Page 8 of Manner of Death
“Oh, call me Carlos.”
“Carlos, then.” He smiled his charming everything-is-fine-I’m-fantastic-look-at-how-pretty-I-am smile. “Would you mind giving me a ride back to my place? I’m afraid I don’t have a car of my own here.”
“Oh, yeah, for sure!” Carlos motioned to the passenger side of the van. “Let’s go! Hey, you want to grab a coffee on the way? There shouldn’t be more than two cars ahead of us in line at this time of the morning.”
Sawyer got into the van and fastened his seat belt. “You must get a lot of drive-through coffee,” he commented.
“I mean, I do, but once I decided to figure it out I sat in the coffee shop all day just so I could compile a spreadsheet. I averaged drive-through visits down to every quarter-hour from when they opened to when they closed, then verified my initial findings with random visits for the rest of the month. I’m ninety-two percent sure there will only be two cars ahead of us.”
Sawyer let his smile fade into something more natural. “You really pay attention to a lot of things, don’t you?”
“I do! A lot of people find it really annoying,” Carlos replied. “Not Doc, of course. He says it’s what makes me a good CSI.”
He wasn’t going to get a better segue. “Speaking of Dr. Ramin…”
“Oh, it’s okay,” Carlos assured him. “I know you’re interested in him, but I won’t tell.”
Not that Sawyer had been trying to hide his interest, but it was still a little disconcerting to be seen through by someone he’d barely met. “How did you know?”
“The length of time you made eye contact, the way you sniffed the air when he passed—that’s his date cologne, it’s Tom Ford, it makes approximately twenty-eight percent of people who smell it try to get closer so they can—”
“Got it,” Sawyer said. Well. As long as he was hanging out with someone who had an apparently encyclopedic knowledge of everything he encountered… “So on that topic, what’s his favorite restaurant?”
“Oh, I know that! He’s got two, actually…” Sawyer settled back to listen to the younger man give him the keys to Dr. Ramin’s heart—or at least his stomach—with a feeling of satisfaction. He could work with this. No one turned away free food, not when it was something they liked.
Yeah, he could work with this.
And…scene.
Chapter 3
“So he figured out you’d been on a date?” Tami Glen, Bashir’s forensic autopsy tech, looked up from her keyboard. “Just by your cologne?” She made a face. “Does that mean it was a new death scene? Or did you put on so much it was recognizable over the decomp?”
“Oh, listen to who’s funny.” Bashir rolled his eyes. “The guy hadn’t been dead long. But there was a lot of blood, so…” He hesitated. “Fuck. Maybe I was wearing too much.”
Tami snorted. “You are way too easy to troll, Bash.”
He shot her a glare. He hated that nickname, and she knew it. That was exactly why she used it. Sighing, he picked up the file he’d started when he’d brought in the decedent last night, and he perused it while he drank his high-octane coffee. At least he hadn’t had to stay at the scene quite as long as everyone else.
Everyone… such as Detective Villeray and his fragrance-detecting abilities. And his beautiful eyes. And—
Okay. Enough. Clearly Bashir had just been frustrated last night because his date had gone to shit, and yes, his entire brain had absolutely been set to find-hot-man-and-have-sex-with-him. So, yeah, he’d been distracted as hell after he’d left. In fact, he’d been so damn distracted he’d nearly made several embarrassing clerical errors last night.
Professionalism and muscle memory had saved him, fortunately, and he hadn’t done anything that might jeopardize his reputation or the case. And if he wanted to continue on that trajectory, he needed to stop thinking about Detective Villeray and focus on one Gilroy Upworth, who was lying on the table in front of him. He’d gleaned all the information he could get from the exterior of the body. Now it was time to go exploring.
Bashir had just finished photographing, disrobing, cleaning, and photographing the body again when the morgue’s main entrance opened. A fast, determined gait clomped in through the vestibule and drove a few colorful Farsi words from his lips that his mother would’ve slapped his face for, and a second later—
Dr. Andy Boyce strode into the room. At her computer, Tami fidgeted uncomfortably and became very interested in what was on the screen. Bashir kept his expression and posture neutral because that was his best bet for fending off a confrontation. Not a sure thing, though; if Boyce was in a mood—and Christ, this man was always in a fucking mood—a confrontation was unavoidable.
Boyce peered at the body, and his lips twisted in disgust. Not the disgust of someone horrified by a mangled corpse, but that of someone who was fucking annoyed with the whole damned world. Bashir could only imagine how that was the victim’s fault, but he was probably about to find out.
“Ah, okay. Now I see why I’m doing four autopsies this morning.” Boyce flailed a hand at the body. “Don’t want the expert to be indisposed for this one.” He folded his arms and cocked his head, smirking at Bashir. “Let me guess—accidental death? Massive blood loss?” He slapped his own forehead. “Good thing you got the call.”
Tami’s chair squeaked, giving away more fidgeting.
Bashir kept his gaze fixed on his colleague. He tried to think of him that way, too—Boyce was his subordinate, which grated on the man immensely, and asserting that authority and telling him to watch himself was just asking for a battle. The last thing he needed was Boyce picking today to remind everyone he had more than enough money to retire and walking out with his middle fingers held high. As long as there were more bodies in the cooler than Bashir could properly autopsy in a single day, he had to play nice with Boyce. Even when Boyce was butthurt—again—that the more high-profile and “interesting” cases always went to Bashir. Since Bashir was, you know, the goddamned county medical examiner.
He took a deep breath and kept his voice measured. “Tell you what, Andy.” He rested his palms on the table, the stainless steel cool through his gloves. “I’ll handle those.” He nodded toward the cooler drawers. “Then you can take this guy”—he tipped his head toward the man laid out in front of him—“and spend the whole morning separating tiny chunks of shredded tissue and figuring out which piece came from which organ.” He snatched a pair of small tweezers off the tray and held them up, hoping his eyes gave away that he was grinning behind his mask. “Sound like a fair trade?”