Chapter One
On the last morning of Virginia's bloodiest year
since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a
window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find
the sea. I was in my robe in lamplight, reviewing my office's
annual statistics for car crashes, hangings, beatings,
shootings, stabbings, when the telephone rudely rang at
five-fifteen.
"Damn," I muttered, for I was beginning to feel less
charitable about answering Dr. Philip Mant's phone. "All
right, all right."
His weathered cottage was tucked behind a dune in a
stark coastal Virginia subdivision called Sandbridge, between
the U.S. Naval Amphibious Base and Back Bay National
Wildlife Refuge. Mant was my deputy chief medical
examiner for the Tidewater District, and sadly, his mother
had died last week on Christmas Eve. Under ordinary circumstances,
his returning to London to get family affairs
in order would not have constituted an emergency for the
Virginia medical examiner system. But his assistant forensic
pathologist was already out on maternity leave, and recently,
the morgue supervisor had quit.
"Mant residence," I answered as wind tore the dark
shapes of pines beyo ... read full excerpt from: Cause of Death ebook
