Out of Body

Chapter 19

The morgue wasn’t Nat Archer’s favorite afternoon destination, but he’d been there often enough to take the scents and sounds in stride. He knew when to shove a bottle of wintergreen under his nose—for all the good it did—and how to neutralize the hollow noise of casket-size metal shelves sliding out and thumping shut. The shelves closed faster than they opened. Without resistance, dead weights slid easily.

Under glaring white lights, Dr. Blades sat at a stainless-steel table attached to the walls in a corner, and wrote on loose papers inside a folder. The man’s hollow cheeks held shadows the size and shade of big, ripe avocados. Nat got a fleeting image of nicking one of Blades’s veins to see green fluid oozing out.

Geez, Archer. He could tell this case had already gotten to him, but he hadn’t realized how badly.

“Archer,” Blades said without looking up. “Glad you could finally join me.”

Nat was ten minutes late. “Good to see you, Doc,” he lied. “You said I should get right over here.”

“Right over here,” Blades said.

“And here I am,” Nat said, refusing to be goaded into an apology for something as trivial as ten minutes in a busy day.

With surprising speed, Blades unfolded his long, thin body and drew himself up to what had to be about seven feet. “I want you to see something,” he said, and scuffed toward the bank of steel drawers. “Did you close the door when you came in?”

“Yeah,” Nat said. “Did you want it left open?”

That got him a faintly evil glance from ice-blue eyes. “No.”

“Oh. I thought maybe you wanted to air the place out a bit. I can open it if you like.”

Blades gave a humorless chuckle and pulled on a handle. The drawer slid out easily enough, which was always the case with small victims. The shape inside a white bag with an encircling zipper was no more than five feet, by Nat’s estimation. Maybe an inch more, but this was a diminutive corpse.

Without ceremony, Blades parted the zipper and revealed a woman’s body, or what was left of it. Shirley Cooper’s remains weren’t pretty.

Pity was never enough. Nat looked down with respect, and the cleansing surge of anger he needed to stay focused.

He frowned and shook his head. “Damn, I’d like to know exactly how this happened. What d’you want me to see?”

Blades sighed and rotated narrow shoulders. “No water in the lungs. She was dead before she went in the water.”

“You let me know that yesterday.” Nat looked at the other man and wondered if he’d dealt with one DB too many and was starting to slip.

“I know what I told you. I also told you about the neck. That happened prior to all the other wounds. Who knows if there was a gator attack on the body?”

Nat bent closer. Looking like a tracheotomy incision, a dark hole shone with a gelatinous sheen. He stood abruptly and put a hand in front of his face. “It smells different.” Even more overwhelming if that was possible.

“Yes, and that’s interesting.” Blades snorted. “But whoever did this is an amateur. They don’t know the voice is complex. Takes more to cut it out, or whatever the fool thought he was doing, than punching a plug out of the larynx.”

“Yes.” Trying to be patient, Nat submitted to the anatomy lesson and decided to allow Blades his moments of drama. “I wonder why.” His eyes watered.

“Making a point about picking on singers, I should think,” Blades said. He pointed at the wound in the corpse’s neck. “That would mess up a singer, but some reconstruction wouldn’t have been off the table here. She would have been able to communicate.”

Nat stared at him. Of course, he probably didn’t know. “Shirley Cooper was a maid at a club, not a singer,” Nat said.

“Huh.” The hairless places where Blades’s eyebrows should be rose in a ripple of wrinkles. “Well, that’s easily worked out. The killer wanted to pretend he wasn’t just killing singers, but then he couldn’t resist leaving his trademark.”

“We’ve never seen this mark before that I know of,” Nat pointed out.

“You will when the women who actually are singers turn up,” Blades said, so coldly matter-of-fact that Nat was reminded why he didn’t like this man, not at all.

“Is that everything?” he asked, unimpressed by the macabre little show. “I need to get on.”

“You’re going to need all the help you can get with this case,” Blades told him. “Look at the wounds all over the body.”

“Hard to miss them.” There was hardly any clear skin between gouges and welts.

“Some are from teeth, but not all of them.”

“What about the others?”

“Claws.” Blades shrugged. “The different odor is in the bite marks.”

“Are they what she died of? Is there a wound I can’t see?”

“I’ve got a tentative diagnosis.”

Nat watched Blades’s face.

Muscles jerked in the man’s jaw. “Yeah.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his white coat. “She was frightened to death.”

“You serious?”

“Have you ever known me not to be? She was dead before most of the wounds were made. Definitely before the poke in the neck.”

Shit, if Blades had said Shirley Cooper died of shortness of breath Nat wouldn’t feel any more hopeless.

Nat exercised his aching jaw. “Did you get good tissue samples? There must have been plenty under her nails and even in those wounds.”

“Matter,” Blades said. He crossed his arms and faced Nat. “There was matter, is matter. All over the place.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“What I say. Not tissue, but matter. Unidentifiable stuff.”

A slow thud started in the region of Nat’s left temple. He massaged the spot. “I’m not following you.”

“We thought a gator had attacked the body. The wounds are consistent with that—maybe. Nothing else we can think of is. Every piece of trace evidence we’ve removed probably can’t be typed. I’m getting that from experts in the field. Very preliminary, but you can take it to the bank. We don’t think whoever, or whatever did this has DNA—not that fits with any DNA we know of.”