‘‘That she and her family should move to Atlanta.’’ ‘‘Did they?’’
‘‘Sure ’nuff, they did.’’ He started toward the door, taking off his face shield. ‘‘I’ll be right back.’’
Diane and Lynn watched the lean young black man walk out of the room.
‘‘I never ask Raymond what he’s doing when he gets that blank look on his face.’’ Lynn shrugged, then shifted gears. ‘‘I’d like to start with the clothes. We’ll have to cut the sleeves, but I’d like to inspect the body before the hands are untied.’’
The material was stiff and hard to dropped from the body to the metal cut. Maggots surface of the table as they worked. They were putting the clothes in a bag when the diener came back in. He put on his gloves and took the bag of evidence.
‘‘I’ll label. What we calling the body?’’
‘‘Blue,’’ said Diane.
‘‘Blue,’’ said Raymond. ‘‘I guess that’s as good a name as any.’’
‘‘When we cut them down, we tied blue, red or green cord around both cut ends of the rope so we could match the ropes again after they were sepa rated.’’ Diane pointed to the blue string wrapped around the end of the rope that marked it and kept it from unraveling.
The noose was still tight around the neck, sunk deep into the flesh under the chin. Diane would hate for any family member to ever see their loved one like this. They would never be able to think of their rela tive again without seeing this image. She stood back and watched as Lynn and her diener tended to the painstaking external examination of the body.
Lynn talked into a hanging microphone as she de scribed what they found. ‘‘The victim appears to be a female at this point...’’
A pounding on the window startled Diane. The three of them looked up to see a man in his thirties standing in the outer autopsy room, looking through the window at them. He was dressed in gray trousers, white shirt and floral tie, holding a hand over his mouth and nose. Lynn flipped the intercom switch.
‘‘What’s going on in here?’’ he said. ‘‘Step out here for a minute.’’
‘‘I’m in the middle of an important examination, Jackson. What do you want?’’
Jackson bent over and gagged. ‘‘Why does it smell so bad in here?’’
The three of them looked at Jackson with their eye brows raised enough to make deep furrows in their foreheads.
‘‘We have a rotting corpse on the table,’’ said Lynn. ‘‘It would be a little better if the air-conditioning sys tem were working, but it’s not.’’
‘‘The air conditioner is working in the rest of the building.’’
Lynn glared at him for a moment before she spoke. ‘‘Well, it’s not working in here. What brings you here anyway? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you visit the autopsy room.’’
‘‘I was talking to a patron when this . . . this . . . horrific odor came into my office.’’
‘‘The maintenance man said it’s a problem with the vents. You’ll have to talk to him.’’
‘‘He’s home sick.’’ As Jackson spoke, he breathed through his mouth and tried holding his nose.
‘‘Surely he’s not the only person the hospital em ploys who can fix air conditioning.’’
‘‘He’s the only one who can look into this. We’ve had an injudicious use of vacation time, and the other man who does this kind of work is out of town.’’
‘‘Then you’ll have to call in someone from outside the hospital.’’
‘‘We don’t have the money.’’
‘‘Then we’ll have to put up with the smell until Mar lon gets back.’’
‘‘This is impossible.’’
‘‘No,’’ said Lynn. ‘‘Just difficult.’’
‘‘I’ll see what I can do.’’ He hurried out of the lab. The door slammed behind him.
‘‘Bean counter?’’ asked Diane.
‘‘That’s him. I won’t ask you what you did, Raymond.’’
‘‘That’d be best, Ma’am.’’
‘‘Yes, well, getting back to Blue. We gave the clothes an initial inspection before you got here,’’ said Lynn, speaking to Diane. ‘‘It’s hard to tell, but the coveralls look relatively new.’’
‘‘From Sears,’’ said Raymond.
‘‘Maybe at your lab you’ll be able to pick up some more information,’’ said Lynn.
‘‘How’d a crime lab in a museum come about any way?’’ Raymond asked Diane as he rolled the body over while Lynn held the head and neck.
‘‘The Rosewood Police Department made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’’
‘‘Uh huh,’’ said Raymond.
‘‘The city and county assessed the museum’s prop erty value so high it couldn’t pay the taxes. The mayor and chief of detectives suggested that if we would op erate a new crime scene evidence laboratory in the museum for the city, the city would arrange for the money from the real estate taxes paid to be returned to the museum for
