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apparently originated between the center and the front, possibly in one of the lower levels. No other information had been released. The Feds were playing their cards close to the chest. They had only now released these bodies for the county to autopsy.
    She pulled a white sliver from a gash on the woman’s arm.
    ‘What’s that?’ Christine Johnson asked. Her lab coat a snow white against the black skin, the pathologist stood at the next table over a body that only loosely resembled a man. Christine was young, fit and gorgeous, but Theresa tried not to hold that against her.
    ‘Looks like ceramic tile to me,’ Theresa said. ‘I wish I knew what the rest of the building looked like before the blast. I never went anywhere in it besides sublevel two. And the suicide’s apartment.’
    ‘You sure he didn’t set a fuse but then wanted a more certain death for himself?’
    ‘No apparent connection.’
    Christine leaned closer to the burned and shredded man than Theresa would have been comfortable with. ‘We’re lucky the place didn’t have more people in it.’
    ‘The tenants are all yuppies, I guess, out at work. Another thing that makes me think the explosion itself was accidental, that someone had stored stuff there that shouldn’t have been stored there. Why purposely blow up a mostly empty building with no political or financial significance?’
    ‘Yeah.’ Dr Banachek, ungloved, used a plastic stick to prod the jagged edge of the dead woman’s broken mandible. ‘I see a whole lot of crushing injuries here and not much else. No burns or signs that she got too close to explosives, no signs that she was tortured into cooperating with terrorists. She doesn’t even smell as nasty as some of the other ones. I’d say she was a good distance from the explosion. Just not good enough to survive.’
    ‘Hmm.’ Theresa used disposable tweezers to pluck a bundle of white fibers from the woman’s ankle into a small Manila envelope. Then she sealed it up, smiled at Dr Banachek, took her collected samples into the amphitheater to store on a lab tray, changed gloves and returned to the autopsy room to start on the next victim.
    ‘He ain’t looking so good,’ she pointed out to Christine.
    ‘Nothing a little aloe and lanolin won’t fix,’ the doctor said absently. ‘Maybe. This is Nairit Kadam, born in Pittsburgh, family from India. Fairly or unfairly, he is the closest the Feds have to a suspect, simply because he is the only victim who didn’t live or work in the building and he was obviously closest to the explosion. Of course, if you were going to blow someplace up, you’d think you’d take great pains to be the
farthest
person from the explosion. Oh, and the Middle Eastern name isn’t helping his case any.’
    The cleaning agent odor filled her nose. Theresa stared at the blackened husk, trying to sort the charcoal-colored protrusions into parts of a body she could recognize. ‘The blast took off his hands and feet.’
    ‘Maybe. Or they were crumbled to dust by falling concrete.’
    ‘Why was he there?’
    ‘For the same reason you go there, to store stuff. That’s how they know who he is – or at least how they’re making a guess at who he is; we’ll have to wait for DNA results because I don’t think dental is going to be completely accurate,’ Christine said, squinting at the decimated skull. ‘A little bird told me that Nairit here had signed in to visit his storage unit just before the blast, and we only know that because the building manager had been chatting up the receptionist when Nairit came in.’
    ‘The same building manager who then left for a doctor’s appointment?’
    The doctor nodded. ‘Which saved his life.’
    ‘So what did Nairit store in his storage facility?’
    ‘According to the lease, files and miscellaneous paperwork from a data entry company called Blount Enterprises.’
    ‘Doesn’t sound too explosive.’ Theresa used a fresh pair of disposable plastic tweezers