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Morgues were emergency rooms for the dead. Their clients were admitted, processed by triage, and released. Morgues didn’t use architectural illusions to dissemble. They opened directly onto side street pavement; they seldom had waiting rooms apart from a makeshift cluster of chairs. There was no casual traffic through a morgue. It was a place always of profound mystery, where forensic resources were brought to bear on the expiration of human beings, to capture their untoward moments of death.

When Morgan and Miranda arrived, they passed a teenage girl standing by the soft drink machine who turned away from them in a sort of innocuous slouch. As they walked through a glass door and down a brightly lit hallway in the direction of muffled voices and the sounds of small whirring motors, the girl’s reflection suggested resignation, as if she had been waiting for hours.

The medical examiner was Ellen Ravenscroft. The coroner was just about to start work on Eleanor Drummond. She dismissed an assistant and conferred briefly with Miranda and Morgan, directing them to some items on top of a stainless-steel cabinet and papers on a desk, then she drew the cover away from Eleanor Drummond’s body and folded it neatly for reuse.

Miranda stood back a little so that her head and shoulders were out of the illumination cast by the low-slung lights. She was sure no one enjoyed an autopsy, but Morgan and the ME seemed to regard the body about to be splayed open with clinical detachment. The worst was when it was a child. Miranda found it easiest when the body was so badly mangled that it didn’t resemble a person.

She had never before been acquainted with the victim in a murder investigation. Robert Griffin, who was filed somewhere in the bank of drawers along one side of the crypt, she knew only as a corpse, despite her intimate connection with his private affairs.

Miranda moved so that she could see past the obstruction of her colleagues. She shuddered. Despite the gaping hole in the woman’s abdomen, for an absurd moment she was struck by how very lovely Eleanor Drummond appeared. Here was a woman who knew how to be naked — and dead. Miranda half suspected she had prepared, with the art of a ghoulish courtesan, for the intimate examination now underway.

Her body was groomed to perfection, her makeup was done with finesse, and her physique was toned and lotioned with loving care. There were no tan lines, she knew enough to stay out of the sun, her legs were entirely clean of hair, her pubic triangle was neatly trimmed, and the down on her belly and arms was soft in the harsh light like a fine mist sprayed on freshly cut flowers.

How could someone be more vulnerable, Miranda thought, than lying naked on a stainless-steel tray, examined only as human remains? Even if the body didn’t know it was happening, it was happening. Miranda wanted to cover the woman. She related to her now — while alive there had been an impossible distance between them. Miranda had only had a bikini wax once in her life, and that was before she had gone to Grand Cayman. She felt sad and oddly exhilarated by the strangeness of a woman who seemed to be so much in control despite the circumstances.

As the ME leaned into her job, the illusion collapsed in soulless procedures of cutting and probing.

“Was she a smoker?” Miranda asked the ME.

“Never.”

“Then why did —”

“Stage business,” said Morgan. “The worse the script, the more smoking there is.”

“Playing out her role as mistress?”

“Was she?” asked the ME.

“His mistress?’ said Miranda. “Apparently. Did she ever have a baby?”

“Yes, not recently, but yes.”

The medical examiner described the superficial appearance of the body in detail, speaking into an overhead microphone and to them at the same time. Miranda turned to the items on the cabinet. She picked up a nail file with a tortoiseshell handle. “Anything unusual about this?”

“Yes,” said the ME. “There was blood and tissue adhering to the tip.”

“It was lying in the pool of blood when we found her,” said Miranda.

“This was more than watery blood. It was as if the nail file had been used as a weapon except —”

“Maybe defence?”

“No, the tissue is hers, and there’s enough to suggest it penetrated more than skin-deep. If it had gone right in, though, the roughness of the file would be rich with details. It’s relatively clean. And there’s no separate wound.”

Miranda put the nail file back and approached the cadaver again to observe the procedure.

“Look at this,” said Ellen, holding the flesh open. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The damage pattern suggests a deliberate separation of organ from organ, mutilating each in a prescribed sequence. Meticulous but brutal. It doesn’t make sense.”

“An exercise in methodical torture?” suggested Morgan.

“Jack the Ripper?” the ME said. “Punishment and pain? I don’t know. More like cruel efficiency. Almost as if she were helping him along.”

“You assume it was a male?”

“It’s a generic thing, Morgan.” The ME winked. “Like women are ships.”

“Is that open to argument?”

“Accept it, Morgan,” said Miranda. “Informed opinion, linguistic convention — men do the killing unless otherwise noted. Is there a readout on the water and blood samples?”

“Yes, love, over there on the desk.”

Yes, love, Miranda said to herself, and smiled with something approaching affection. No matter how long they were here, she thought, something of the language stayed with them. Miranda nearly apologized for the gauche condescension, except that it was only a thought. Sometimes inflections from elsewhere lasted for generations; it was as if they were genetic.

They knew each other off duty and were almost friends — two professional women married to their jobs. When Ellen Ravenscroft went home on vacation, she came back with rollicking tales of trekking through Heathcliff country alongside strapping country gentlemen, her Yorkshire accent thickened almost back to the original. For Miranda a trip home at the most exciting meant soaking up a bit of illicit sun along the mill race out past the old grist mill, something, in fact, she wasn’t sure she had done since her teens.

She scanned the lab report until she found the anomaly she was looking for. “So there are traces of sodium thiosulphate in the water and not much chlorine.”

“That’s what you’d expect,” said Morgan. “Fish people use sodium thiosulphate to dechlorinate city water, which would have killed the Showa.”

“The what?” asked the ME. “The Japanese fish we found beside the… deceased. It was still alive, a Doitsu Showa, and a genuine beauty.”

“I’m sure.”

“But there are variations,” said Miranda. “Some of these samples, ones taken directly from the body, contain chlorine and chloramines.”

“Tap water,” said Morgan.

Miranda circled around the perimeter of the room as if she were taking a stroll, lost in thought. Morgan turned his attention to the autopsy. He knew when to leave his partner alone.

“Have either of you talked to the girl outside?” asked the ME.

“What girl?” said Miranda from the shadows. “The teenager in faded jeans, Birkenstocks, and a lavender silk shirt?”

“That would be the one,” said the ME. “She said she was supposed to meet someone called Molly Bray. There’s no Molly Bray here, living or otherwise. She said her mother left a note. Asked me if she could wait. She was flicking a lighter. I’d have shown her a smoker’s lungs if I had any lying about. I don’t relate well to young people. I was there once myself, but I grew out of it. If she’s still hanging around, could you guys deal with her? Maybe she’s just a death junkie.”

“You go talk to her, Miranda. You’re better with kids.”

“Yeah, okay. But I think you should know …” Miranda remained silent for a few moments until she had their interest, then declared, “Eleanor Drummond died by suicide.”

“No way,” the ME shot back.

Morgan was more circumspect in his response. “What makes you think that?”

“Elementary, dear Holmes. Have you ever read Yukio Mishima, the Japanese author?”

“Possibly.”

“You’d remember if you’d read ‘Patriotism.’ It’s a short story. I’ll bet she read it.” Miranda nodded at the body lying open in front of them. “Morgan, with Griffin we have a murder that pretends to be suicide. And now we have a suicide meant to look like murder.”

He waited.

“Yukio Mishima disembowelled himself in the same grisly ritual he described in his fiction. He knew exactly what he was doing. Seppuku. He had already been through it in words. Of course, he describes ritual suicide as an honourable thing. Yet somehow the fiction deconstructs in spite of the author. The warrior’s actions as he kneels and slides the sword into his belly and moves it through his pain in a prescribed pattern, severing his guts organ by organ, he and the author regard as ennobling, and eventually Mishima emulated his astonishing story.

“There is a woman, though — the warrior’s wife. She’s meant to be his necessary witness to affirm his nobility. After he dies, she methodically prepares the house for their discovery and then without fanfare takes her own life. A reader sharing Mishima’s fanaticism might find her role trivial. But to me her apparent passivity subverts the whole idea of seppuku. It’s just a game boys play when they come to the end of things.”

Morgan was fascinated by her leisurely exegesis, and baffled by its relevance to her bizarre revelation about the death of Eleanor Drummond. The ME was listening but proceeded with her work. They waited.

Miranda touched the arm of the corpse with the back of her hand as if the contact would somehow confirm her account. “Eleanor Drummond was both the warrior and the wife. She had to have read Mishima. I guarantee it. She understood the warrior’s unwavering commitment and she understood the humility needed for the ignominious death of the wife, leaving no explanation.”

“Even if it was suicide, why like this?”

“I don’t know, Morgan. Eleanor Drummond displayed utter conviction about the necessity of death. I don’t think the brutality was collateral damage. She needed to do it the way she did.”

Ellen put down the instruments she was using for the autopsy, turned, and leaned against the stainless-steel table. “What about the wound? This wasn’t done by Excalibur. Take a look inside, love. She was battered not sliced. And there was no warrior’s sword at the scene, not even a blunt one. How could she hide it? I can’t conceive of suppressing the agony. There was no evidence of drugs. Why in the world make suicide so bloody complicated?”

“Don’t know,” said Miranda with a trace of smugness that let Morgan know she was confident and probably right.

“Okay, shoot,” he said.

“I have no idea why she did it. That may be our real mystery. But her desperation must have been absolute. She wasn’t herself. We know that, literally. This was the ultimate act after years of ferocious dissembling. Ellen, did you notice her blouse wasn’t torn? That was the first thing that struck me. Maybe she was in control of her entire death scene.”

“You’re right,” said the ME. “Like it was lifted aside before the weapon went in.”

“She was fastidious,” said Miranda. “She rolled up the carpet. She could have just moved it aside, but she rolled it up and put it in the closet. She put her shoes neatly out of the way —”

“But not her jacket?” the ME interjected.

“She needed her jacket.”

“She did?”

Morgan found something deeply sensual in Miranda when she was totally caught up in extravagant thought; the raw intellectual energy released pheromones or something. He listened with benign, almost indulgent concentration. They were, all three, excited by where she was going.

“Okay,” Miranda continued, “she knows precisely what needs to be done. Everything is prepared. She lifts the aquarium down onto the chair. She kneels beside it. This isn’t so you won’t hear when it breaks, Morgan. It’s because she knows once she starts she won’t have the strength to pull it down from the shelf. She doesn’t know you’re there. She takes her nail file and jabs a hole in her abdomen to get things started. She puts down the file and pulls the aquarium over so that it breaks in front of her and spills water over her legs and lap. Then using her jacket to get a good grip — that’s why her jacket is scrunched up and bloody — she takes hold of a large shard of ice she’s made for the purpose. It’s about the size of a small sword. She inserts the end of the ice into the gut wound, but it won’t go in as easily as she anticipated. It takes all her strength to drive it through. There’s your bruising. Then she leans forward against the ice and works it in a predetermined trajectory among her lower organs. Her heart and lungs are still going strong, pumping the blood through her guts. The blood spreads in a sheet across her lap. With less blood in her head the pain eases and she slips into a kind of euphoria, gouges away as much as she can, falls to the side, and dies.”

The three of them stood close to Eleanor Drummond’s splayed cadaver, pressed together by the intimacy of a shared secret. Then, a little embarrassed, they separated emotionally, but stayed close, not wanting to lose what they had.

“Was it the tap water?” Morgan asked. “Is that what tipped you? I’ve heard of icicles as weapons before, or at least it’s out there in the realm of urban myth, but the meltwater always gives them away. The spilled aquarium was meant to cover it up. A bit cruel, though. She was willing to sacrifice that beautiful fish.”

“I don’t think she shared all of Griffin’s passions,” Miranda said.

“What about the ice sword? Where did that come from? You said ‘prepared for the purpose.’ How so?”

“Remember the vase with the long-stemmed roses?”

“The dying flowers, yeah, in Waterford crystal.”

“After we found her, when we went down to the den, the flowers had been thrown out. She used the vase. Dumped the flowers — they were dead, anyway — filled it with water, and popped it into the freezer alongside the shrimp. It’s the right shape — tall and slender, tapered toward the base. In a matter of hours she had her weapon. She could have made it while we were still there, Morgan. Between talking to you and talking to me, she began the procedures of her own demise. Chilling, isn’t it?”

He decided not to pick up on the ice motif.

“Why the need to inflict such terrible pain on herself?” Miranda asked rhetorically. “Why ritual suicide? It had to be more than simply an attempt to mislead. Surely, it wasn’t for honour or for ritual obligation. How far can we push the Japanese connection?”

“Maybe it all has something to do with the koi,” Morgan suggested.

“I don’t know Mazda from Toyota, Hyundai from seppuku,” said Ellen.

“Subaru,” said Miranda, then conceded, “yeah, seppuku.”

“Hyundai is Korean,” added Morgan.

They both stared self-consciously at the medical examiner. This was her realm, the kingdom of the dead, and morbid good humour was an affirmation of primacy. She was neither stupid nor malicious, just territorial, they decided. And Miranda, while not threatening, was the one in control.

Miranda continued her rhetorical inquiry. “Could anyone need to suffer so much? How terrible or beatific to embrace absolute pain.” Caught up in her own words, she lapsed into silence for a moment, then said, “Martyrs welcome arrows and flames. Yearning for release, purification, absolution, redemption, yearning for heaven? If what she was trying to resolve was bad enough — yearning for hell.”

“Or oblivion,” Morgan suggested.

Miranda frowned. “Oblivion? There would be easier ways, don’t you think? It may have to do with koi, or maybe not.”

“It does make sense,” said the medical examiner. “The deliberate pattern of violence inside her gut, the bruising, the lack of resistance, no weapon, the focused brutality. I think you’re absolutely on, love. Absolutely on. I still don’t know about controlling the pain, though.”

“I was reading a while back about operations in the early nineteenth century,” said Morgan. “A witness in London described a woman being led out into an operating theatre and curtsying to the medical observers before climbing onto the surgical table and lying back while aides held her arms and legs. She had a large tumor excised from her breast without anaesthetic. According to the diarist, she didn’t cry out. When her breast was sewn back up, she was helped from the table. As soon as she got on her feet, she turned and curtseyed again to the audience before being led back to the ward.”

“The point being?” prompted Miranda.

“The point being, since there were no alternatives available, she controlled her nervous response. It surely isn’t that she didn’t feel pain. Her mind and her body conspired to deal with it by wilful quiescence, just as another person might by screaming bloody murder.”

“And you agree that Eleanor Drummond could have had that kind of will?” asked Miranda.

By way of confirmation, the ME observed that she had seen women in childbirth go through absolute misery, their bodies tearing open and wracked with agony, yet they barely cried out beyond an involuntary whimper, while others, through easy births, had howled enough to wake the dead. After she told them that, she surveyed the crypt, the wall of stainless-steel drawers marked with ID labels, and the tables with sheets pulled up over their occupants. Then she looked at the body of Eleanor Drummond. “Well, maybe not wake them up, but to scare hell out of them, anyway. And look at those fakirs in India. We don’t know how they control blood flow to self-inflicted wounds, but they do. And apparently pain, as well.”

“There was a woman in Mexico,” Morgan said, “who went into labour and was alone. When the baby wouldn’t come, she knew something was wrong. She took a carving knife and delivered the baby by Caesarean. Both mother and baby survived.”

“So we’re agreed?” asked Miranda. “She was a very determined woman whose options had narrowed to zero. That leaves us with a bigger mystery than ever, I suppose. The big question is why? And how does all this connect with the death of Robert Griffin?” She took a deep breath. “Is her suicide an implicit confession that she killed the old boy? Or that she couldn’t live without him? I mean, it’s got to connect, but I’m at a loss.” She smiled. “I’ve had enough for one night. Triumph is tiring. I’m going home.”

“You’d better talk to the girl out there,” Ellen reminded.

“Sure, on my way. Good night, Ellen. Night, Morgan.” Miranda slipped out into the brightly lit corridor. The lights were kept high, she observed, even in the dead of night.

The girl was sitting on a bench by the soft drink machine, legs outstretched, staring at the floor.

“Hi,” said Miranda. “Are you here with someone?” She noticed the girl was playing with a lighter, but there were no butts on the floor and her fingers weren’t stained.

“My mom said to wait for her.”

“Here?”

“She left a note.”

“What’s your mom’s name?”

“Molly Bray.”

“There’s no Molly Bray here.”

“Maybe there is,” said the girl.

“What’s your name?”

“Jill.”

“Well, Jill, this is no place for you. You’d better go home. I’ll give you a lift. I’m a police detective.”

A tremor of apprehension passed over the girl’s face, which resolved into a mask of studied composure. “No, thank you. I’ll wait. She said I should come here.”

“To the morgue? Jill, do you know what this place is?”

“Yeah, I think so. It’s for dead people.”

“Do you think your mother’s dead?”

There was a long pause.

“Yes.”

The girl regarded her with astonishing self-possession. At the same time there was vulnerability in her eyes, as if she might suddenly collapse but didn’t know quite how to do it. This girl was used to self-restraint — and self-reliance. But she was so young, and underneath the bravado she must be incredibly frightened.

“Is there anyone I can call?” Miranda asked.

“No. Thank you.”

“What’s that pin you’re wearing? It’s very beautiful.”

“A fish.”

“Is it silver?”

“It’s black and white. The silver’s where the white parts are and the black is empty. So it’s whatever colour you’re wearing. I mostly wear black. My mother gave it to me.”

“Do you know what kind of fish it is?”

“Shiro Utsuri.”

Miranda shuddered. “Jill, does the name Eleanor Drummond mean anything to you?”

“No.”

Miranda reached into her purse and retrieved the envelope with the photograph. She examined the picture, then held it out to the girl.

“That was me when I was nine.”

“I think you’d better come with me, Jill.” Miranda preceded the girl into the autopsy area of the crypt and asked Ellen to cover the body of Eleanor Drummond, except for the head.

Miranda held the girl by the arm and drew her close to the table. Gazing at the composed features of the dead woman’s face, the haunting pallor giving her skin the translucent quality of a Lalique sculpture, Jill seemed mesmerized. No one said anything. Jill reached out tentatively and touched the back of her hand to the woman’s cheek. She didn’t flinch when contact was made with the cool flesh, as Miranda had expected. Jill related to the brutality of death in ways Miranda did not at the same age, or even now.

The girl turned and walked out of the room, and Miranda followed her, with Morgan close behind. Jill sat by the soft drink machine, staring at the floor, uncertain what to do next. Miranda wanted to comfort her, but the girl apparently needed distance.

Morgan tried for clarification, speaking in a quiet voice to Miranda. “It seems out of character. She wouldn’t just leave a message saying, ‘Pick up my body at the morgue.’”

“Jill, do you have your mother’s note?” Miranda asked. “Could we see it?”

The girl handed her a folded sheet of pale blue vellum. On it were clear instructions to meet her at this address. Miranda expected a spidery script, but the writing was slanted all to one side.

“Your mother didn’t write this, did she?” Miranda asked.

“No.”

“Did you write it?”

“Yes.”

“Why? I don’t understand how you knew to come here.”

She gazed into Miranda’s eyes with the bewildered look of a bird plucked from the air.

Miranda resisted taking the girl in her arms. They had to sort this out. “How did you know to come here, Jill?”

The girl seemed to be searching inside for an answer.

“When did you last see your mother?” asked Morgan, sitting beside her. Miranda was sitting on the other side; between the two of them they were shoring her up without touching her.

“This morning … when she drove me to school. She said not to worry and I wasn’t worried until she said that. Like, of course, I worried. She sometimes does strange things. She told me Victoria, our housekeeper, would look after me. She said you, the woman cop, would look after me. I asked her why would I need anyone to look after me. I asked her what cop. She said you’d find me. So I went into school, worried sick. When I got home, she wasn’t there and she didn’t come home for supper. Victoria had no idea what was going on, so I phoned all the hospitals. When I phoned here, they said there was a woman here, a murder victim, who fit my mom’s description. So I came over. I was waiting for you.”

She looked into Miranda’s eyes, her own eyes pleading for release from the emotional confusion. Miranda recognized the familiar fear of a brutalized child. She had been the same age when her father died.

Almost immediately Jill rallied and spoke in an even tone. “You know it when someone says goodbye to you and what they mean is forever. I knew this morning that I’d never see her again. But it was like being inside a movie. The more scary it was the more unreal it all seemed. Now it seems real. That’s my mom in there on the table. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Yes,” said Miranda, “she’s very beautiful. Why the note, Jill?”

“I’m a kid. Kids can’t hang around places like this without permission.”

“Permission?”

“Like school, a note from my mom.” Miranda winced, and Jill smiled at her sweetly. “That’s irony, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Jill, that’s irony. Come on now. Let’s get you home. Is anyone there?”

“Victoria.”

“Your father?”

“My father is deceased,” the girl said with incongruous formality.

“I’m sorry, Jill.”

“It’s okay.” She gazed plaintively at Miranda and then away. “I don’t want my mom to be dead.”

“I know. Come on. Let’s go home.”

“Call me first thing in the morning, Miranda,” said Morgan. “Good night, Jill.” He remained seated while Miranda and Jill walked out through the front entrance, Miranda’s arm draped lightly across the girl’s shoulder, the girl leaning slightly into Miranda’s body, almost as if they were comforting each other.

When they were gone, Morgan picked up a chrome-plated Zippo lighter from the bench and fiddled with the unfamiliar mechanism until it flared into an orange-blue flame that burnt his finger. With a rapid flick of his hand he let the lighter drop to the floor. Then he leaned over, retrieved it, and slipped it into his pocket, where he could feel its residual warmth.

After the time it would have taken him to have a cigarette, Morgan went back into the autopsy room. “The big question is why?” he mumbled as he moved close to Ellen to follow her progress. He was thinking about smokers, not the corpse on the table.

“I can’t tell you that, Morgan. I never know why. No matter how much I cut and probe, I can’t get there. I can slice and dice the brain, but the mind is something else. I know that’s trite, but it’s true. I’ve never seen a soul, either.”

“Maybe you’ll surprise yourself someday and find a cavity the size of a walnut near the hypothalamus, but it’s empty and the occupant has fled. There’s a whole galaxy of souls out there, billions of walnuts rattling along the corridors of heaven. And I don’t even know what you mean by the mind.”

“The potential inherent in the functioning brain for awareness…” She paused and leaned low with a bright light to peer into the depths of the body. “I don’t know, Morgan. You tell me. What is the mind?”

“Maybe it’s like a grasp, something shaped in the air with your hands, the way your fingers move to catch water. It’s not the hand or the water but what they can do. More like the content in a computer, not the hard drive or a memory stick, but the content itself. And it can be erased. Look at her, just like that, and all you’re left with is machinery.”

“Late night at the morgue — the chatter never stops! Can you pour us some coffee? I don’t know how much more I’m going to get out of her tonight.”

Morgan got two cups of coffee and came back. “What about him?” He nodded in the direction of the stainless-steel drawers. “Robert Griffin. What’s the last word?”

“Died from asphyxiation. No trauma to speak of apart from death. His lungs were rosy and plump. Seems to have died without protesting.” She walked to a drawer, pulled it open, and peeled back a white cloth so that Griffin’s face gleamed in the phosphorescent light. “There was a fair dose of Valium in his system. Maybe that explains it. Apart from a little water damage he looks quite passable. Death becomes him, I think.”

“More so than life. He seems to have had an impoverished existence despite his wealth. No family, no friends, an indifferent lover, an obsession with fish. There was no water in his lungs, right?”

“Right.”

“No sign of a struggle?”

“Right. A small cut on his left temple, nothing much.”

“Would there have been blood?”

“I doubt it. It happened, as far as I can tell, virtually at the point of death. There would hardly be any to speak of.”

“Unless someone cleaned it up.”

“Who? He was busy expiring.”

“The killer.”

“I don’t think there was anything much, not if his heart had stopped pumping.”

“But it must have bled a little. I can see veins.”

“His face was underwater.”

“He didn’t drown?”

“Right.”

“But he was asphyxiated?”

“Right.”

“So it was almost as if he co-operated in his own murder, let someone smother him.”

“Possibly.”

“Then maybe he had a burst of air pumped into him, say, from an aerator used for an aquarium. Just to make sure he would float.”

“He was gassy. It must have gone into his gut. Why bother?”

“The killer wanted it to look like suicide but didn’t want him to sink, to remain undiscovered. Or didn’t want us draining the pools.”

“Surely a killer would know we’d find his lungs dry.”

“The killer didn’t expect an autopsy. The killer thought we’d find him, write him off as an accidental drowning or suicide, and that would be that. She could bury him and get on with her life.”

“You think Eleanor Drummond did it?”

“Yeah, that’s what I think. And then killed herself in a sort of Grand Guignol fit of housekeeping.”

“So it’s all wrapped up then?”

“I think the fun has just begun,” said Morgan. “How do we tell victim from villain? What about the daughter? Why the double life of Eleanor Drummond? There’ll be a registered birth for Molly Bray. And what about the fortune in fish? There’s Miranda’s connection —”

“Miranda’s connection?”

Morgan explained.

“And Eleanor Drummond witnessed the document naming Miranda executrix?”

“Executor. Yeah, and since Griffin knew he was going to die, he must have known Eleanor would be his executioner. That’s strange enough. But why bring Miranda into it? And why wouldn’t Eleanor intercept the request? What could she gain from Miranda’s involvement? That’s as much a mystery as why Griffin would ask in the first place.”

“And bribe her with bequests she could hardly refuse …”

“She’s not his beneficiary.”

“Well, whoever is, is in for a lot of money, I guess. I’m going to clean up here. It’s getting late.”

“Sure,” he said, prodding at Griffin’s effects lying inside a plastic bag near his head. He took a wallet out, opened it, and removed a folded piece of yellow paper. “I knew there would be one of these here. The guy left notes all over the place.”

He read aloud, his voice sepulchral in the sterile chamber. “‘A farmer in Waterloo County once showed me a peculiar phenomenon. We were standing in his barnyard near a cow and her newborn calf. He walked over and stood between them, edging the calf away from its mother. The cow became visibly anxious as the distance increased, and in spite of being wary she came trudging forward in her calf’s direction. The farmer then lifted the calf off the ground, cradling it with one arm under its rump and the other under its neck. He lifted it maybe six inches. The cow suddenly stopped and gazed around in bewilderment. She could no longer recognize her own calf; she had lost it. As soon as the farmer set the calf’s feet on the ground, the cow saw it again, even though it was still in the farmer’s embrace. Several times he lifted it a few inches off the ground and each time the mother became confused by its disappearance. The point is, the cow had no concept of her calf. Her maternal instinct was directed toward a particular set of stimuli. When one of these was removed, namely that her calf was connected to the ground, the set collapsed. She could not extrapolate from the remaining stimuli.’

“I can’t get any sense who he’s addressing. Whom. He owned a bunch of feed mills. I suppose he knew farmers. I guess he even owned a couple of farms up near where Miranda’s from. Can’t see him in a barnyard, though. He strikes me as urban to the core. Anyway, there’s more.

“‘Bees are remarkable navigators. They travel far afield in random flight and yet like most foragers they return home by the most direct route possible. This in itself suggests mental activity no less astonishing than the migration of monarch butterflies to the place of their ancestral origins in Mexico. The bee flies home from three miles away with unerring efficiency. Within the hive she conducts a sound and motion seminar, instructing fellow workers on the distance and direction to a particular nectar trove. They travel there directly, following the path of the explorer’s return flight. Communication precipitates action. In fact, it is only by their action that we know communication has taken place. Now, if the returning bee were to be cleaned of pollen and nectar when she reenters the hive, or lost her load along the way, the same patterns of sound and motion would elicit no response from her peers. When one of the key factors is missing from the seminar, worker attention is absent. They cannot extrapolate from those factors remaining that it is in their interest to respond. Despite reinforcement for previous response to similar stimuli, conceptualization necessary for them to take action, even if their survival is dependent upon that action, is beyond them.’

“The folksiness is almost attractive. It’s as if he’s trying to create a speaking voice with a personality that maybe he can co-opt as his own. This is less about thinking than about inventing a personality for himself as a thinker.”

“Morgan,” Ellen said.

“Yeah?”

“It’s time to go home, love.”

“Yeah.”

“You want a lift?”

“Thanks.”

“To my place?”

“Yeah.”

“My place?”

“Sure.”