Postmortem(7)

The rain was soft and cool on my face as Marino held the station wagon door open for me. As I turned the ignition he leaned down and said with a smirk, “Drive real careful, Doc.”





Chapter 2




THE WHITE CLOCK FACE FLOATED LIKE A FULL MOON in the dark sky, rising high above the old domed train station, the railroad tracks and the I-95 overpass. The great clock’s filigree hands stopped when the last passenger train did many years before. It was twelve-seventeen. It would always be twelve-seventeen in the city’s lower end where Health and Human Services decided to erect its hospital for the dead.

Time has stopped here. Buildings are boarded up and torn down. Traffic and freight trains perpetually rumble and roar like a distant discontented sea. The earth is a poisoned shore of weed-patched raw dirt littered with debris where nothing grows and there are no lights after dark. Nothing moves here except the truckers and the travelers and the trains speeding along their tracks of concrete and steel.

The white clock face watched me as I drove through the darkness, watched me like the white face in my dream.

I nosed the station wagon through an opening in the chain-link fence and parked behind the stucco building where I’d spent virtually every day of the past two years. The only state vehicle in the lot aside from mine was the gray Plymouth belonging to Neils Vander, the fingerprints examiner. I had called him right after Marino called me. Set into effect after the second strangling was a new policy. If there was another, Vander was to meet me in the morgue immediately. By now he was inside the X-ray room and setting up the laser.

Light was spilling on the tarmac from the open bay, and two paramedics were pulling a stretcher bearing a black body pouch out of the back of an ambulance. Deliveries went on throughout the night. Anybody who died violently, unexpectedly, or suspiciously in central Virginia was sent here, no matter the hour or the day.

The young men in their blue jumpsuits looked surprised to see me as I walked through the bay and held open the door leading inside the building.

“You’re out early, Doc.”

“Suicide from Mecklenburg,” the other attendant volunteered. “Threw himself in front of a train. Scattered him over fifty feet of tracks.”

“Yo. Pieces an’ parts . . .”

The stretcher bumped through the open doorway and into the white-tiled corridor. The body pouch apparently was defective or torn. Blood leaked through the bottom of the stretcher and left a trail of speckled red.

The morgue had a distinctive odor, the stale stench of death no amount of air deodorizer could mask. Had I been led here blindfolded, I would have known exactly where I was. At this hour of the morning, the smell was more noticeable, more unpleasant than usual. The stretcher clattered loudly through the hollow stillness as the attendants wheeled the suicide into the stainless-steel refrigerator.

I turned right into the morgue office where Fred, the security guard, was sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup and waiting for the ambulance attendants to sign in the body and be on their way. He was sitting on the edge of the desk, ducking out of view, just as he always did when a body was delivered. A gun to his head wouldn’t have been sufficient incentive to make him escort anybody inside the refrigerator. Toe tags dangling from cold feet protruding from sheets had a peculiar effect on him.

He shot a sidelong glance at the wall clock. His ten-hour shift was almost at an end.

“We’ve got another strangling coming in,” I bluntly told him.

“Lord, Lord! Sure am sorry.” Shaking his head. “I tell you. It’s hard to imagine anybody doing something like that. All them poor young ladies.” Head still shaking.

“It will be here any minute and I want you to make sure the bay door is shut and remains shut after the body’s brought in, Fred. The reporters will be out in droves. I don’t want anybody within fifty feet of this building. Is that clear?” I sounded hard and sharp, and I knew it. My nerves were singing like a power line.

“Yes, ma’am.” A vigorous nod. “I’ll keep an eye out, I sure will.”

Lighting a cigarette, I reached for the telephone and stabbed out my home number.

Bertha picked up on the second ring and sounded drugged with sleep when she hoarsely asked, “Hello?”

“Just checking in.”

“I’m here. Lucy hasn’t budged, Dr. Kay. Sleeping like a log, didn’t even hear me come in.”

“Thank you, Bertha. I can’t thank you enough. I don’t know when I’ll be home.”

“I’ll be here till I see you, then, Dr. Kay.”

Bertha was on notice these days. If I got called out in the middle of the night, so did she. I’d given her a key to the front door and instructions about the operation of the burglar alarm. She probably arrived at my house just minutes after I left for the scene. It dully drifted through my mind that when Lucy got out of bed in several hours, she’d find Bertha inside the kitchen instead of her Auntie Kay.