CLAIRE LOOKED UP when Rich and I banged open the ambulance bay doors to the autopsy suite. She wore a flower-printed paper cap and an apron, the ties straining across her girth. She said, “Hey, you guys. Check this out.”

  Instead of a corpse, there was a bisected tube of what looked like muscle, about seven inches long. The thing was clamped open on the autopsy table.

  “What is that?” I asked her.

  “This here’s a trachea,” Claire told us. “Belonged to a schnauzer Hanni found in the bushes outside the Chu house. See how pink it is? No soot in the pooch’s windpipe and his carbon monoxide is negative, so I’m saying he wasn’t in the house during the fire. Most likely he was in the yard, raised the alarm, and someone put him down with a blow to the head.

  “See this fracture here?”

  So much for the APB on Graybeard. Whose sad task would it be to tell Molly that her dog was dead? Claire went on to tell us she’d spent the day getting George and Nancy Chu’s bodies from the funeral home.

  “It’s not our jurisdiction, not our case, but I finally got permission from the Chus’ son, Ruben. Told him that if I have to testify against the killer and I haven’t examined all the victims’ bodies, I’ll get diced into pieces by the attorney for the defense.”

  I murmured an encouraging “uh-huh” and Claire went on.

  “Ruben Chu was a mess. Didn’t want his parents to ‘suf............