Primary Justice (Ben Kincaid series Book 1) by William Bernhardt Page A

lucky.”
    “All right, all right, ease off. I’m not your mother.”
    “Is this why you called, Mike?”
    “Actually, no.” Ben heard him shuffling papers. “Dr. Koregai is starting his autopsy of Adams. I thought you ought to be there.”
    Ben felt an unpleasant sensation in his stomach. “Why in God’s name should I be there for the autopsy?”
    “Come on, Ben. Don’t wimp out on me now. You knew the man.”
    “What’s that got to do with the autopsy?”
    “I want you to be present when the evidence comes in. Besides, I have some new information to share with you.”
    Ben massaged his temples. “None of this convinces me that I need to be present for an autopsy.”
    “I think it’s important, Ben. Do it for me.” He paused. “If you won’t do it for me, do it for Bertha Adams.”
    Ben took a deep breath, men exhaled slowly. “I’ll meet you in twenty minutes,” he said. He slammed the receiver back into its cradle and started searching for his toothbrush.
    Ben arrived in twenty-five minutes, after stopping for his traditional early morning fix of chocolate milk. This was definitely a two-carton morning.
    He met Mike outside the coroner’s office and accompanied him into the examining room of Dr. Koregai, a middle-aged Japanese man who seemed to approach autopsies with the same matter-of-fact manner one might bring to disassembling a model airplane. Mike said he was the best. He was a little strange, true, but what do you expect from a man who cuts up corpses for a living? At least he wasn’t the type to tell jokes or eat lunch while he was cutting. He was very observant, if very temperamental. To get Koregai to answer your questions, Mike explained, you have to give him the impression that you’re here for the sole purpose of serving him in his quest for truth, justice, and autopsic excellence.
    Ben covered his mouth and nose with a paper towel as he entered the room. Be brave, he told himself. This is only the preliminary examination, not the actual postmortem. He considered the relative merits of watching a series of violations of bodily orifices as opposed to watching the slivering and dismembering of body tissues. He was barely in the room and he already felt ill.
    The first thing Ben noticed was the odor. The odor of formaldehyde and God knows what other chemicals were thick in the air. The second thing he noticed was a string quartet, Vivaldi, he thought, playing over the built-in intercom system. Maybe Koregai needed his nerves steadied, too.
    Three bright white ceiling lamps shone down on the mutilated corpse of Jonathan Adams. Ben stifled the instinct to gag. If anything, the body looked better now than when they had found it in the Dumpster. Most of the caked and coagulated black blood had been scraped away; the jaw and other loosened and detached body parts had been rearranged and returned to their proper places. The skin was an eerie, translucent color, sort of green and sort of not.
    Dr. Koregai took a thin rotor saw from his worktable and held it in his latex-gloved hands. His mouth and nose were covered by a blue mask.
    “If you could give us an idea about the cause of death,” Mike said, with extreme deference, “we might be able to obtain information in the field to assist you in detailing your report.”
    Evidently, the doctor’s talents included the ability to chat while he worked. “I already know how he was killed,” Dr. Koregai replied. “With a knife.”
    “What a breakthrough,” Ben mumbled under his paper towel.
    “The blade of the knife was three-quarters of an inch wide,” Koregai continued. “And it was serrated.”
    “Like a saw?” Ben asked.
    “Or a carving knife,” Mike suggested. “Unfortunately, even with that extra information, the weapon is still something you could find in nearly every home in Tulsa.”
    “But it’s not something a person would just happen to carry,” Ben thought aloud. “Unless he was planning to kill someone.”
    “What