“Detective Czarnek tells me you have an interesting work history,” Roth said.

“Detective Czarnek wouldn’t know the truth if it ran over him with a semi.”

“A regular Seinfeld, this guy,” Czarnek said, chewing his gum.

The elevator doors opened. Dr. Roth led us down a hallway and into a dressing room. There were shelves stocked with scrubs, caps, gloves, and protective booties.

“You know the drill. I’ll be right back,” Roth said to Czarnek, and left.

We put on surgical smocks and fabric booties over our shoes.

“I never knew death could be so contagious,” I said.

“They don’t want you getting anything on your street clothes,” Czarnek said. “Lawyers, they’ll sue for anything. Which reminds me. If you drop a child molester and an attorney off the Empire State Building, you know which one hits first?”

“Who cares.”

“Exactly.”

Roth returned and handed us each a respirator equipped with an N-100 hepa filter. “Standard procedure, strictly precautionary,” he said. “Nothing to get freaked about.”

“I promise I won’t sue,” I said.

Czarnek tossed his gum in a receptacle for toxic waste. We pulled on our surgical gloves, masked up and followed Roth to a windowless stainless-steel door marked, “Security Floor, Authorized Personnel Only.” Scotch-taped to the wall beside the door was a sheet of green construction paper announcing the coroner’s office’s upcoming annual holiday potluck: A-through-I, bring meat; J-through-R, a side dish; S-through-Z, soft drinks or dessert. The announcement was adorned with stickers of Christmas trees and Stars of David. Roth tapped an entry code on a computerized keypad. The electronic lock clicked. Roth held the door for us.

“Welcome to the show,” he said.

The dead are not conveniently stored in stainless-steel pull-out drawers at the LA County Coroner’s Office, as they are in Hollywood’s version of reality. There are too many cadavers for such cushy accommodations. Most bodies don’t even rate body bags. A decent quality bag can cost upwards of sixty bucks apiece these days. In the cash-strapped City of Angels, corpses are instead packaged like 7-Eleven burritos in opaque plastic sheeting — Saran wrap, only beefier — then stacked floor-to-ceiling in an oversized walk-in cooler. When room runs out in the cooler, the human burritos are stacked in the corridors.

Business was brisk that day at the coroner’s office. The newly departed lay all around. One body in particular caught my eye. It was on a gurney. Brown. Slender. Young. It was shirtless and wearing oversized chinos, the kind favored by Latino gangbangers. Its hair was buzzed short, close enough that I could read the letters “VNE” tattooed on the scalp in Old English script. There was a symmetrical bullet wound the size of a dime in the back of the skull. There was another hole the size of a fist where the nose used to be. The left eye dangled from its socket by the optic nerve like a handset on an old wall phone. A coroner’s technician in scrubs and a mask was fingerprinting the dead boy. The boy’s hand was still supple. No rigor. Not yet autopsied.

“Hey, Doc,” the tech said to Roth as we strode past, rolling the tip of the boy’s left thumb on an electronic, handheld scanning device, “why don’t blind people skydive?”

“Because it scares the crap out of the dog.”

“You heard it already, huh?”

We walked past three autopsy rooms where postmortem examinations were in full swing — pathologists sawing skulls and weighing internal organs on hanging scales like so many tomatoes at the grocery store. In one room, a doctor was stitching up the gaping, Y-shaped incision he’d made in the chest of a young girl, tugging on the catgut with both fists as though he were lacing up a hiking boot. The cadaver flopped limply on the stainless-steel table like a rag doll.

“This way, gentlemen,” Dr. Roth said.

He led us into what looked to be a converted meeting room. The conference table and chairs were pushed to one side, replaced by a flat metal table on wheels. On the table was the charred body of a man laying on its back. Its hands were missing.

“He was shot, then torched postmortem,” Roth said. “They obviously burned him and sawed off his hands to make it harder to ID him.”

The bullet had left a perfectly neat hole just above the dead man’s left ear. The pathologist had removed the skull cap to retrieve the fatal round and examine the victim’s brain. The man’s head had been sawed in half, like an orange.

“Single GSW to the left temporal lobe, 40-cal, copper jacket,” Czarnek said. “The round matched the ones we pulled out of your friend, Arlo Echevarria.”

“The plot thickens,” I said.

Czarnek unwrapped a fresh square of gum. “You recognize this guy?”

“His own mother wouldn’t recognize him,” I said.

A patch of blackened skin had been scraped clean from the body’s right shoulder during the pathologist’s examination, revealing a tattoo — a miniature martini glass bearing what looked to be the initials, “WS.”

“The missing persons report his wife filed indicated he had a ‘WS’ tattooed on his left shoulder,” Czarnek said. “I checked corporate DBA’s. Baskin Robbins owned a lounge called the Wet Spot. The tattoo’s on his right shoulder, so, obviously, Mrs. Baskin Robbins got that part wrong, but, I mean, what are the odds?”

“It just goes to show,” I said, “how well do we truly know the people we’re married to?”

The tattoo was confirmation enough as far as I was concerned that the otherwise unrecognizable crispy critter I was standing over was Bondarenko. Poor Gennady. I always kind of liked the guy, even if he was an old school Commie. Always good for a free drink and the occasional tidbit of actionable intelligence. Looking down at what was left of him, I couldn’t say I was surprised by the terrible violence that had marked his end of days. His arena had been one of sketchy characters, a landscape of ever-shifting loyalties bought and sold. The crowd he’d catered to and curried favor with embodied the very definition of dangerously unpredictable. Sometimes, when you run with the bulls, you get gored.

“If you already knew it was Bondarenko,” I said, “why’d you bring me here to ID him?”

“Show him,” Czarnek said to the pathologist.

Roth picked up the surgically removed chest plate like the lid from a garbage can and set it aside. Bits of blackened skin flaked off like burnt bread crumbs.

“I was dissecting the soft tissue adherent to the posterior plate,” Roth said, “when I first noticed it.” He flipped the breastplate over and set it on the table beside the body. Rib bones branched outward from the exposed sternum like the truncated legs of a scorpion. “At first, I thought it was some sort of new pacemaker or insulin pump, but it’s different from any medical device I’ve ever seen. Plus, its placement is substantially lower than normal implantation sites. That’s it, right there.” He pointed. “Very unusual. Never seen anything like it before.”

I leaned in for a better look: a metallic object the approximate size and shape of a matchbox, with a two-inch-long wire lead protruding from it, was affixed between the lower ribs, held in place by titanium surgical screws.

Czarnek said, “What the hell is that?”

“It’s a remotely triggered explosive device.”

“A bomb?”

“Give that man a cookie.”

“Jesus.” Dr. Roth backed away fearfully from the autopsy table. So did Czarnek.

“Not to worry,” I said, “it’s most likely inert.”

“You sure about that?” Czarnek said warily.

“It’s got a thermal safety to prevent accidental detonation. If the core temperature of the host body drops below a certain point — say, upon death, for example — the weapon automatically disarms itself. Plus, the battery’s probably already dead if it’s been in for any length of time.”