floor and half of the walls. Unless a victim’s organs were currently open, it did not smell bad, more like the humid odor of a seedy bar during the day. Autopsies were performed one after the other until the doctors ran out of candidates; sometimes this would be early in the day and sometimes late. The dieners, or autopsy assistants, would then clean the room and go home, a system that provided every incentive to work quickly and efficiently.
Any new deceased who arrived after cleanup joined the queue for the following morning’s work. Jillian Perry made it in under the wire.
“Could have been an early day.” Jesse, a skinny black man who didn’t look old enough to have a driver’s license, absently hosed the body as he grumbled. He did not seem at all enamored of the beautiful model; a hot dead girl was no match for paid time off.
Undressed, Jillian’s body continued to show no signs of violence. No needle marks, no injuries, not so much as a bruise. Lividity, of course, on the buttocks and backs of the legs, but Theresa expected that. She and the pathologist, Dr. Christine Johnson, had already collected fingernail scrapings, a rape kit, and a few hairs and fibers from the skin. Now the ebony-hued doctor held a small but brilliant flashlight up to the mouth.
“Her throat’s clear. I don’t see any of the foaming you usually get with an OD.”
Jesse offered his opinion. “She froze to death.”
Theresa peered down the throat as well. “That would take a long time. It wasn’t that cold out.”
“Just long enough to screw up my day. If she’d been here this morning, I’d be going home by now.”
Theresa had often proposed a law restricting all crimes to only daylight hours to keep from being dragged from bed, and didn’t blame him. “It sucks to be you.”
“Not as bad as it sucks to be this chick today,” Christine said, clicking off the flashlight with a brisk snap, similar to the way she discouraged potential suitors. The young, black, brilliant pathologist was too interested in studying for her board exams to be distracted by romance. “It seems we have a rash of people freezing to death in the woods all of a sudden.”
Theresa said, “Not really. We have a thirty-year-old, half-clothed, throttled prostitute, a warmly dressed fifteen-year-old boy with a single blow to the head, and now a lightly but fully dressed twenty-four-year-old mother dead of-what?”
“Good question. I’ll let you know what I find.”
Theresa relinquished control of the body and went next door to the old teaching amphitheater which, by virtue of its size, availability, and the fact that it had a table in the middle, doubled as the trace evidence department’s examination room. She covered the table with fresh brown paper and spread out the aqua sweatshirt, noting its size, color, and brand. It smelled faintly of perfume, a light and undoubtedly expensive floral scent. Would a woman intending suicide wear perfume? Sure, why not? No need to save the good stuff for a special occasion, as Theresa did. She still had perfume from high school.
Aside from a little dirt and some dead leaves, almost certainly picked up when they rolled the body, the shirt was clean. Theresa turned it inside out-more of the same, except for a smear above the right cuff, on the inside of the forearm. It could have been a minuscule amount of oil. Perhaps Jillian had had something in her hand when she pulled the shirt on? But the victim’s hands were clean, and no spots appeared on the shirt’s waistband, where she would have had to tug downward.
The pink polo shirt under the sweatshirt had become discolored from the seepage of the decomposing tissues. Theresa hung it on a wheeled rack; when it dried she could tape its surface to pick up any loose hairs or fibers. Odd that it hadn’t been tucked into the jeans underneath the sweatshirt, which would have kept her warmer, but perhaps the victim had dressed in a hurry, or it had something to do with the current fashion.
The jeans were a designer brand, size four, making Theresa think there might be something to the rumor that clothing manufacturers had downgraded all women’s clothing sizes to make customers feel better about their bodies, and, by extension, better about parting with the cash to clothe them. Jillian seemed slender, but by no means undernourished for her height. A close look at the back pockets yielded a tiny dusting of white powder, which Theresa dutifully scraped into a paper fold to be tested for the presence of cocaine. The left front pocket contained some lint. The right front pocket held a single stud earring-a small cubic zirconium, as near as Theresa could figure-and a phone number with a Cleveland exchange scribbled on a piece of paper.
Don Delgado poked his head in. “What’s that?”
“This is what we, in law enforcement circles, call a clue.”
He dropped his six foot three frame into an amphitheater seat too small for him and ran two hands over his shiny olive skin. “Clue to what?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe to whoever left Jillian Perry to freeze to death at the base of an oak tree.”
“I thought she did that herself.”
“She probably did. I’m just not so sure.”
“Why not?”
She did not own up to any guilt over her first harsh assessment of Jillian Perry; Theresa’s ex-husband had taught her the folly of exposing any personal weakness. So she told Don merely this: “I have a hunch.”
“You don’t get hunches.”
“I thought I’d start. It will help me keep up with all those TV detectives.”
“You’ll have to start wearing high heels and low-cut sweaters too.”
“Forget it.”
“That’s a pity. You’d look good in them.” He clasped his hands behind his head and watched her work. He did not offer to help, no more than she would have offered to help him. The lab tried to maintain one forensic scientist per case-it cut down on staff time spent in court when the defendant came to trial.
Jillian had worn white Keds with socks. Not the sort of thing Theresa would have picked to walk three miles in, especially in very cold weather. The treads seemed clean for having traveled through the woods, but then it had been much colder on Monday than today and even mud or slush would have been frozen to an icy solid. “Are you hiding from Leo?”
“Yep. He has to meet with the companies bidding to handle the move to the new building, doesn’t want to leave his office or the coffee machine, and is looking for a handy substitute.”
“That doesn’t sound that bad, really. At least you could get away from test tubes for a while.”
“I like DNA. It don’t talk, just stays in its little incubator and multiplies. Besides, he wants you to take the moving companies-least you could do after bailing on that defense expert. He wants
Theresa cringed. The deep freeze, a walk-in subzero room used for long-term storage, smelled bad enough to sicken strong men, and anything placed there before she was hired could not be located without hours of work. Organization, like supervision, had never been Leo’s strong point. She turned on the alternative light source and a blue beam of light at 420 nanometers flowed out of the flexible head. She donned a pair of orange plastic goggles and said, “Hit the light switch, would you?”
Jillian’s underwear did not glow, indicating an absence of semen. One errant fiber lit up on the sweatshirt, but the taping had removed most of them. The embroidered words stood out as the optical properties of the threads reacted with the ultraviolet light. Then Theresa turned it over.
She heard Don approaching in the darkness. “What’s that?”
The smudge on the right cuff glowed brightly under the light. “I think that’s the smear of oil I saw. Why the heck is it glowing?”
“It’s not just glowing. It’s signaling the mother ship.”
She marked the area with a Sharpie in case it became difficult to see in regular light. “Sounds like a job for the FTIR, Robin.”
“Don’t call me Robin. You can be Batgirl if you want, but I ain’t going to be Robin. Stupidest name for a superhero ever.”
A knock sounded at the door. The building’s receptionist, an older woman with the physique of a wren but not the sweet voice, cracked it open, turned on the lights, and gave them both a suspicious look, as if wondering just what the two had been up to in the pitch black. “That suicide you just brought in, name of Perry?”
“Yeah?” Theresa asked.
“There’s a guy here wanting to claim the body, and giving me the impression he’s going to stage a sit-down strike until he gets it.”
