“Er, yeah,” Berg said. “Didn’t they tell you? It’s not going to be an open-casket funeral.”
“As dead as one of you can be,” is what Paris had said. Tyson swallowed. “They may have mentioned it.”
The sound of running water ceased abruptly. A moment later, a squat woman settling comfortably into her sixties walked into the main room toweling off her hands. A vaporizer hung pinched at the corner of her mouth like an outgrowth of her lips, while a haze of smoke rose from her mouth and nostrils as if she was preparing to breathe fire.
The coroner looked Tyson up and down like she was mentally fitting him for a coffin. “Well, aren’t you a fancy-looking one?”
“I’m not sure I approve of your tone,” Tyson said, unaccustomed to open insolence.
“Heh, strap in, honey. I’m not one for diplomacy. Why’d you think they keep me down here?”
“Should you really be vaping?” Tyson asked with an unplanned edge to his voice. “I thought hospitals were supposed to be sterile.”
The woman squeezed the vaporizer straw between two fingers. The tip lit up purple as she took a long pull before blowing the smoke out through her nose. She waved an arm at the bodies lying dead on the tables. Her tables.
“Haven’t had any customer complaints yet.” She smirked.
“I suppose not,” Tyson allowed. “But I’m complaining, and I’m alive and standing in front of you. So, do you mind?”
The coroner made a display of removing the pen from her mouth and powering it down with her middle finger.
“Thank you,” Tyson said.
“Bein’ a health nut never saved anyone, Mr. Abington. Everyone ends up on the slab sooner or later. All you’re doing is making the time before your appointment boring. So, you’re here to ID my Jane Doe?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I hope you have a strong stomach for this sort of thing.”
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
The coroner, who still had not shared her name, knelt and grabbed a small recycling bin from next to a cabinet and pushed it into Tyson’s stomach. “I’m not cleaning it up if you pop. I have to deal with enough bodily fluids as it is.”
Tyson took the bucket, offended, but also not entirely confident he wouldn’t be in need of it. “Fair enough.”
“Mr. Abington,” Berg said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just be guarding the door. I’ll escort you back up when you’re ready to leave.”
So, even the seasoned cop didn’t want to stick around for the messy part. It must’ve been bad. “That’s just fine, Officer Berg.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“She’s just over here.” The coroner pointed to the far table as she walked. Tyson realized he was avoiding looking down at the green sheet with the prominent brown stain slashing diagonally across its middle. He forced himself to do so. Whatever lay beneath it ended about halfway down the examination table.
The coroner grabbed the top corners of the sheet. “Are you ready? I’m not going to sugarcoat it. What’s under here isn’t pretty.”
Tyson steeled his nerve, promising himself he wouldn’t flinch. “I am.”
She grunted a nod and pulled back the sheet.
He flinched.
“Jesus…” For a moment, Tyson’s stomach felt like it was going to implode. An unexpected wave of panic washed over his consciousness as long-buried instincts fought for attention.
“Yeah,” the older woman said knowingly. If there was any mockery in her tone, he couldn’t hear it.
Through a force of will, Tyson tamped down both his sudden urge to take flight and the nausea. He took a breath, then made himself look down at the table again. The body, or what remained of it, was nude, because that’s how it … she had been found, or because the clothes had been removed prior to examination, he couldn’t say. Deep lacerations gouged out valleys in the dead woman’s flesh. Everything below the rib cage, as well as her left arm below the elbow was missing, the flesh at the edge torn and shredded as if by a shark or another such monstrous predator. But there were none native to Lazarus, at least none that had survived to the present day. The Methuselah City Zoo held a number of big cats from Earth, but he’d have heard immediately if one had escaped.
“What the hell did this?” Tyson asked in a hushed tone.
“Organics reprocessor. One of the maintenance techs down at the central recycling plant found the body half chewed up by the second-stage shredder. It’s basically a big wood chipper that breaks organic waste down into pieces small enough to be composted easily. But it wasn’t meant for things this big. It got through her legs all right, but bogged down by the time it reached the pelvis. Someone didn’t do their homework.”
A perfectly horrible thought crossed Tyson’s mind. “Was she, you know…” he trailed off, afraid of the answer.
“Alive? No, no. Thank God. The meat grinder was postmortem. Cause of death was a nail from one of those pneumatic drivers through the base of the skull, up into the brain stem and cerebellum. Doubtful she even felt it.”
“A small mercy.” Tyson was relieved. He’d been furious with the mystery woman, of course. But no matter how angry he was, wishing that kind of death on anyone was beyond him. The nail driver was a makeshift weapon. Guns were illegal for private ownership on the planet and had been from the earliest days of the colony. Only the police were allowed them, and even then only among the Critical Response Team, which had a great deal of additional specialized training for dealing with hostage rescue, active attacker situations, and the like. Guns were occasionally smuggled in and used in crimes, but customs and security at the spaceport were highly competent and made sure such occurrences were exceedingly rare. Murderers had to be a bit more creative as a result, but this was the first time Tyson had heard of a nail driver being used.
He inspected the woman’s face. Her eyes were
