I WAS WEARING my new blue uniform, and I’d washed my hair thirteen times and once more for good luck when I walked into the autopsy suite the next day. Claire was standing at the top of a six-foot ladder, her Minolta focused down on Mieke Vetter’s decapitated and naked body. Claire looked huge and wobbly up there.

  “Can’t someone else do that?” I asked her.

  “I’m done,” she said. She climbed down the ladder, one ponderous step at a time.

  I gestured to the woman on the table. “I can save you some time,” I said to Claire. “I happen to know this victim’s cause and manner of death.”

  “You know, Lindsay, I still have to do this for evidentiary purposes.”

  “Okay, but just so you know. Yesterday, your patient sprayed me with blood, bone fragments, hair, not to mention brains. You have any idea what dripping brains feel like?”

  “Warm gummy bears? Am I right?” Claire said, grinning at me.

  “Uh. Yeah. Exactly.”

  “One of my first cases was a suicide,” Claire said, getting on with her work, drawing a Y incision with her scalpel from each of Ms. Vetter’s clavicles to her pubis.

  “This old soldier ends it all with a twelve-gauge shotgun under his chin. So I come into his RV, fresh out of training, ya know? And I’m leaning over his body in the La-Z-Boy, taking photos, and the cops are yukking it up.”

  “Because?”

  “I had no idea. You see, that’s the point, girlfriend.”

  I started laughing for the first time in a long while.

  “So as I’m leaning over the body, about a quarter of the guy’s brain has been slowly peeling off the ceiling - it falls and smacks me right behind my ear.”

  She slapped her neck to show me, and I rewarded her story with a good guffaw.

  “Like I said, warm gummy bears. So............