“Any autopsy results yet?”

“Waiting on Pomeroy. He wanted to get two done today-one of the supposed drowning victims, and the girl with the mysterious injuries. Compare and contrast the findings.” Mike switched channels and muted the commercial. “What did the mayor have to say?”

“Nothing to me. Keenly interested in Ethan’s situation.”

Mike saw Alex Trebek on the screen above my head and clicked on the sound. “That’s right,” Trebek said, “the category of tonight’s question is THE COLOR PURPLE. THE COLOR PURPLE, folks.”

“I spoke too fast. Literary stuff.”

“Double or nothing.” I had majored in English literature at Wellesley before deciding that my interest was a career in public service, and went on to study at the University of Virginia School of Law.

“That’s taking candy from a baby, Coop,” Mike said, offering me the small brown bag of chocolates. “Wipe the grin off your face. All I’ve got is my M and M’s and twenty-four bucks. It’s almost payday.”

“Spent too much on the holidays?” I bit my tongue to prevent myself from making a crack about New Year’s Eve.

“Back to purple. Spielberg movie,” Mike said. “Eleven Oscar nominations.”

“Walker novel. Pulitzer Prize.” I could take him on a handful of topics like literature, but Mike knew more about military history than anyone I’d ever met. Mercer’s father had serviced planes for Delta and he’d grown up with maps of the world’s airline routes papering his bedroom walls, so he took the kitty whenever the subject was related to geography.

One of the attendants came to the doorway. “Dr. Pomeroy would like to see you downstairs.”

Mike put one foot on the floor. “Be right there.”

At the morgue or in fashionable mansions, at crack dens or social clubs, very little interfered with Mike’s evening ritual of watching the final question, even if it delayed for a few minutes the crews bagging bodies and recovering evidence.

“Here’s your answer, gentlemen,” Trebek said, as the board pulled back to reveal the phrase. “The answer is ‘City from which this purple hue, worn for centuries by royalty, derives its name.’ ”

Trebek repeated the answer while his three bespectacled contestants studied the words before starting to write on their video tablets.

“I can see it in your face, Coop. Not on your reading list, as you’d expected, right?”

I was walking to the door. “Let’s go.”

“Wait a minute. You doubled me down, didn’t you? Check it out.”

Trebek approached the first young man, who hadn’t been able to come up with a good guess. “What is-?”

“Sorry. Oooh, and you wagered seven thousand five hundred on that one. Very sorry.”

“And you, sir? You’ve written ‘What is Maroon?’ ”

“Like where in the world would that city be?” Mike said, balling a piece of paper and throwing it at the screen. “Maroon, Italy? The guy’s a jerk. Won the last three nights on sheer luck.”

He had drowned out Trebek, who moved on to the third player. “You’re shaking your head already, Scott. And your question is, ‘What is Indigo?’ Wrong again.”

Mike had both feet on the floor. “What is Tyre? I’m telling you, get me on that show and I’ll make enough money to quit this job tomorrow.”

“What is Tyre? That’s what we were looking for,” Trebek said. “The color Tyrian purple. That’s the name we wanted. Also called imperial purple, first produced by the ancient Phoenicians in the city of Tyre, and royal figures everywhere used it almost exclusively to flaunt their stature.”

“And you know that because…?” I asked, as we headed down the quiet corridor to go to the basement where the grim work of the medical examiners was performed.

“Alexander the Great crushed the Tyrians. Three thirty-two B.C. Tyre was one of the great early seaports of the world. The people dissed Alex-wouldn’t let him enter the city when his troops arrived-so he practically wiped them out. All the great ancient emperors wore Tyrian purple robes, Coop. Very expensive stuff. And you know what it was made from? Mucus. A mucus secretion from the gland of a predatory sea snail in the Mediterranean.”

Mike opened the door to the basement and I could smell a strong antiseptic odor, as though someone had just cleaned up the autopsy rooms and overwhelmed the familiar chemical smells with even harsher fluids.

“Don’t turn up your nose at me. Too much reading about female empowerment with those weepy women’s novels and not enough cold, hard facts.”

“I wasn’t sniffing at you, Mike. It was the idea of the colorful dye coming from mucus.”

He took a package of mints out of his pocket and offered them to me. Every detective had different ways of dealing with the strong scent of death, and Mike had something ready for almost every occasion.

Gurneys lined the wall of the long, narrow staging area, which led from the bay in which the bodies were received from morgue vans and hearses into the autopsy theaters.

The first room, where Pomeroy usually worked, was empty. Someone had just mopped the tiled floor and wiped down the stainless steel table, ready to receive the next unfortunate voyager.

“Good evening, Alex. Hey, Mike,” the doctor said as he came out of the locker room, wiping his hands on a towel before extending one of them to us.

“How’d you do today?” Mike asked.

“We’ve actually finished three autopsies. Not too much competition on the homicide front.”

“What’s the news?”

“We started with the two young women. Jerry also had time to help me with one of the men, so I could make the necessary comparisons,” Pomeroy said, leading us into the second theater, where a sheet appeared to be covering one of the bodies. “Two of them are most certainly accidental drownings.”

“Most certainly?” I asked.

“I’ve told you before, Alex, that drowning deaths can be difficult to call.”

“What’s the mechanism?”

“Well, submersion in water is usually followed by a struggle to reach the surface. Most often, it’s a panicky process.”

Panic kills. Exactly what the guys had told me on the beach.

“The energy reserves get exhausted,” Pomeroy continued. “People try to hold their breath, till the carbon dioxide accumulation builds up. Then they open their mouths and end up inhaling large amounts of water. Once they swallow the water-it’s pretty gruesome, Alex. You really want to understand this?”

“I need to, of course.”

“Then the gagging starts. Coughing, sometimes throwing up. The air escapes from the lungs and it’s replaced by water.”

“So, it’s an asphyxial death?” I asked.

“Rarely. Less than twelve percent of the time. Though more so in salt water, like these cases, than in fresh. The salt moves into the bloodstream to establish an osmotic balance, which makes it appear more like an asphyxial death.”

I listened to Pomeroy but looked at the still form covered by sheeting.

“Me and science weren’t a natural match, Doc,” Mike said. “What does that mean for these guys?”

“The victims become unconscious. Often suffer convulsions. It’s anoxia that causes death-low oxygen as a result of the inhalation of large amounts of water.”

“So the tests you do to say they drowned, those are all done?”

“There are no reliable tests.”

“Water in the lungs?” Mike asked. “Water in the stomach?”

“No real significance to those facts. The water can easily reach those organs after death. In a situation like this with rough ocean movement,” Pomeroy said, “water, sand, seaweed, all get forced into the body.”

“So what do you need?”

“The key question is whether or not we have facts that establish whether the person was alive when he-or she-entered the water. All the background observers give to you, what the scene was actually like, what the condition of the deceased’s clothing is when we recover the body.”

“I got a shipwreck in the middle of the night with a boatload of hysterical Ukrainians. So far nobody can tell us anything I understand. What next, Doc?”