'Phil Blasky?'
He shot his thumb at the door. 'In the fridge.'
I signed in, received a plastic badge, and entered the main room.
Death overpowered the cherry, so strong I could taste it in the back of my mouth. It had a sickly-sour smell, like rotting carnations.
To the right, a mortician in an ill-fitting suit hefted a body off a table and onto a rolling cot. When he finished, he pulled off his latex gloves and shot them, rubber-band-style, into a garbage can.
Next to him, resting on a stainless steel scale built into the floor, was a naked male corpse, grossly obese, with burns covering most of his torso. The LCD screen on the wall blinked 450 lbs. He smelled like bacon.
I held my breath and pulled open the heavy aluminum door, which led into the cooler.
The stench worsened in here. Bleach and blood and urine and meat gone bad.
Cook County Morgue was the largest in the Midwest. Indigents, unclaimed bodies, accident victims, suicides, and cases of foul play all came through these doors. It held about three hundred bodies.
Just my luck, they were running at capacity.
To my left, corpses lay stacked on wire shelves warehouse-style, five high and thirty wide. Stretching across the main floor was a traffic jam of tables and carts, all occupied. Some of the dead were covered with black plastic bags. Some weren't.
Unlike movie depictions of morgues, these bodies didn't lie down in peaceful, supine positions. Many of them had kept the poses they died in; arms and legs jutting out, curled up on their sides, necks at funny angles. They also didn't look like a Hollywood conception of a corpse. A real dead person had very little color. Regardless of race, the skin always seemed to fade into a light blue, and the eyes were dull and cloudy, like dusty snow globes.
The temperature hovered at fifty degrees, fans blowing around the frigid, foul air. It chilled my sweat in a most unpleasant way.
To the right, in an adjacent room, an autopsy was being performed. I focused on the figure holding the bone saw, didn't recognize him, and continued to look around.
I found Phil Blasky near the back of the room, and walked up to him carefully; the floors were sticky with various fluids, and all of them clashed with my Gucci pumps.
'Phil.'
'Jack.'
Phil was leaning over a steel table, squinting at something. I stood next to him, trying not to gape at the nude body of a toddler, half wrapped in a black plastic bag, lying next to him. The child was so rigid and pale, he appeared to be made out of wax.
'I went through every stiff in the place a second time. No one is missing arms.'
I glanced down at the table. The arms were severed at the shoulder, laid out with their fingertips touching, the elbows bending in a big M. They belonged to a female, Caucasian, with fake pink nails. A pair of black handcuffs connected them at the wrists. There was very little blood, but the jagged edges to the wounds suggested they didn't come off easily.
'I suspect an axe.' Phil poked at the wound with a gloved finger. 'See the mark along the humerus, here? It took two swings to sever the appendage.'
'It doesn't look humorous to me.' Benedict had snuck up behind us.
'Funny,' Phil said. 'Never heard that one before, working with dead bodies for twenty years. Next will you make some kind of gimme a hand joke?'
'I did that one already,' Herb said. 'How about: It appears the suspect has been disarmed?'
'She was always such a cut-up?'
'Would you like a shoulder to cry on?'
'Can I go out on a limb here?'
'At least she'll get severance pay?'
Phil cocked an eyebrow at Herb.
'Severance?' Herb said. 'Sever?'
I tuned out their act and got a closer look at the arms. Snapping on a latex glove, I pushed back the cold, hard fingers and peered at the handcuffs. They were Smith and Wesson model number 100.
'Those are police issue.' Benedict poked at them with a pencil. 'I've got a set just like them.'
So did every other cop in our district, and probably in Chicago. They were also sold at sporting goods stores, sex shops, and Army/Navy surplus outlets, plus a zillion places over the Internet. Impossible to trace. But maybe we'd get lucky and the owner had etched his name and address on the . . .
I inhaled sharply.
This couldn't be right.
On the cuffs, next to the keyhole, were two small initials painted in red nail polish. I tugged out my .38, holstered under my blazer, and looked at the butt. It had the same two red letters.
JD.
'Herb.' I kept my voice steady. 'Those handcuffs are mine.'
