Free The First Commandment by Brad Thor

doing a pickup. While waiting for the body, he had hung out with a pal of his, an assistant ME named Frank Aposhian. According to Gosse, they were pretty good friends. Their boys attended the same high school and the men played cards together a couple of times a month.
    During Gosse’s pickup, his conversation with Aposhian was interrupted by two men who identified themselves as FBI agents and requested to speak to the assistant ME in private. As Frank was in charge of the office that night, the request didn’t strike Gosse as odd at all. Law enforcement officers came and went all the time in the ME’s office, and it definitely wasn’t for the coffee.
    One of the agents followed Aposhian into his office while the other began examining corpses. But not just any corpses-he only seemed interested in unclaimed bodies, more commonly referred to as John Does. Many of them were found in parks, under bridges, or in abandoned buildings, often half-eaten by rats or stray dogs by the time they were discovered.
    Their fingerprints were run through local and national databases and investigators were assigned to try to uncover their identities, but more often than not they went unidentified. Mortuary science students practiced their embalming techniques upon them, and the John and Jane Does were then placed in plywood coffins to be interred in the nearest potter’s field.
    What struck Gosse as odd was that the agent didn’t appear to know what he was looking for. He didn’t carry any photos with him. He simply moved from corpse to corpse checking them over as if he were shopping for a new set of golf clubs.
    When Aposhian appeared moments later with the man’s partner, the agent pointed at one of the bodies, and the assistant ME wrote down the number from the toe tag and went back to his office to process the paperwork.
    The body was bagged and loaded into a nondescript van, and the G-men disappeared.
    When Gosse asked his friend what the deal was, Aposhian told him that he’d been instructed not to speak about it. Apparently, the corpse wasn’t a John Doe at all, but rather a person who had been involved in a serious felony case.
    That’s where the story should have ended, but it didn’t. The FBI agents had presented the proper paperwork to claim the body, but had insisted that Aposhian hand over the ME file on it as well. They explained that the Bureau was involved in a complicated sting operation that would be jeopardized if the man’s death became public. It was an unusual request, but the men were polite and had all their paperwork in order, so Aposhian had no reason to get into a pissing match with them. It wasn’t until months later that the assistant ME realized his mistake.
    One of the mortuary science students working with him that night had retrieved the wrong file for him. When Aposhian called the local FBI field office to try to correct his mistake they told him they had no record of an Agent Stan Weston or Joe Maxwell ever being assigned there. He next contacted FBI headquarters in Washington, D. C., but they informed him that they didn’t have any agents by those names in the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation and that maybe he had made a mistake.
    Aposhian checked his notes. There was no mistake. None of this was making any sense.
    He handed the John Doe’s fingerprint card to a woman named Sally Rutherford. Rutherford was one of the office investigators and Aposhian’s girlfriend of eleven months. The next day, there was an email printed out and waiting for Aposhian on his desk.
    According to Rutherford, there was some sort of mix-up. The prints came back as belonging to a man who had been killed in a shootout with police in Charleston, South Carolina, days after the FBI agents had taken the John Doe from their facility. The investigator had a call in to the Charleston Police Department and was waiting to hear back.
    Aposhian figured it was all just another bureaucratic screw-up, but changed his mind