Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“In a perfect world, sure.” Dr. Metzler smiled, but this time it was the look a parent might give a five-year-old asking if the moon was made of green cheese. “It’s just not an accurate science. There are too many variables.”

“I see.”

“You seem more versed in forensics than a lot of the cops who come in here.”

“It’s an important part of my job, that’s all.”

“If you’re interested, I’d be willing to teach you a little, help you out. No sense me having all this information in my head if I can’t share it with someone who so clearly wants to learn.”

She nodded, smiled politely. The burdens of being so smart, she wanted to say.

“I wonder whether they really appreciate you on the Major Case Team.” He pretended to adjust the perforated stainless-steel tubing around the perimeter of the examination table, which washed the fluids off the body during the autopsy.

“I’ve never felt unappreciated,” she lied. For the first time she noticed the toe tag on the body’s left foot. It said “Unknown John Doe #6.” Wasn’t that, what was the word? A “John Doe” was unknown, wasn’t it?

“Somehow I doubt your beauty helps you in your line of work.”

“That’s very kind of you, Doctor,” she said, casting around desperately for a question in order to change the subject, but her mind had gone blank.

“Not kind at all. Accurate. You’re a fine-looking woman, Audrey. Beauty and brains — not a bad combination at all.”

“Why, you sound just like my husband,” she said lightly. He’d never actually said anything remotely like that, but she wanted the pathologist to get the message without hammering him over the head about it, and that was the first thing she thought of.

“I saw your ring, Audrey,” he said, giving her a smile that seemed more than playful.

The man was cutting up a dead body, for heaven’s sake. This wasn’t exactly a singles bar.

“You’re too kind,” she said. “Doctor, do the gunshot wounds give you any sense of the distance from the shooter?”

Metzler smiled to himself awkwardly as he studied the body on the table before him. He took a steel scalpel from the metal shelf attached to the table and, with maybe a little too much force, carved a large Y -shaped incision from the shoulders all the way down to the pubic bone. He was clearly trying his best to accept defeat gracefully. “There’s no stippling, no powder burns, no tattooing, no soot,” he said. His voice had changed; now he was all business.

“So they’re not contact wounds?”

“Neither contact nor intermediate range.” He began trimming back the skin and the muscle and tissue below.

“So what does that tell us distancewise?”

He was silent for a good thirty seconds as he worked. Then he said, “Actually, Detective, that tells us nothing except that the muzzle was more than three feet from the wound. Certainly not without determining the caliber of the bullet, the type of ammo, and then test-firing the gun. It could have been fired from three feet away, or a hundred feet. You can’t tell.”

The glistening rib cage exposed, he positioned the round jagged-toothed blade above the bone and flicked the switch to start it. Above the high-pitched mechanical whine, he said, “You might want to stand back, Detective. This can get a little messy.”

As badly as he wanted to, Nick couldn’t easily cancel the weekly number-crunching lunch with Scott McNally, not with the big quarterly board meeting coming up. He felt feverish, clammy, nauseated. He felt, unusually for him, antisocial. His normal ebullience had been tamped down. He felt the beginnings of a raging headache, and he hadn’t had a headache in years. He felt hung over, his stomach roiling. Coffee upset his stomach now, even though he needed it to stay awake and alert.

A chef from the corporate cafeteria had set out lunch for the two of them at the small round table adjacent to his home base. It was the usual — an eggplant Parmesan sub and a salad for Scott, a tuna sandwich and a cup of tomato soup for Nick. Folded linen napkins, glasses of ice water and a glass pitcher, Diet Cokes for both of them. Nick normally just ate a sandwich at his desk unless he had to do a working lunch. And until Laura’s death, she always packed his lunch — a tuna fish sandwich, a bag of Fritos, carrot sticks — and put it in his briefcase. It was a little tradition that went back to their earliest days, when they had no money, and he’d gotten used to it. It was one of those little things Laura liked to do for him, even when she was teaching college and barely had time in the morning before class to make his lunch. She always put a little mash note in the paper lunch bag, which always made him smile when he came upon it, like the prize in a Cracker Jack box. There’d been times when he’d been having an informal lunch with Scott or another of his executives and one of Laura’s notes had fluttered out, to Nick’s embarrassment and secret pride. He’d saved every single one of her notes, without telling her. After her death, he’d come very close to throwing them away or burning them or something, because it was just too excruciating to have them around. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that. So a neat pile of yellow Post-it notes in Laura’s beautiful handwriting lay in the bottom drawer of his desk at work, secured with a rubber band. Sometimes he’d been tempted to take them out and look through them, but in the end, he couldn’t. It was too painful.

“You look wiped out,” Scott said, tucking right in to his sub. “You getting sick?”

Nick shook his head, took a careful sip of ice water, its coldness making him shiver. “I’m fine.”

“Well, this ought to help,” Scott said. “I know how you feel about the numbers. You might want to grab a pillow.” He produced a couple of Velo-bound documents, slid one in front of Nick, next to his lunch plate.

Nick glanced at it. Income statement, cash-flow statement, and balance sheet.

“Check it out,” Scott said. “Man, I love the way they toast the bun. Grill it, maybe, I don’t know.” He took a slug of Diet Coke. “You’re not eating?”

“Not hungry.”

Nick skimmed through the statements without interest while Scott examined the Diet Coke can. “I hear the artificial sweetener in this stuff can cause mood disorders in rats,” he said.

Nick grunted, not listening.

“Ever seen a depressed rat?” Scott went on. “Curled up in a ball and everything? Some days they just don’t feel the maze is worth it, you know?” He took a large bite of his sub.

“What’s Stratton Asia Ventures?” Nick asked.

“You read footnotes. Very good. It’s a subsidiary corporation I’ve formed to invest in Stratton’s Asia Pacific ops. We needed a local subsidiary for permitting and to take advantage of certain tax treaties with the U.S.”

“Nice. Legal?”

“Picky, picky,” Scott said. “Of course legal. Clever doesn’t mean illegal, Nick.”

Nick looked up. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Our earnings are up? ”

Scott nodded, chewing his huge mouthful, made some grunting noises indicating he wanted to speak but couldn’t. Then he said, mouth still half full of food, “So it appears.”

“I thought — Jesus, Scott, you told me we were in the toilet.”

Scott shrugged, gave an impish smile. “That’s why you’ve got me around. You know I always come to play. I’m bringing my A game, huh?”

“Your ‘A game’? Scott, did you ever play a competitive sport in your life?”

Scott tilted his head to one side. “What are you talking about? I was point guard on the Stuyvesant math team.”