Monday Mourning

Restricted to those with special clearance, this elevator featured buttons allowing only three stops. LSJML. Coroner. Morgue. I pressed M and the doors slid shut.

Downstairs, through another secure door, a long, narrow corridor shoots the length of the building. To the left, an X-ray room and four autopsy suites, three with single tables, one with a pair. To the right, drying racks, computer stations, wheeled tubs and carts for transporting specimens to the histology, pathology, toxicology, DNA, and odontology-anthropology labs upstairs.

Through a small glass window in each door, I could see that Ayers and Morin were beginning their externals in rooms one and two. Each was working with a police photographer and an autopsy technician.

Another tech was arranging instruments in room three. He would be assisting Santangelo.

And I was on my own.

And Claudel would be here in less than four hours.

Having begun the day down, my mood was descending by the moment.

I continued on to room four. My room.

As do the others, room four has double doors leading to a morgue bay. The bay is lined with refrigerated compartments, each housing a double-decker gurney.

Tossing my clipboard onto the counter, I pulled a plastic apron from one drawer, gloves and mask from another, donned them, snagged a small metal cart from the corridor, and pushed backward through the double doors.

Bed count.

Six white cards.

Six in residence, one HIV positive.

I located those cards with my initials. LSJML-38426. LSJML-38427. LSJML-38428. Ossements. Inconnu. Bones. Unknown.

Normally, I would have taken the cases sequentially, fully analyzing one before beginning another. But Detective Delightful was due at one-thirty. Anticipating Claudel’s impatience, I decided to abandon protocol, and do a quick age-sex assessment of each set of remains.

It was a mistake I would later regret.

Moving from one stainless steel door to a second, then a third, I selected the same bones I’d viewed in the pizza parlor basement, and wheeled them to room four.

After jotting the relevant information onto a case form, I began with 38426, the bones from Dr. Energy’s crate.

First the skull.

Gracile muscle attachments. Rounded occiput. Small mastoids. Smooth supraorbital ridges ending in sharp orbital borders.

I switched to a pelvic bone.

Broad, flaring hip blades.