.'

The medical examiner waited patiently for the girl's body temperature to have its effect on the mercury in his thermometer. Meanwhile he looked up at Henry and Gil and Susan, and said, 'Who are these people? Gawkers, or what?'

'These people found the body,' said Lieutenant Ortega.

The medical examiner asked Henry, 'Ever see anybody dead on this beach before?'

Henry shook his head.

'Fine way to start the day, finding a body,' the medical examiner remarked, as casually as if he were discussing the weather. He withdrew his thermometer and frowned at it carefully. ' Sixty-one degrees.'

'And what does that mean?' asked Lieutenant Ortega.

'It means that the temperature inside the body is sixty-one degrees,' said the medical examiner.

'But what do you conclude?'

'Conclude? I don't conclude anything. It's up to you to make the conclusions. But you could take into consideration the fact that the air temperature here is something like fifty-five or fifty-six degrees, and that the ocean temperature is something like forty-two to forty-eight degrees.'

'So, if the body had been floating in the water all night, her body temperature would have been lower than sixty-one degrees?' said Lieutenant Ortega.

'Possibly,' the medical examiner replied.

Lieutenant Ortega let out another of his short, testy breaths. 'All right,' he said. 'Now can we turn her over?'

The medical examiner stood up, and fastidiously brushed the sand from the knees of his pants. As he did so, the two medics came forward, and positioned themselves on either side of the body. Henry, watching, was gripped by an irrational feeling of dread, and he had the strongest urge to turn and look the other way. Somehow, however, he found that he couldn't, that he had to watch. Otherwise the girl on the beach would remain faceless forever, and when he dreamed about her at night, which he inevitably would, he would see nothing but that mermaid hair, tangled with weed, and nothing but that long pale back.

'Be careful,' the medical examiner instructed the medics. 'I don't want any extra bruising.'

He came over and stood next to Henry and Gil and Susan. 'You didn't touch her at all, or try to move her?'

Henry shook his head. 'I don't think I would have had the nerve.'

Susan ventured, 'Do you suppose that somebody might have killed her? I mean, on purpose?'