Perri O'Shaughnessy - Unlucky in Law

They ended up in an alley between the school yard and the church, but by the time Paul found the two other men again, Krilov had slammed Giorgi against a wall. Without pausing he leaned down and reached a muscular arm around the priest’s neck and pulled him tightly to him. The knife was back in place before Giorgi could let out more than a surprised grunt and before Paul could get a clear shot.

Krilov dragged the priest to his feet, Giorgi’s bulky body covering all but four inches of his round head, white-blond hair, one eye, a glimpse of a once-broken nose. He began edging the priest toward Paul. Paul didn’t move, but Giorgi jerked again, resisting, and the knife sliced smoothly across the priest’s throat.

The priest’s eyes widened. Then they closed and he sagged. Blood flowed from the long slice, down the neck and onto the black cassock. That was good, it wasn’t spurting, maybe he hadn’t hit an artery. “Back off!” Krilov yelled from behind the priest. The light was bad and Paul couldn’t take the chance. He lowered the gun. Krilov pushed Giorgi at Paul. Paul caught him, and Krilov ran for the street, disappearing around a corner, fast and low.

Where the hell was help? Paul let out an enraged yell, realizing he couldn’t follow. He let Giorgi down gently and took off his sweater. He pushed the two flaps of neck skin together first, then wrapped the sweater around Giorgi’s wound. Pushing against it with what he hoped was enough pressure to keep Giorgi alive, but not enough to strangle him accidentally, he called for an ambulance on his cell phone.

Giorgi was coming around. “Hang on, Father,” Paul said. Paul got him up, propping his head against the wall, thinking a better position, gravity, hell, what did he know about all this blood except that neck wounds could bleed profusely, and he had an idea that Sergey might not have nicked the priest if he hadn’t startled him. As the sirens got loud, Giorgi opened dry lips and said, “Am I going to die?”

“Relax. The ambulance is here.” From somewhere in the cassock the priest’s hands produced some beads and he began mumbling prayers. Finally, another priest came rushing out of the church. Wailing at what he saw, he pushed Paul away to attend to Giorgi. Giorgi was now fully conscious and Paul saw to his relief that the bloody sweater didn’t seem to be getting any more catastrophically soaked.

Paul and the other priest stayed at Giorgi’s side as the paramedics slid him into the ambulance, the one thing that whole day that Paul did absolutely right, because just before they shut the doors, Giorgi pulled off his oxygen mask. “Warn her,” he said, voice gurgling on his own blood.

“Who?”

“The woman with the bones.”

“Who? What do you mean?”

“She kept samples, Alex told me. I had to tell…”

“I’ll take care of it, buddy.”

But Giorgi didn’t hear. His eyes closed and the doors closed, too.

Dr. Ginger Hirabayashi returned from her eight P.M. appointment two hundred dollars poorer, with her newly rhubarb-red waif hair a quarter inch shorter than it had been, soft around the face, with stiff spikes that radiated like sunbursts from her skull. She admired it in the reflective glass doors leading into the boring building in North Sacramento where she ran her forensics lab.

“Hey, Doc,” the security guard at the desk said, checking her out. “I like it, although my wife might feel moved to give you a word of motherly advice about that color.” A retired cop, he still had the brush mustache he had worn in younger days, only the originally firm brown jaw had a fleshier edge, and the once-dark hair was a spongy white. He pushed a clipboard toward her to sign.

“Hi, Phil. Tell her my mother does that for her.” She signed, then kissed her palm and flipped it toward the video camera screwed into a high corner near the elevators that faced the doors. “You awake up there, Dick?”

A long pause. The image of a young man with tousled black hair and whisker-bruised cheeks appeared on the monitor on Phil’s desk. “Of course I’m awake,” said the tinny speaker. His slow words echoed off the marble walls in the darkened atrium.

Phil and Ginger rolled eyes at each other. “Finish that paper on Milton yet, Dick?”

“Turned it in this morning.”

“Ever consider studying a real subject, the kind of thing that might get you a real job someday, like, say, pathology?”

“The smells coming out of your lab say it’s not for me.” The video clicked off.

“They ought to fire that guy,” Phil muttered as she pushed the clipboard back toward him.

“Helps to be the landlord’s son. Anyway, we’ve got you, Phil. He’s just dressing.” She didn’t care if Dick was listening. He hated the job, and didn’t mind saying so.

“What you doing in so late, anyway?”

“What do you think?”

“Hard to imagine what’s so goldang urgent about dead people,” he said, “that it should keep you up at night.”

Ginger walked past his desk, hit the elevator button, and waited, listening to the elevator moving through space without giving a hint of its whereabouts. A clunk, and the doors opened abruptly. She got in. More mirrors inside gave her a chance to adjust her blue denim miniskirt. She liked it riding low. Although she worked in a lab, she had never owned a white lab coat. Most of the consultants who shared facilities on her floor, all forensics experts who had formed a consortium a few years ago, did wear a uniform, however: jeans and T-shirts, jeans and dress shirts, jeans and blouses, jeans and tank tops.

Her concession to pragmatism was to wear a red faux-leather apron, the better to keep herself clean as she went about her messy business.

She didn’t like working late but her new girlfriend kept strange hours, and hadn’t been home when she called. She could give Nina’s case some extra time. She touched her new gold ear cuff, which hurt more than her other piercings, and reminded herself to douse it in alcohol when she finally did get home. She knew only too well what an infection looked like when it got to tearing through a body’s system.

She might be here for hours. She stepped out of the elevator into the hall, where she had hung a jolly painting by an artist named Hans Bellmer who liked to mix up female body parts.

Ginger was a forensic pathologist, not a priest or a detective, but it was human to seek explanations, and curiosity had kept her awake a few nights since that meeting with Nina, when her lover hadn’t. If Nina’s client had in fact committed the murder, the crime scene made sense. If he hadn’t, the evidence was somehow misleading them. With the certainty of a person who relied on science and reason for explanations, she felt illumination lurked inside those bits of DNA in the blood from the victim’s apartment, but after two weeks of looking she still had no answer to her questions.

She was supposed to testify for the defense within the next few days, and she had nothing for them yet.

Unlocking the door to her lab with a key, she decided that was exactly why she liked Nina’s jobs. When Nina worked a case, she took the dross nobody else found interesting and, with the fire of a fanatic, made it fascinating, whether you believed or not. So she wasn’t going to let the little matter of an old man’s dry bones stop her from figuring out whatever there was to figure out.

Her lab was large, about eight hundred square feet, which she couldn’t have afforded if she was on her own. She shared it with several other people: Jimmy, the HPLC wizard; Carol, the toxicologist, who did chromatography on suspect drugs and used tissue samples to find traces of poison or drugs; and Kevan, their resident blood-man. He did ELISA’s and radio-immuno assays to determine blood types and find useful proteins that might be present in a sample. She flipped on the banks of color-corrected overhead lights, illuminating slab benches made of black epoxy with a matte finish in varying states of disarray.