that also seemed to droop tiredly. "Sorry to have ta drag you back here, Mr. Wood." he said.
"It's okay," I said. "I know what it's like when you're doing an investigation."
"Guess y' do, at that. Anyways, to be honest we're kinda at a loss. Jerry may not have been the friendliest guy in town, but he sure weren't the nastiest, an' I don't have a clue about who would've killed him."
"Are you sure he was killed?"
Baker's moon-round face twisted in a sour grimace. "Ain't sure of anything, right now. Coroner says that so far as he's concerned, Jerry should've been gettin' up off the damn slab before the autopsy. Not a thing wrong with him—heart in great shape, brain jus' fine, everything jus' fine—'ceptin' of course that he happens to be dead." He grunted and handed me a file. "Ain't procedure, but you've got yourself a rep in more than one way—I checked out what the cops up North had to say about you. Anything in there give you an idea?"
"Well, I'll see . . ." I opened the file, started reading. Sheriff Baker, relieved of the responsibility of talking to me for the moment, went into the outer office for a while.
Baker wasn't exaggerating; while I'm no doctor, I know how to read ME reports, and this one was clearly frustrated. Jerry Mansfield, twenty-nine, had apparently been a health nut. He was in perfect shape—not too fat, not too thin, prior medical records showed wonderful cholesterol and blood pressure measurements, and so on and so forth. The coroner really truly had no idea why this man had been dead. There weren't any marks on his body anywhere, no foreign substances on his skin aside from a bit of dirt and silver dust. The latter had been found on his clothes, most heavily concentrated on the hands,