Rafiel seemed to take this as encouragement to come further into the house. "Yes and no," he said. "They could see . . . sort of, that things weren't exactly textbook. But the thing is that the fire got really hot there, at the center of the garden, and they couldn't say much for sure about each of the corpses, except identify them through dental records."
"The . . . beetles . . ."
"They must have reverted, in death or in burning, because they found skeletons." He sat down at the table, across from her. "They identified Frank and the woman who owned the castle. The castle itself survived, by the way. There's talk of someone buying it to make a school for deaf and blind kids."
Kyrie nodded, and flipped through the other papers. There were pictures of all the other dead. Even Frank, with his Neanderthal brow, graced the front pages of all newspapers. All of them smiled from posed photos or looked out from poses obviously clipped from candid snapshots. All except Tom.
"There are no pictures of Tom," she said.
Rafiel shook his head. "No," he said. "His father's picture of Tom, in his wallet, is from when Tom was six. We didn't think it was appropriate. And while his father thinks there are mug shots from his juvenile arrests, he didn't think those were appropriate either. And no one has tracked them down, possibly because the record is sealed."
Kyrie felt bereft. She couldn't explain it to herself, but she felt like she needed to see Tom's face, just once more. She was afraid of forgetting him. She was afraid his features would slip from her mind, irrecoverable.
While she'd come to accept that she'd live on past this, that she might very well live on to find someone and marry, maybe, sometime—her shifter handicap being accounted for—she couldn't bear the thought of forgetting Tom. "It's just . . . I would very much like to remember his face," she said.
Rafiel looked at her, intently. He was wiggling his leg again, this time side to side, very fast. "About what I said about Tom, the day . . . I was an ass, Kyrie. I could tell you were interested in him, and I was afraid. You . . . are very special to me, Kyrie."
She didn't know what to say to that, and just looked at him, with what she was sure was a vacant look.
He laughed, a short laugh, more like a bark. "And I'm being an ass again, aren't I? I can't give you a picture of him. Unless you want the one from when he was six and I don't suppose . . ." He sighed. "Would you like to come to the morgue? To see him? He's being given back to his father tonight, so if you want to see him, it has to be now."
Kyrie thought of Tom's face contorted in pain, as she'd last seen it. She wasn't sure that was the memory she wanted.
"He doesn't look like he did, you know. In death . . . His face has relaxed. They . . . the coroner closed him up. He doesn't look gross at all. More like he's sleeping."
"You were there?" Kyrie asked. "For the autopsy?" She thought of what she'd seen done to the corpse in the parking lot—the body opened, the brain sawed out of its cavity.
"There was no autopsy. It didn't seem needed. We supposedly saw death, you know, attack by wild animal. They found a couple of scales on his body. They're not exactly Komodo dragon scales." He frowned. "To be honest, they were in his boots and were probably . . . his . . . but they analyzed as reptile scales and the paper is printing something about the danger of exotic pets. They love to preach. And his father didn't want him autopsied, so he wasn't. He really looks . . . very natural."
Kyrie wasn't sure. The morgue had scared her. But perhaps seeing Tom without that expression of agony on his face was all she needed.
She nodded. In the bathroom, she caught herself putting on lip gloss and combing her hair. As if Tom could see her.
Feeling very silly, she headed out the door with Rafiel.
* * *
The morgue was . . . as it had been before. The guy at the desk didn't even make much fuss over Kyrie coming back. Just tipped his hat at her, as if she were a known person here.
Rafiel led her down the cool, faintly smelly corridors, to a door at the end. He opened the door and turned on a very bright fluorescent light, which glared off tiled walls. In this room, the tiles were white, and it made the whole thing look like an antiseptic cell. Or the inside of an ice cube.
It wasn't an autopsy room. Just a small room, with a collapsible metal table set up against one wall. On the table was something—no, someone—covered with a sheet. The room was just this side of freezing.
"We don't have drawers," Rafiel said. "Just ten of these rooms. If needed we can cram three people per room, but I don't think we've ever needed to. The closest we came were the bones, from the castle, and those we just put all together in one room, while we sorted out who was who and identified victims by dental records and DNA."