Praise for Annelise Ryan
and
“Sassy, sexy, and suspenseful, Annelise Ryan knocks ’em dead in her wry and original
—Carolyn Hart, author of
“Move over, Stephanie Plum. Make way for Mattie Winston, the funniest deputy coroner to cut up a corpse since, well, ever. I loved every minute I spent with her in this sharp and sassy debut mystery.”
—Laura Levine, author of
“Mattie Winston, RN, wasn’t looking for excitement when she became a morgue assistant—quite the contrary—but she got plenty and so will readers who won’t be able to put this book down.”
—Leslie Meier, author of
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—Tess Gerritsen,
“Matty is klutzy and endearing, and there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments…her foibles are still fun and entertaining.”
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“Ryan, the pseudonym of a Wisconsin emergency nurse, brings her professional expertise to her crisp debut…Mattie wisecracks her way through an increasingly complex plot.”
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Books by Annelise Ryan
SCARED STIFF
WORKING STIFF
Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.
Working Stiff
Annelise Ryan
A Mattie Winston Mystery
Acknowledgments
Warm thanks go to Jamie Brenner, my agent, and Peter Senftleben, my editor, for believing in me and making this happen. You guys rock my world. Thanks, too, to Doug Clegg, for keeping my flagging spirits up and pushing for Mattie every time I was ready to give up on her. To my family, thanks for all your loving support and faith in me, for understanding why I sometimes become a social recluse so I can write, and for being my best promoters.
And finally, a hearty thanks to all the family, friends, coworkers, and miscellaneous acquaintances in my life who ever made me laugh, especially those of you who share my warped and occasionally dark sense of humor. Laughter truly is the best medicine and this book is my small way of trying to return the favor.
Chapter 1
I’m surprised by how much the inside of a dead body smells like the inside of a live one. I expected something a little more tainted, like the difference between freshly ground hamburger and that gray, one-day-away-from-the-Dumpster stuff you get in the discount section at the grocery store. Of course, all I’ve seen so far is the freshly dead, not the deadly dead. Apparently the deadly dead can invade your nostrils with molecules of nasty-smelling stuff that clings and burns and threatens to make you vomit for days afterward.
Or so says Izzy, and he should know since cutting up dead people is what he does for a living. And now, so do I. It’s only my second day at it, but I can already tell it’s going to be a real conversation stopper at cocktail parties.
At the moment, we are standing on opposite sides of an autopsy table with a woman’s body laid out between us, her torso looking as if it’s just been filleted. I’m sure we create a strange tableau, and not just because of the open corpse. Izzy and I are the yin and yang of body types—the Munchkin and the Amazon. The only thing we have in common is a tendency to put on the pounds: Izzy is nearly as wide as he is tall, and I’m cursed—or blessed, depending on your perspective and what century you were born in—with the perfect metabolism for surviving long periods of hunger. My body is a model of energy efficiency, burning calories the way a miser on a pension burns candles.
But that’s where our commonalities end. Izzy is barely five feet tall, while I hit the six-foot mark at the age of sixteen (though I tell anyone who asks that I’m five-foot-twelve). Izzy has a dark, Mediterranean look while I’m very fair: white-blond hair, blue eyes, and a pale complexion, though not nearly as pale as the woman on our table.
Izzy reaches over, hands me the woman’s liver, and asks, “So, what do you think so far?” He sounds a little concerned, which isn’t surprising. This job takes a bit more getting used to than most.
“Think? I’m trying not to think.” I place the liver on the scale beside me and record the result on my clipboard.
“Aw, come on. When you get right down to it, is this really all that different from what you were doing before?”
“Uh, yeah,” I answer in my best
“How so? You used to cut people open. You handled their insides. You saw blood and guts. It’s pretty much the same, no?”
Hardly. Though it’s been a mere two months since I traded in the starched white lab coat from Mercy Hospital that had my name, MATTIE WINSTON, RN, embroidered across the pocket, at the moment it feels like an eternity ago. This is nothing like my work in the OR. There, the patients’ bodies were always hidden behind sterile drapes and waterproof shields, the field of focus nothing more than an iodine-bronzed square of skin and whatever lay directly beneath it. Most of the time I never even saw a face. But this…not just a face but the entire body, naked, ugly, and dead. And there’s no poor-man’s tan here. These people are the color of death from head to toe. It’s a bit of a mental adjustment. After twelve years of working to save people’s lives, I now remove their innards after they’re dead and weigh them on a scale like fruit. Not exactly a move
