As he drank the heavy beer from its heavy stein, he wondered if this was the start of another liaison or whether she really had come to tell him of something significant in the autopsy results of Juan Doe #67.

“So now I need a date for New Year’s Eve,” she said, looking up from the soup. “What are you staring at?”

“Just watching you. You need a date, you got one. I read in the paper that Frank Morgan’s playing at the Catalina.”

“Who’s he and what does he play?”

“You’ll see. You’ll like him.”

“It was a dumb question anyway. If he’s someone you like, then he plays the saxophone.”

Harry smiled, more to himself than her. He was happy to know he had a date. Being alone on New Year’s Eve bothered him more than Christmas, Thanksgiving, any of the other days. New Year’s Eve was a night for jazz, and the saxophone could cut you in half if you were alone.

She smiled and said, “Harry, you’re so easy when it comes to lonely women.”

He thought of Sylvia Moore, remembering her sad smile.

“So,” Teresa said, seeming to sense that he was drifting away. “I bet you want to know about the bugs inside Juan Doe #67.”

“Finish your soup first.”

“Nope, that’s okay. It doesn’t bother me. I always get hungry, in fact, after a long day chopping up bodies.”

She smiled. She said things like that often, as if daring him not to like what she did for a living. He knew she was still hooked by her husband. It didn’t matter what she said. He understood.

“Well, I hope you don’t miss the knives when they make you permanent chief. You’ll be cutting budgets then.”

“No, I’d be a hands-on chief. I’d handle the specials. Like today. But after today, I don’t know if they’ll ever make me permanent.”

Harry sensed that now he was the one who had shaken a bad feeling loose and sent her traveling with it. Now might be the right time.

“You want to talk about it?”

“No. I mean I do, but I can’t. I trust you, Harry, but I think I have to keep this close for the time being.”

He nodded and let it go, but he intended to come back to it later and find out what had gone wrong on the Moore autopsy. He took his notebook out of his coat pocket and put it on the table.

“Okay, then, tell me about Juan Doe #67.”

She pushed the soup bowl to the side of the table and pulled a leather briefcase onto her lap. She pulled out a thin manila file and opened it in front of her.

“Okay. This is a copy so you can keep it when I’m done explaining. I went over the notes and everything else Salazar had on this. I guess you know, cause of death was multiple blunt-force trauma to the head. Crushing blows to the frontal, parietal, sphenoid and supraorbital.”

As she described these injuries she touched the top of her forehead, the back of her head, her left temple and rim of her left eye. She did not look up from the paperwork.

“Any one of these was fatal. There were other defensive wounds which you can look at later. Um, he extracted wood splinters from two of the head injuries. Looks like you are talking about something like a baseball bat, but not as wide, I think. Tremendous crushing blows, so I think we are talking about something with some leverage. Not a stick. Bigger. A pick handle, shovel, something like-possibly a pool cue. But most likely something unfinished. Like I said, Sally pulled splinters out of the wounds. I’m not sure a pool cue with a sanded and lacquered finish would leave splinters.”

She studied the notes a moment.

“The other thing-I don’t know if Porter told you this, but this body most likely was dumped in that location. Time of death is at least six hours before discovery. Judging by the traffic in that alley and to the rear door of the restaurant, that body could not have gone unnoticed there for six hours. It had to have been dumped.”

“Yeah, that was in his notes.”

“Good.”

She started turning through the pages. Briefly looking at the autopsy photos and putting them to the side.

“Okay, here it is. Tox results aren’t back yet but the colors of the blood and liver indicate there will be nothing there. I’m just guessing-or, rather, Sally is just guessing, so don’t hold us to that.”

Harry nodded. He hadn’t taken any notes yet. He lit a cigarette and she didn’t seem to mind. She had never protested before, though once when he was attending an autopsy she walked in from the adjoining suite and showed him a lung from a forty-year-old, three-pack-a-day man. It looked like an old black loafer that had been run over by a truck.

“But as you know is routine,” she continued, “we took swabs and did the analysis on the stomach contents. First, in the earwax we found a kind of brown dust. We combed some of it out of the hair, and got some from the fingernails, too.”

Bosch thought of tar heroin, an ingredient in black ice.

“Heroin?”

“Good guess, but no.”

“Just brown dust.”

Bosch was writing in his notebook now.

“Yeah, we put it on some slides and blew it up and as near as we can tell it’s wheat. Wheat dust. It’s-it apparently is pulverized wheat.”

“Like cereal? He had cereal in his ears and hair?”

A waiter in a white shirt and black tie with a brush mustache and his best dour Russian look came to the table to ask if they wanted anything else. He looked at the stack of photos next to Teresa. On top was one of Juan Doe #67 naked on a stainless steel table. Teresa quickly covered it with the file and Harry ordered two more beers. The man walked slowly away from the table.

“You mean some kind of wheat cereal?” Bosch asked again. “Like the dust at the bottom of the box or something?”

“Not exactly. Keep that thought, though, and let me move on. It will all tie up.”

He waved her on.

“On the nasal swabs and stomach content, two things came up that are very interesting. It’s kind of why I like what I do, despite other people not liking it for me.” She looked up from the file and smiled at him. “Anyway, in the stomach contents, Salazar identified coffee and masticated rice, chicken, bell pepper, various spices and pig intestine. To make a long story short, it was chorizo-Mexican sausage. The intestine used as sausage casing leads me to believe it was some kind of homemade sausage, not manufactured product. He had eaten this shortly before death. There had been almost no breakdown in the stomach yet. He may’ve even been eating when he was assaulted. I mean, the throat and mouth were clear but there was still debris in the teeth.

“And by the way, they were all original teeth. No dental work at all-ever. You getting the picture that this man was not from around here?”

Bosch nodded, remembering Porter’s notes said all of Juan Doe #67’s clothing was made in Mexico. He was writing in the notebook.

She said, “There was also this in the stomach.”

She slid a Polaroid photograph across the table. It was of a pinkish insect with one wing missing and the other broken. It looked wet, as indeed it would be, considering where it had been found. It lay on a glass culture dish next to a dime. The dime was about ten times the size of the bug.

Harry noticed the waiter standing about ten feet away with two mugs of beer. The man held the mugs up and raised his eyebrows. Bosch signaled that it was safe to approach. The waiter put the glasses down, stole a glance at the bug photo and then moved quickly away. Harry slid the photo back to Teresa.

“So what is it?”

“Trypetid,” she said, and she smiled.

“Shoot, I was about to guess that,” he said.

She laughed at the lame joke.

“It’s a fruit fly, Harry. Mediterranean variety. The little bug that lays big waste to the California citrus industry? Salazar came to me to send it out on referral because we had no idea what it was. I had an investigator take it over to UCLA to an entomologist Gary suggested. He identified it for us.”