Page 30 of Edge of Honor

“You want to explain to me what we’re doing here?” she asked as they walked across the garage.

“Newton’s first law of investigations,” Carolan replied.

“Which is?”

“An investigation that’s in motion tends to stay in motion.”

“Well, let me tell you something about motion. If I see a single corpse so much as twitch in there, my Glock’s coming out and they’re getting a free ride on the nine-millimeter train to hollow-point station.”

Carolan smiled. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said. “Kinemortophobia. Fear of zombies.”

“Just keep your eyes open,” Fields responded, squaring her shoulders and stepping through the large glass doors. “It’s always the people who don’t believe in zombies who are the first to go.”

After presenting their credentials at the desk and signing in, they waited for a member of the ME’s team to take them back. Out of curiosity, Carolan scanned the names for anyone he might recognize. None rang a bell.

A few minutes later, a young man in scrubs appeared. “The FBI was just here an hour ago,” he stated.

“And now we’re back,” Carolan responded.

Exasperated, the young man checked his clipboard and said, “This way. Follow me.”

The young man took them back to a large, rectangular room. The far wall was studded with stainless-steel icebox-style doors, behind which human bodies could be stored on pullout drawers and kept cold.

The rest of the room was painted a chalky, pale blue with large porcelain floor tiles to match. The ceiling was covered with white acoustic panels. Stainless-steel counters, shelving units, and deep sinks lined the remaining walls.

Amassed in the center of the room, perfectly spaced, were six metal gurneys with a black body bag atop each.

“These are the attackers from outside the Naval Observatory?” Carolan asked.

“John Does one through five,” the young man replied, confirming the information on his clipboard. “John Doe number six was bagged inside the residence of the Norwegian ambassador. Where do you want to start?”

“That one,” said Carolan, pointing at the nearest body bag.

“Lucky number six,” the young man stated as he grabbed a pair of latex gloves from a box on the counter and put them on each of his hands with a snap.

Carolan and Fields followed suit, albeit with considerably less flourish, especially Fields, who quite visibly would have preferred to have been anywhere other than here.

“What are we looking for?” the ME staffer inquired as he unzipped the first bag.

“Pornography,” Carolan replied.

“Excuse me?”

“Back in 1964, when Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked for his definition of pornography, his answer was ‘I know it when I see it.’ That’s my answer too. What are we looking for? I’ll know it when I see it.”

Whether or not the answer made sense to the young man, it had the desired effect of getting him to stop asking questions. Carolan wasn’t here for chitchat. He needed to think and to observe.

While he and Fields inspected the first body, he sent the young man to unzip the other bags.

“Hell of a shot,” Carolan commented as he examined the hole in the corpse’s head.

After reading the report, he had gotten down on the floor of the kitchen in the Norwegian ambassador’s residence and had re-created what it had taken for Harvath to make that shot. Only someone who had gone through as much trigger time as a guy like that could have had both the ability and the balls to pull it off.

“Besides porn,” said Fields, keeping her voice low as she forced herself to be professional and stand next to her boss, “what exactlyarewe looking for?”

“Anything that shouldn’t be here. Anything unusual or out of the ordinary,” he replied. “Their clothes have already been bagged for evidence, so we’re looking for distinguishing features like scars, tattoos, unusual bone growth—anything that might help us identify who they are.”

“Wouldn’t the agents before us have done this?”