chapter 4
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
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.
A photograph was stapled inside the file. Tess avoided it for as long as she could, but she finally confronted Jane Doe’s death mask. Death by a massive head injury, combined with living on the streets, didn’t bring out the best in a person. Jane Doe’s eyes were closed, her face bruised, at once lumpy and hollow. The tip of her tongue protruded from the corner of her mouth, her farewell to the world that had treated her so badly. The rubber tubing around her neck, fashioned into a bow, was particularly obscene somehow, an ugly posthumous joke. Henry must have lingered over the body, Tess thought, needing to defile it for some reason. Why?
Still, the vestiges of a pretty face remained. Jane Doe had a sensual mouth; a straight, neat nose; and the loveliest brows, thick and natural looking. Working-class Baltimore women tended to overpluck and tweeze, laboring over their eyebrows the way some worked their tiny rowhouse gardens. Ruthie Dembrow, for one, had that overarched, perpetually surprised look. She’d be better off if she misplaced her tweezers for a few months. Not Jane Doe.
Tess handed the report back to the front desk clerk. “I’d like one page copied, if I could. Well, not a page, really-but this photo. Could you do that?”
“It won’t come out very well,” the clerk warned her.
“I know,” Tess said, pushing two quarters toward her. “But I want it anyway.”
Funny, the Polaroid photo reproduced almost too well. Jane Doe’s face was so pale, her features so dark, the rubber tubing at her neck darker still. Tess folded the paper into fourths and hid it between the pages of her datebook.
After the medical examiner’s office, Tess stopped at the police department to pick up the transcript of Henry Dembrow’s confession. No fifty cents a copy here, not as long as Homicide Detective Martin Tull was on the force.
“You want to go over this with me?” he asked, and Tess knew
“We can walk over to that place on Guilford,” he said, his girl-pretty features wistful. “The one with Peet’s Coffee and all those bars.”
“Bars?”
“You know, the salad bar, the soup bar, the sandwich bar, the cookie bar, the juice bar…”
Tess made a face. The morgue hadn’t dented her appetite, but she had other ideas for lunch. “I’d rather
