"For his wallet or papers. If you want to keep a corpse anonymous for a few hours you shove his IDs down his throat. It doesn't get spotted till the autopsy."
A chortle of laughter from outside.
Which Sachs ended quickly when she grabbed the man's jaws, pulled wide, and started reaching inside.
"Jesus," Earl muttered. "What're you doing?"
"Nothing there, Rhyme."
"You better cut. The throat. Go deeper."
Sachs had bridled at some of Rhyme's more macabre requests in the past. But today she glanced at the grinning boys behind her and lifted her illegal but c
herished switchblade from her jeans pocket, clicked it open.
Took the grins off both faces.
"Say, honey, what're you doing?"
"Little surgery. Gotta look inside." Like she did this every day.
"I mean, I can't deliver no corpse to the coroner cut up by some New York City cop."
"Then you do it."
She offered him the handle of the knife.
"Aw, she's shitting us, Jim."
She lifted an eyebrow and slipped the knife into the man's Adam's apple like a fisherman gutting a trout.
"Oh, Jesus, Jim, lookit what she's doing. Stop her."
"I'm outa here, Earl. I didn't see that." The trooper walked off.
She finished the tidy incision and gazed inside, sighed. "Nothing."
"What the hell is he up to?" Rhyme asked. "Let's think . . . . What if he isn't ID-proofing the body? If he'd wanted to he would've taken the teeth. What if there's something else he's trying to hide from us?"
"Something on the vic's hands?" Sachs suggested.
"Maybe," Rhyme responded. "Something that he couldn't wash off the corpse easily. And something that'd tell us what he was up to."
"Oil? Grease?"
"Maybe he was delivering jet fuel," Rhyme said. "Or maybe he was a caterer--maybe his hands smelled of garlic."
Sachs looked around the airport. There were dozens of gasoline deliverymen, ground crews, repairmen, construction workers building a new wing on one of the terminals.
Rhyme continued, "He's a big guy?"
"Yep."
"He was probably sweating today. Maybe he wiped his head. Or scratched it."
I've been doing that all day myself, Sachs thought, and felt an urge to dig into her hair, hurt her skin as she always did when she felt frustrated and tense.
"Check his scalp, Sachs. Behind the hairline."