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“Elijah?” a voice called, and he turned to it.
“Elijah Harris?” Saber said.
He looked back at her, scrutinizing.
“That’s what the secretary called you,” she said.
Elijah got up and grabbed a plate with one piece of avocado toast artfully dressed with nori flakes and a drizzle of some kind of sauce.
“What do you do at the coroner’s office?” Doug asked, smiling and trying to be friendly.
“I’m the assistant to the lead pathologist.”
“What does that mean?”
“I usually do everything the pathologist is supposed to do, then sometimes he comes and checks my work.”
“What’s your education?”
Elijah gave Doug a very irritated look, frowning cartoonishly. He tugged on the sleeves of his rust-colored sweater and seemed to chew his lip.
“I’m sorry, I just want to know—”
“I have a bachelor’s in chemistry from UCLA and almost two years at the University of Washington’s medical school.”
“You didn’t finish?”
“I dropped out.”
Doug nodded.
“Still impressive,” he said, but Elijah rolled his eyes and took a bite out of his toast.
Saber looked at him for a long moment.
“You met us here because I asked you if you’d seen any strange deaths, blood loss that didn’t make sense.”
“Exsanguination without obvious wounding or trauma,” Doug said. “I’ve seen it all over, in animals.”
Elijah looked back and forth at them.
“Who are you with?”
“What do you mean?” Saber asked.
“You don’t look like journalists. I can’t figure out what else you would be.”
Saber looked at Doug.
“We’re just regular people,” she said, “who are trying to make sense of some stuff we’ve seen.”
“What have you seen?”
“Tell us what you’ve seen,” Doug said. “We asked first.”
Elijah wiped his lip carefully with a black paper napkin and nodded, looking up at the ceiling as though to avoid eye contact at any cost.
“The first was, I don’t know what you’d call her… a street person? It turned out she was from Seattle, so the location of the body didn’t make sense.”
