12th of Never

Bunny entered the room from the door that led to the morgue. She signaled to Claire as if to say, I need to talk to you.

“What’s the holdup, Bunny?”

“I need to see you for a second, Doctor.”

Claire sighed, crossed the room, and followed Bunny to the morgue, a refrigerated room lined with stacks of stainless steel drawers, each designed to hold a body. Some of Claire’s patients had recently checked in. Some had been waiting for months for someone to ID them before they were buried as nameless corpses.

“What is it, Bunny?”

The girl’s blue eyes were shifting and her lips were trembling. Claire didn’t get it. What the hell?

“I can’t find her,” Bunny said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Faye Farmer,” Bunny said. “She’s gone.”

“What’s her drawer number?” Claire asked, exasperated. She went to the whiteboard, ran her finger down the list.

“Twelve,” said Bunny Ellis.

Claire turned away from the whiteboard, crossed to the wall of drawers, pulled the handle of number 12. The drawer slid out smoothly, bringing the corpse into view. There was a tag tied to the big toe. Claire saw instantly that there had been a screwup. Faye Farmer was not and had never been a seventy-year-old black man.

She said, “Who mixed up the bodies? What drawer is this man supposed to be in?”

“Seventeen,” said Bunny. “Dr. Washburn, I already checked.”

Claire reached down, opened drawer number 17. It was empty. She started pulling out drawers, slamming them closed, each body in its assigned box except for the black John Doe in Faye Farmer’s drawer.

Bunny was crying now. She was a competent young woman and liked to do a good job.

“Stop that,” Claire snapped. “Think. Did you see Ms. Farmer’s body after she was checked in yesterday?”

“Not after I logged her in. She’s supposed to be in twelve.”

“Who moved John Doe one thirty-two out of box seventeen?”

Bunny shrugged miserably. “Not me.”

The body couldn’t have left the premises.

That was impossible.

Chapter 18

CLAIRE WONDERED WHAT she was supposed to tell the gang of junior law enforcement personnel. We’ve been robbed? She returned to the autopsy suite, clapped her hands, and said, “People, we’ve encountered a problem that I need to address right away. Sorry about this. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can reschedule.”

Conklin stood like a tree in a stream that flowed around him as grumbling law enforcement trainees shed their outerwear and filed out. He said to Claire, “What’s going on?”

“Ms. Farmer’s body has been misplaced. I want to make a joke about how she didn’t like the accommodations, Richie, but there is nothing funny about this. If we don’t find her in three minutes, I’m going to have a cerebral hemorrhage.”

“Tell me what you know, from the beginning.”

“The beginning: Faye Farmer was logged in last night at eight seventeen p.m. and stowed in drawer twelve. We’ve got double records and triple logs on that. When I left last night, Faye was tucked in. I came in this morning, ready to do the post, as you know, and overnight the body vacated the morgue.

“She’s a one-hundred-and-thirty-five-pound dead woman. I can’t see her anywhere. She’s totally missing.”

“Okay. Calm down, Claire. She didn’t walk out of here, did she? She was positively dead?”

There had been a few instances in which people who appeared to be dead had regained consciousness after a stunning head injury or after having been in a coma. And a few of them had sat up on an autopsy table and walked out. Claire had no personal knowledge of these cases, but there were stories. This couldn’t be one of them. Faye Farmer had a bullet through her head. Through and through.

It was cool inside the morgue, and yet Claire was sweating through her clothes and her lab coat. Sweat seemed to be pooling in her shoes. She had never lost a body before. This was unimaginable.

“She was dead, Rich. Dead dead. Ten minutes ago I was worried about someone sneezing on her. Now, at the very least, we’ve lost chain of custody, which is plenty bad enough. Worst case is, we don’t recover the woman’s body and we never learn what killed her.”

“Okay, okay, Claire. We’ll find her.”

Morales and four kids from the crime lab strip-searched every part of the medical examiner’s office—the morgue, the back rooms, the supply closet, the administration bull pen.

Meanwhile, Claire and Conklin took the AV tech, Ryan Perles, into Claire’s office, shut the door, and questioned him.

“I came in at about eight this morning,” Perles said. He looked smug, Claire thought. Or as though he liked the attention, which he didn’t normally get.

“I had a lot of things to do when I got in and I was busy doing them when Dr. Washburn paged me. I looked and saw that the cord to the video system was unplugged from the battery backup. When I left last night, it was plugged in and A-OK.”

“Let’s see the disk from last night,” Conklin said.

The young tech opened the CD drawer. It was empty.

Claire put her hand on the back of a chair to steady herself. The conclusion was inescapable. Whoever took Faye Farmer’s body had access to Claire’s lab; most likely it had been someone who worked for her.

She could already visualize a video of Faye Farmer in some obscene pose in a car or a Dumpster posted on YouTube, going viral.

“Ryan, you came in this morning through the side door?” Claire asked him.

“Yes. Same as always.”

“It was locked?”

“Yes ma’am. Of course it was locked.”

“You’re sure?”

“Do you mind if I ask what’s wrong?”

“Ryan, let’s take this conversation upstairs,” Conklin said. “Sometimes a change of scene can help a person remember something he didn’t know he forgot.”

BOOK II

OFF THE BENCH

Chapter 19

IT HAD BEEN a long, loud, fussy night, but Julie had finally worn herself out and gone to sleep on Joe’s chest. His clock projected the time on the ceiling in bright red digits. It was 4:54. I reorganized my blanket and settled in for what I hoped would be maybe forty-five minutes of deep sleep.

But Joe was wide awake. He said, “Let’s talk about this again, Linds. I think in this case I know what’s best for you better than you do.”

I yawned, fluffed my pillow.

“I can’t go back yet, Joe. I’m only going to be thinking about you and Julie, anyway.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, I’m the oldest of seven. I have burped and changed a lot of nephews and nieces,