1 The Question of the Missing Head by E. J. Copperman

cooler, took a cup and filled it. When I drank, I noticed the water was cold but had a slightly different flavor than the bottled water I get from the machine in my office. Still, it was a relief to drink that cup and the one I filled after it.
    “Blood,” Lapides said, trying to remind me of something I had not forgotten. “On the floor. Of the chamber.”
    “Just a moment,” I told him. “Two more cups.” I filled the third and emptied it as Lapides, seeming impatient, watched. After I’d completed the sixteen ounces of water I’d set out to drink, I turned to him.
    “Dr. Springer had not been shot,” I said. “The empty containment vessel had been shot. There was no head inside, and even if there had been, there would have been no blood in it. Fluids are drained before the freezing process is initiated.”
    “But liquid nitrogen had been released into the room,” the detective countered. “Wouldn’t the air have been freezing? Why wasn’t there more of a wound to her head when she hit the floor?”
    Clearly, Detective Lapides was a person whose idea of science was formed by watching a good deal of television. “First of all, the liquid nitrogen released into the room would immediately have boiled, because it was no longer being kept at a temperature that could sustain it in a frozen state,” I said. “But even if the room had been that cold, a person’s head doesn’t simply shatter because it sustains an impact in cold weather. There was no blood on the floor because Dr. Springer’s head did not receive a severe blow; it was the lack of oxygen in the room that killed her.”
    Lapides, who had been taking notes while I spoke, kept scribbling, but he managed to ask, “Did you notice anything unusual in the chamber?”
    “Besides the woman’s body on the floor?” Ms. Washburn asked.
    Lapides looked up sharply at her, and I decided I didn’t care much for the way the detective was interrogating us. He was doing his job, but not well. I wondered if his superiors would have sent him to the scene if it had been known from the outset that this was a case of homicide.
    “I had never been in the chamber, or any other such area, before in my life,” I told him, deflecting his attention from Ms. Washburn. “So I have no basis of comparison to judge what is unusual and what is not.”
    I believe Detective Lapides sighed. “You know what I mean,” he said.
    “I assumed you meant what you said. Was I in error?” I looked at Ms. Washburn for concurrence, but her hand was at her mouth—perhaps suppressing a smile—so it was difficult for me to determine whether I’d said something inappropriate. Sometimes I do take conversation more literally than it is intended, because many expressions do not really mean what they appear to mean. When was the last time, for example, that someone actually pulled your leg?
    Now that I’d taken in sixteen ounces of water, it would not be terribly long before I would need to find a restroom, and I had not noticed where the facilities were in this building. It would be awkward to ask Ms. Washburn if she’d noticed, because she was a woman, and pointless to ask Lapides, since I did not believe he would have observed the area closely enough to know. I would have to ask a GSCI employee, and the prospect was not pleasant; I am not always comfortable asking strangers for information.
    “Let me … rephrase my question,” Lapides said. “Did anything you saw in the storage chamber—with the exception of Dr. Springer’s body—seem worth noting? Is there anything you think that I should know?”
    There were a great many things I believed Detective Lapides should know, but I knew enough about conversation after many hours of social skills training to realize that he meant something else by his question. “It seemed odd that Dr. Springer was in the room with Ms. Masters-Powell’s receptacle the only one out of place,” I said. “The administration of the facility and its