Laura Lippman - The Sugar House

“It’s from common law,” Crow said. “John Doe was the plaintiff and Richard Roe was the defendant.”

Whitney was not put off the scent so easily. “No, really, why couldn’t I be your partner?”

So many answers occurred to Tess that it was hard to pick just one. “Because I work alone. Because I can’t afford you. Because you would go cross-eyed with boredom the first time you had to do surveillance, or sort through receipts found in a dumpster dive. Besides, what use are you now that you no longer have access to the Beacon-Light ’s resources? I have to pay Dorie Starnes for the kind of stuff you used to give me for free.”

“Oh well, it was just a passing fancy. I think what I really want is my own talk show, one of those NPR ones, all erudite and earnest,” Whitney said. “You know, one of the really boring ones, where the guest is always some State Department undersecretary no one has ever heard of.”

“How does one go about getting a talk show?” Crow asked.

Whitney waved her hand in the air. “I haven’t the vaguest idea. But how hard can it be?”

A waiter was unloading a trayful of appetizers at the table-meat and vegetable samosas, nan, a round of Kingfisher beer. Apparently Whitney hadn’t waited for them to order the first course. Tess wondered if she had allowed them their choice of entrées. The maddening thing was, Whitney often did know better than Tess what Tess really wanted, or needed. If she had saved her life once, in the literal fashion, she had saved it a hundred times over in other ways. Tess was never bored when Whitney was around.

“I think,” Tess said, “you should get an advice column, one where people write to you about their most heart-felt problems and you respond by telling them the proper timetable for wearing white shoes, and why it’s gauche to get the Caesar salad at Eddie’s already mixed, instead of with the dressing packaged on the side.”

“I’ll add it to the list, dearest. Right after ballet dancer and just before fireman.” Whitney’s voice sharpened. “Oh stop it, you two, just stop it.”

Beneath the white tablecloth, Crow’s hand returned guiltily to his own lap.

IT WAS A BUSY MONDAY MORNING AT THE MORGUE ON Penn Street, the corridors overflowing with the weekend catch from throughout Maryland. Nothing like the combination of hunting season and Christmas cheer to up the number of bodies who needed their passports stamped before they could continue on their journey. Tess, trying to act nonchalant in the extreme, waited among the gridlocked gurneys for the assistant medical examiner who had autopsied Jane Doe a little more than a year ago.

She had been here before, the first time as a rookie night cops reporter, learning the ropes. An older reporter tried to test her mettle, but it had been Tess’s good fortune to arrive on a day when death, if not exactly on holiday, was definitely slacking. Only one body was out in plain view, an overweight young man who had died of a heart attack while interviewing for a job at JCPenney’s.

In the eight years since then, Tess had seen many more bodies-unexpected bodies, fresher bodies, riper bodies, in less contained circumstances. But a girl never forgets her first corpse. He had been blue, the pale blue used in raspberry-flavored Ice Pops. Tess had felt, well, mortified on his behalf. Whatever his life plans, they hadn’t included being a blue, naked prop in the ritual hazing of some cub reporter. He had looked unreal, and Tess found it hard to imagine he had ever been flesh-colored, much less alive.

She had been only twenty-two.

“Miss Monaghan?” Dr. Olive Horvath, the assistant M.E., motioned for her to follow her into a small conference room. Harried, bristling with impatience before Tess had spoken a single word, she made it clear that Tess was at the bottom of the list of things she had to do today, and she was eager to draw a line through her.

“Here,” she said, brandishing a folder.

“Where?”

“Here.”

Tess had expected an attendant to lead her to a drawer somewhere and slide out the preserved remains of Henry Dembrow’s victim. She had steeled herself for this, in fact. But Jane Doe’s body was long gone. No room at the inn, not with the city homicide rate still in the top five nationwide.

“Buried in a pauper’s grave down at Crownsville,” Dr. Horvath explained. Pink-cheeked, with sky-blue eyes and thick, honey-colored hair, she was not so much pretty as in vivid good health, which was jarring in this setting. “We have her DNA, prints, and blood work on file, but we don’t have the room for that kind of storage, not for a closed case. It’s standard practice with the Jane and John Does, or anyone whose body isn’t claimed.”

“Do you know that name has an origin?” Tess asked, thinking to delight the woman with her scrap of knowledge. “John Doe, I mean. My boyfriend explained-”

“Nope, never really thought about it.” It was clear that the living, and their customs, held little interest for Dr. Horvath. “Look, do you want a copy of my report? It’s fifty cents a page.”

Tess was familiar with this racket: City, state and federal agencies charged ten times the going rate for photocopies, if only to keep the nuisance factor down. Normally, she wouldn’t have thought twice about taking this out of her expenses, but Ruthie Dembrow’s finances were limited. As was her father’s patience, if he found out she was featherbedding a client he had referred to her.

“Is there a break room, where I could read it and take notes? I’ll let you hold my driver’s license for collateral.”

“No need for that,” Dr. Horvath said. “I’ll find a spot for you, and you can drop the report off at the front desk when you’re done. Tell them if you need any copies, and they’ll help you out. I’ve got work to do.” She led Tess to a small room with a coffeemaker and an old-fashioned vending machine that looked as if it hadn’t been used for years. Tess wasn’t sure if they even made Zagnut bars anymore.

“Our old smoking lounge,” the assistant medical examiner said, her voice wistful. “Now we have to go stand in front of the building, like addicts on some drug corner.”

“You smoke?”

“When you spend your day looking at healthy young men, with pristine organs and beautiful arteries-young men who just happen to have bullets in their brains-you become a little more fatalistic, I guess. Death has its own timetable.”

Her eyes lingered briefly on Tess as if she could see through her, as if she could gauge every slice of pepperoni pizza devoured, every drink consumed, every joint smoked. Tess felt like the transparency in the old World Book Encyclopedia , the one she had studied to master the rudiments of male anatomy. She couldn’t help wondering how her arteries would rate with Dr. Horvath.

Suddenly, a Zagnut bar seemed like a very good idea.

The autopsy report was slow going for someone whose last science class had been the required chemistry lab for Western High School sophomores. Where the science was clear, the English was murky. The bureaucrat’s motto: Why say it once, if you could say it three times, in three increasingly clunkier sentences? Tess read carefully, taking notes as she went, backtracking over and over again. At the end of the hour, she had only a page of notes.

Jane Doe, estimated age 15-25. Caucasian. Cause of death: head injury, consistent with a fall. Length of rubber tubing tied at neck post-mortem. 5-7, 118 pounds. Brown hair, blue eyes. Black tattoo, on left ankle a straight line, two inches long, appears to be quite recent, still some blood and scabbing around it. Enamel on teeth badly decayed. Fingerprints taken, no matches found. Has never given birth. No scars .