I shook the mouse, waking up the computer. Password. Of course. Above the desk hung a corkboard, pinned with all sorts of reminders, photographs, and scribbled notes. I sifted through it all, looking for something that resembled a password. Buried beneath a bunch of sticky notes was a shred of paper with a random combination of letters and numbers. I started typing it into the computer.
“Hey!”
The morgue door ricocheted open. One of the attendants had returned from his lunch break. His hand hovered over the phone by the door, ready to page someone if I turned out to be a threat. The other hand clutched half of a ham sandwich.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” he said.
I backed away from the computer and accidentally knocked into the metal table. The boy’s body rocked. “So sorry. I got lost.”
“The sign on the door says ‘morgue,’” the attendant replied acidly. “How lost could you be?”
I tried a different tactic and let tears form in my eyes. “The anniversary of my mother’s death was a few days ago. I guess I wanted to see where she spent her last few hours on earth.”
From the look on the attendant’s face, my second excuse wasn’t much better than the first. I sidled past him and into the corridor.
“Sorry,” I said again. “Enjoy your sandwich.”
“Uh-huh. This whole floor is off-limits to the public. Get back upstairs.”
“Will do. Off I go.”
With the attendant’s eyes boring holes into my back, I had no choice but to head right for the stairs. Sighing, I climbed all the way up to the floor of Evelyn’s room. Maybe the nurse had another update for me, one with actual information.
As I was about to leave the stairway, I caught sight of something unusual on Evelyn’s floor. A familiar skinny figure with purple hair paced back and forth in the hallway. What was Matthew Thompson doing in the hospital?
I lingered in the stairway to watch. He seemed to be waiting for something too. He wrung his hands, his gaze flickering up and down the hall. The nurses’ station was too far away for them to notice his odd behavior, but I had a front row seat.
Suddenly, he darted behind a large locked cart of medications and ducked down. A nearby door—one with a numbered pad to unlock it—swung open, and a nurse emerged from the room, holding a file. Matthew waited for her to walk past, then he dashed across the hall and slipped inside the room right before the door closed again.
I exited the stairway and took up Matthew’s previous post behind the medication cart. Five minutes later, he came out, cracking the door an inch to make sure the coast was clear. The front of his sweater was bulky and bunched up as if he’d hidden something beneath it. He didn’t spot me and scurried toward the stairway.
“Not so fast.” I popped out from behind the medication cart and grabbed Matthew by his sweater. A file fell out of his shirt and hit the floor, strewing papers everywhere.
He bent down to collect everything and shoved it all together with reckless abandon. “What’s your problem, lady?”
“Remember me? From Saint Francis?”
He looked up from the floor. “You’re that psycho who almost hit me.”
“I did not hit you.”
“I said almost.” He rose, hugging the messy file to his chest. “What do you want from me?”
I pointed to the name on the file he’d stolen. “I want to know what you had to do with Rosie Brigham. Why was your prefect pin near her body in Whitechapel when you were supposed to be in school in Lambeth?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You can tell me or the police,” I bargained. “One quick shout, and I can get one of those nurses down there to call security. All I have to do is say you broke into a locked room and stole a patient’s file. That’s a serious crime.”
I caught him, and he knew it. Tears filled his eyes. His bottom lip wobbled. “If I tell you, you can’t tell anyone else.”
“Your secret is safe with me.” And it was, as long as he hadn’t been the one to knife Rosie Brigham and steal her uterus while she bled out in the streets. “Hide that file and come with me.”
Once the file was safely under his sweater again, I took him back to Evelyn’s room and closed the door.
“Out with it,” I ordered. “Who was Rosie Brigham to you?”
“My girlfriend,” he said.
“Your girlfriend?” I repeated, confused. “That can’t be. She was twenty. You’re, what, sixteen?”
“Almost seventeen.” He wiped his nose. “That’s why I couldn’t say anything. Rosie was a teaching assistant at my school. One day, I was helping her grade papers and—I couldn’t help it—I kissed her. She didn’t push me away.”
I tried not to let my nose wrinkle, unsure what a respectable twenty-year-old teaching assistant would have seen in this purple-haired, crying mess of a boy. “Is this why you lost your prefect standing? Someone found you out?”
“One of the teachers,” he confirmed. “He caught us in a classroom—uh—”
“No need to elaborate on that.”
He sighed with relief. “They let me off with a warning, saying it was Rosie’s fault because she was older than me. She had to take some leave without pay. When she came back, she told me she didn’t want to be together anymore, but I could tell she was lying. That night—the night she died—we agreed to meet at a bar in Whitechapel to tie up loose ends. We figured it was far enough away from the school that no one would see us.”
“I’m guessing that wasn’t the case.”
Matthew shook his head. “First of all, I was right. Rosie didn’t want to break up. I gave her my prefect pin to prove she was worth all of the trouble we’d been through. Out in the alleyway, we—”
“Again, skip it.”
“The same teacher came
