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to pull a melted glob from the man’s rib. He might have been wearing a polyester shirt, or he might have been standing near plastic when the explosion occurred. Or it fell on him from one of the eight upper floors.
    ‘Except that Blount Enterprises doesn’t exist.’
    Theresa nearly lost the glob before dropping it into an envelope. She had been so hoping for a rational, accidental, non-malicious explanation. Life didn’t often strike her speechless but right now she could come up with nothing more than, ‘Doesn’t exist?’
    ‘That’s all I know.’
    ‘So he has a fake company, but not a fake name?’
    ‘Apparently.’
    ‘Who is this little bird?’
    Christine smiled, without bothering to lift her eyes from her work, only made a scribble on the anatomy diagram to represent a fracture of the man’s right ulna. Hadn’t Leo said one of the Feds observing the autopsy had been single and handsome? Christine had only to look at the average man and he would chatter away simply to have an excuse to stay in her presence. If she smiled, he might cough up anything, from his own bank account numbers to gossip straight from the corridors of power.
    ‘Can you tell if that occurred before or after death?’ Theresa nodded at the right arm.
    ‘Like maybe terrorists tortured him and then left him to die with his own explosives? Man, I wish I could say you’ve been watching too much TV.’
    ‘I have,’ Theresa said grimly. ‘The non-fiction type.’
    They both leaned over the broken bone until their heads bumped. After a few moments, Christine said: ‘I can’t be positive, but I don’t think so. I don’t see any change in what’s left of the tissue around the break or any healing at the end of the bone. Most likely it’s a post-mortem crushing injury.’
    Theresa retrieved another envelope and collected a piece of paper-thin fabric from the stump of the left leg. It remained entirely possible that someone meant to blow up the Bingham building and not themselves, using a detonator with a timer. She herself could have placed a nuclear reactor in the sublevel storage chamber without notice, as long as she brought it in piece by piece in cardboard boxes. Nairit could be an unlucky soul who went to drop off some data entry sheets exactly when the storage unit across the hall went kablooey. Maybe his company could not be located because they had moved, or had a name change.
    Or Nairit had been manufacturing or storing extremely explosive devices, and accidentally – not even the most desperate terrorist would consider the Bingham worth a suicide attack – set them off. Explosive devices utilizing nitrogen triiodide. But why? What had he hoped to do with it?
    And if he had achieved his goal, how many bodies would they have on their hands right now?
    Christine straightened, rubbed her lower back with one hand. ‘So what’s on your mind?’
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘You seem distracted. What’s bugging you?’
    Theresa glanced back at the dead fitness center worker, as Dr Banachek made the Y incision down her chest. ‘Other than a building collapsing on a bunch of people as they went about their daily business?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Not to mention on top of nearly every piece of Medical Examiner’s Office evidence accumulated during the last century?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And almost on top of me and Frank?’
    ‘Your face is looking better, by the way. But yeah, aside from that.’
    Theresa paused to find a whitish crystal on the exposed patella, but it crumbled to dust – and without exploding – when she tried to remove it. Plaster. ‘Well, I did have a police officer shot to death while at a scene. That hasn’t been too easy to shrug off.’
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    Theresa never knew how doctors did this, how they could look at the tone of your skin and gauge your weight and figure out what you didn’t even know that you didn’t want to tell them. They must spend a whole semester of med school on it. She tried again. ‘I met a