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