Michael Prescott - Next Victim

They were standing together in the morgue’s radiography room, conveniently down the hall from where the dead bodies were stored. In the movies, the dead were always filed away in cabinets, but in actuality they were more likely to be stacked on gurneys or piled up in corners, awaiting inspection. There was a lot of death in LA County, and the cabinets were all full.

Another thing about the movies-the morgue technicians always wore surgical masks. So did the cops, when they were played by somebody like Brad Pitt or Robert De Niro. But this was real life, and nobody wore a fucking mask. They would think you were a wuss if you wore a mask. You just stood there breathing whatever germs and shit were there to be breathed, and you were stoic about it.

Dodge had visited the morgue many times, because it was often necessary for at least one detective working a case to observe an autopsy. Today he had drawn the detail while Al Bradley had gone back to Reseda. Truth was, he didn’t mind. He still thought there was a story here, one that might be worth another two grand from Myron Levine.

Besides, he had no problem with taking a trip to the morgue. Sort of liked it, in a way. The place impressed him-all these pathologists working with quick efficiency, unpacking their lifeless patients, taking samples of fluids and organs, dictating comments into microphones suspended overhead. The comments would be typed up into transcripts attached to the official reports, the vials of fluid and plastic containers of heart and lung tissue would be sent to the lab for analysis, and the lab reports would go into the file as well.

It was fucking incredible, really, how the county of Los Angeles had succeeded in making the autopsy an assembly-line process-dissection on a mass scale, an army of doctors and lab technicians all working together to reduce body after body to its raw components, while reducing the fact of death itself to a sheaf of paperwork.

Every time he came here, he had the same thought: This is how it ends. This is all there is.

He didn’t give a shit about religion and all that metaphysical crap. Death was a pile of flesh on a sheet of steel with gutters to carry off the sluice of blood. Nothing else. Just that.

Today, though, he wasn’t going to witness an actual autopsy. There was always a backlog of corpses in the morgue. An autopsy was almost never scheduled until at least twenty-four hours after the deceased had been found. All that was happening now was a postmortem radiology session. Winston was going to shoot X rays of the victim’s teeth, then compare them with the antemortem dental records of Scott Maple, who remained missing and unaccounted for.

Had the dead man been a South Central gangbanger-or, for that matter, a South Central honor student-there wouldn’t have been any rush to identify his remains. But when the victim was presumed to be a lily-white college student in lily-white Westwood-an affluent kid with affluent parents attending an affluent school in an affluent neighborhood-well, pull out all the goddamn stops, fast-track this case, get it cleared.

"We’ll do a full set of radiographs," Winston said as she pried open the corpse’s mouth with a wedging instrument. "Put on your aprons and gloves."

Dodge and the assistant complied. You weren’t a wuss for wearing a lead apron in the X-ray room. There were your nuts to worry about. Radiation caused impotence or sterility or something.

"Guess there’s no doubt how the guy died, anyhow," he said, just for the sake of conversation.

"There’s always doubt." Winston sounded weary.

"I don’t know, Doc." He knew Winston hated being called Doc. "Looks to me like the cause of death was proximity to an open flame."

"He’s burned, all right. Full thickness burns throughout the epidermis and dermis. But that damage could be postmortem. We’ll need to see his trachea. If there’s soot in the airway below the vocal cords, then he lived long enough to inhale smoke."

The X-ray machine made a prolonged humming sound as the first bite-wing was shot. The image was displayed in black and white on a video screen in the workstation.

"That’s the most likely finding," Winston went on. "Plenty of toxins in a chemistry lab. Hydrogen chloride, hydrogen cyanide, benzene, ammonia, sulfur dioxide, you name it. Or just plain old carbon dioxide-the blood samples will tell us his carboxyhemoglobin level, and if it’s over fifty percent, we’ve got a winner."

"You enjoy your work too fucking much, Doc." The f-word just slipped out. He normally didn’t curse around female colleagues if there was any chance he could get them into bed, and he hadn’t entirely given up on Winston. She might not be a dyke. Maybe he’d just asked her out on the wrong day of the month. PMS made women crazy.

"I’m simply aware of all the possibilities," Winston said, unruffled. "Smoke inhalation is only one of them. Thermal trauma to the larynx is another. It can cause spasms that bring on suffocation. Or there’s vagal inhibition, which produces reflex cardiac death-"

"Okay, okay."

She shrugged. "I don’t like making assumptions."

"Yeah, I get that impression." He tried a little wit. "Maybe you should have your own TV series. Winston, ME."

She actually smiled, a rare thing. "I’ve heard worse ideas." To her assistant: "Okay, take the other bite-wing."

The radiograph machine hummed again. It was something called an MDIS-Mobile Digital Imaging System. The rotating arm of the device could be moved manually to shoot the subject from various angles.

"We’re lucky his damn teeth didn’t burn up," Dodge said, for no particular reason.

"Teeth burn only at temperatures exceeding one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Fillings last even longer. They can survive temperatures of up to sixteen hundred degrees."

"Learn something new every day on this job." He didn’t mean to sound sarcastic, but he did anyway. He tried to compensate by adopting a friendlier tone. "You ever see one this bad?"

"I’ve seen everything. This one is nasty, though." Winston looked over the body with professional detachment. "Third-degree burns over more than seventy percent of the anterior body surface. Tissue desiccation and avascularization, skin blackening and contraction, probable artifactual fractures of the carpi and metatarsals-"

"Fractures?"

"Postmortem. Caused by the shortening of the ligaments attributable to thermal injury. The small bones crack under the strain."

"But no sign of foul play?"

She smiled again. "I thought you said the cause of death was obvious."

"Like you, Doc, I don’t make assumptions."

"A wise policy. So far, I don’t see anything to suggest that John Doe was a victim of anything other than bad luck or his own stupidity. But I could be wrong."

"You are," a voice said from behind them.

Dodge and Winston both turned. A woman in a gray suit and a string tie stood in the doorway of the room. It took Dodge a moment to remember where he’d seen her.

The elevator in the Federal Building. Special Agent Tess McCallum, the lady fed who’d brushed him off.

Now here she was, stepping right back into his life.

Interesting.

Tess had spent the past two hours following a zigzag path that had led her, without knowing it, closer and closer to this room in the morgue.

Her first stop after leaving the MiraMist had been the Santa Monica Police Department, where she’d cornered the watch commander in his office, flashed her FBI creds, and asked about any crimes reported within the last twelve hours that involved chemicals, chemical supply companies, or labs-break-ins, burglaries, anything. She was particularly interested in the theft or unauthorized use of equipment meant for analyzing unknown substances.